{tag [Review]} {tag [News]} {tag [PC]}

Loki was the game that would combine four great mythologies into one great game. Or so we were led to believe. But after eight hours, 1841 dead enemies and 43 deaths of my character it was plain to see it wasn't all we had hoped it would be. 

Graphics: 85%

The graphics in the game are great. So great that my poor ATi Radeon 9700 Mobility was unable to handle them all. Luckily there are a wide variety of options to turn things down so the game is playable. A PC game must not only look great but it must appeal to a wide range or capabilities. This game does just that. If I was in a tolerant mood I could turn the graphics up to 1024x768 and medium or high textures and sacrifice some game speed. If I was not in a tolerant mood then it was 800x600 and low textures so the game ran as smoothly as possible.

The environments in the game are large and well made. Of course while you are playing in a specific mythological period you will see the same sorts of sites and textures over and over again as you would expect.

However on far too many occasions you will see a palm tree exist in the exact same place as say a wall or a house. It is as if there was no thought put into the placement of the object and none of the objects are actually physical except when you need to move. Then they are so physical that they actually stop you and spells and other projectiles from acting properly. For some reason which I was unable to fathom a round pillar blocked projectiles in a larger area around it. Infuriating at the very least.

Sometimes when you kill something the blood sprays into the air and then hangs there like it is frozen in time. On occasion when you walk through the blood splatter it will fall to the ground. I am not sure what that is all about but it was strange.

On several occasions some monsters walked THROUGH a wall, talk about breaking my concentration.

Sound: 80%

The variety of sounds for the battles are good. The ambient sounds in this game are great with a few exceptions. For example the sounds of town are simply a five second loop of people chattering in a market. But there are only five or six people visible in the area. Meanwhile the sounds of the environments and the music are brilliant. The score definitely underlined the culture you were playing in and I think helped to heighten the involvement in the game

The voice acting on the other hand, is absolutely terrible. Almost every voice is totally out of place. A great example is the pharoah's guard at Karnak who has a strong Scottish accent. Nearly every voice has some strange accent that is simply not fitting as if the game were cast by a non-native speaker who was oblivious to the fact that people actually have accents.

 Gameplay: 50%

As I said, eight hours was 1841 enemy deaths and 43 of my own. I was quite surprised actually because I was sure I died like a million times. You enter the first area and meet some angry beasties which you swiftly wipe out. Then suddenly you walk ten steps and run into this mega-beastie who crushes you like an ant and not a giant-sized ant that can cut a man in half, I mean one of those tiny regular ants that you step on every day and don't realize it. Basically you are spoon fed a story and every quest is essentially go somewhere, mow through a horde of enemies and find someone or something. Then once you have that you talk to someone and then pretty much do it all over again. It's a standard wash, rinse, repeat type game where all you are ever doing is killing piles of wandering mobs.

As if that's not bad enough strange things happen when you are playing. A swarm of insects will parry your blow though I thought about it long and hard and couldn't exactly figure out how they would do that. The movement AI is stupid, so stupid that if you summon something and it stands in front of you, your character will not be smart enough to walk AROUND it! If there is a slab of stone in front of you and you want something on the other side you will have to click several times to get around the slab as the game simply cannot figure out how to do it on its own. Even the peons in Warcraft were smarter than this.

Once the mobs manage to kill you, which they will manage to do a lot, they continue to attack you after you are dead and even after you have respawned though you are hundreds of meters away. I respawned several times and took damage from blows that were dealt before my death.

Sometimes you character will walk and sometimes he will oddly glide over the ground. Not because he has developed some super power or spell-like ability but simply because the game cannot keep up if you rapidly left click to move. It just decides to forget to animate your character while he moves.

The character interface itself is well done. There are several gods you can worship while you are out killing and a percentage of your XP goes to gaining you new levels in spell abilities in their particular area. When you level up you get a point to use in any skill you are qualified for. The character levelling is quite similar in that you level up, get five attribute points and stick them where you think you need them.

Weapons, armor and spells are all level-graded and do varying amounts of damage. So as you get stronger the damage you do and protection you have increase as well. Then again so do the monsters so basically everything remains fairly level throughout the game.

Interface: 40%

First and foremost, there is no good camera angle in this game. If you play from the overhead it's not isometric and not top-down, it's some slightly annoying spot in between them. Then when you zoom in it goes into third-person over-the-shoulder mode. This mode is even more irritating because you can only click the equivalent of five feet in front of your character. So if you want to play in this mode you need to constantly click to move and I mean constantly. And a lot of those clicks will be useless because the game can't comprehend that you want to move ten feet.

To attack, you must continually click your opponent - right click for spells, left click for physical attack - as there is no automatic attack function that I could find. Eventually my finger was so tired of clicking I could only manage to play an hour before I was annoyed and my finger was stiff.

When you are standing on one side of a wall and there are enemies on the other you only need to spin the camera to make the wall disappear and then say, zap them with lightning. Not very realistic is it since I would have no actual idea of where they were. Some sort of Fog of War would have been nice here to make it more realistic. If you find a big enemy you can simply run away and hide behind a wall and zap them with magic. That is called 'strategy.'

The controls are also extremely sloppy. If you right click a spell to the right and then left click to run in the opposite direction the spell will be misfired. There is no action queueing in this game so that it first fires the spell and then moves. Not to mention on many occasions my character 'locked up' so that when I thought he would stop at the place I had clicked with the mouse he instead continued to float along until I clicked somewhere else in an effort to stop him from running into a gaggle of mobs.

Sometimes quest messages would show up at the wrong time or show up multiple times. A minor annoyance in the grand scheme of thing, but an annoyance nonetheless.

Gold is, as far as I can tell, totally useless in this game as I have accumulated over 260,000 and have nothing to spend it on. The monsters drop tons of things and you never really need to go buy anything so I don't know why it is even there.

If you are running a dual monitor setup, sometimes the mouse will fall off the edge of the game and minimize it and not pause. This was probably the cause of several of my character deaths.


Summary: 64%

This game is a visual and auditory delight. Unfortunately the gameplay is 'wash, rinse, repeat,' and frankly I am just sick of it. Spending eight hours basically just left and right clicking on mobs is not my idea of fun anymore. I need good storyline, which this has, and interesting gameplay, which this is seriously lacking. This is just another game in a long line of so-called role-playing games that are utterly devoid of role-playing. It is a real shame because I excitedly followed the development and was excited when the review copy arrived. I could look at the game for hours but it just does not have enough power to actually be entertaining for more than a week at best. It is a classic mix of those so-called 'FedEx quests,' where you go get something and bring it back, and standard hack N slash gaming. Overall a major disappointment.

Again, you may be one of those people who spends hours upon hours in a game like World of Warcraft. You might have played both Diablos, all the Dungeons & Dragons games and every other isometric hack n slash and still enjoy them. Then this game is definitely for you because it is exactly like those games in gameplay only much much prettier in many cases.

If you just skipped to the bottom read these last two paragraphs. Also I just wanted to say that if this game were to remain installed on my PC I would go and play it maybe an hour a week just for some mindless mob destruction. But I would much rather have a game with a good storyline and interesting game mechanics. Oh and on a side note, I did play both Diablos, beta-tested WoW and still play Dungeon Siege II and D&D games on occasion so I do like this particular genre.