Loki Review
Not the Lie-Smith's greatest trick.
Version tested: PC
When we previewed French developer Cyanide's action RPG title Loki at the start of last month, our conclusion was that the game was shaping up to be pretty enjoyable and entertaining, without actually contributing anything new or particularly interesting to the action RPG genre.
We used words like "solid" and "competent", which is a bit of a shame; in retrospect, we'd prefer to have saved such phrases for this review. Perhaps we'd qualify them a little, though. Loki is fairly solid. It's quite competent.
Yes, we know - we're fairly heavily damning the game with faint praise at this point. However, that's the thing about Loki; having now played through the review version of the game, we find ourselves not really disliking a great deal about the game.
We can't complain that the graphics are ugly; they're not, they're perfectly passable for a game of this type. The combat system isn't intrinsically broken in any way; there's a vaguely irritating lag between pressing the button and executing the action, but nothing worth writing to your MP about. The equipment system is okay, we suppose. The quests are fairly reasonable.

The random dungeons suffer greatly from repetitive scenery - it can feel like you're just plodding through endless featureless passages and chambers.
The problem, as you may have gathered, is that there's not a lot to actually like about Loki. Our primary fear, when we previewed the game, was that its shameless aping of previous games in the genre would overpower the general competence of its execution. This is indeed the case; and the results are deeply, deeply, almost crushingly average.
To recap briefly, the fundamental idea behind Loki is that you play as either a Norse, Greek, Egyptian or Aztec warrior (two female classes, two male; two melee, two magical), and assist the four Pantheons of the Gods with sorting out the Egyptian god Seth, who is hatching an Evil Plot.
Unfortunately, the hugely promising mythology of the title is let down by storytelling so thin as to be almost transparent. You fight your way through the four different ancient areas (which you can do in any order you like - enemies level up alongside you so the order makes little difference) carrying out various terribly uninspired quests and exploring near-endless random dungeons, whose random nature can't disguise the fact that they all basically look the same.
The game is, at heart, a clone of Diablo 2, and it blatantly copies just about every feature the genre has seen thus far - without actually adding anything of its own to the mix, or even combining pre-existing features in an interesting new way.

We know we used this screenshot for the preview, but it's still funny, because it looks like a girl farted and some men are running away from the smell! Brilliant.
A perfect example is the armour system, which initially looked fascinating due to the ability to reforge pieces of armour with new materials, thus changing your resistance to a wide variety of elemental and status effects. However, this system is far less interesting in practise than in theory, due to the somewhat botched job Cyanide has made of resistances in general. Having added a bewildering array of elements and status effects, the developer then clearly realised it was all too complex, and made it possible to increase swathes of resistances all at once. The net effect is to create a system that looks over-complicated, but is actually simple to the point of being uninteresting - the worst of both worlds.
In Loki's defence, Cyanide has managed to get one key aspect of the game very right; its online co-op and battle modes are well considered and boast solid cheat protection, which will appeal to those who like playing these games with strangers online. Beyond that, however, Loki's downright mediocrity starts to grate very quickly - and we are simply reminded time and time again of far more interesting, innovative games in the same genre, such as the legendary Diablo 2 or the more recent Titan Quest.
There's much to be said for games which simply polish an existing formula to a shine - but Loki, sadly, doesn't even quite accomplish that. It's solid, and it's competent, but unless you're absolutely crazy for point and click action RPGs, we find it hard to recommend a game on the basis of competence alone.
5 / 10
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Comments (14) Latest comment 5 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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1/10
5/10
I see a pattern.
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You get 666... Think about it.
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bah-dhum-tish
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Solid cheat protection? And this was demonstrated how, exactly? Sounds suspiciously like a back of the box bullet point to me...
/is dead cynical today
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If I can convince a fellow clueless new to the genre player we can romp through on co-op having a good time
/dead optimistic today
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1/10
5/10
I see a pattern."
Eh?
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This game deserves more than a 5.
Goes to show that reviews are just bull. The guys who review games have played so many games that nothing is good anymore.
I have a friend that just bought this and he thinks it's great, he has a PS3 and an x360 also. But Loki is what he's playing at the moment.
Graphics are good, gameplay is good. Lots of fun.
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Well THQ and Midway have surprised people of late, publisher form has gone all awry!
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- No, the multiplayer part is neither consistent, solid, or working
You can barely play with two people in a game, with more it's unplayable.
There is NO incentive to play multi as mobs are harder to kill, but don't give more xp, there is no group xp bonus, and the quests and wp are only validated for THE HOST, not the client.
- The "closed" mode with cheating prevention is a JOKE. You can do nearly anything and as the games are hosted on your comp, you can use any trainer/hack.
- This game is bugged as hell, and most of them are not and WON'T be corrected as most of the devs who worked on Loki have moved onto something else.
It's easy to see when you look at what will be incorporated in the next patch(and we will have wait it for more than a month.... the next one will be far later too)
- There is a LOT of design flaws that won't be corrected(autoleveling, xp rate, level generations, lack of npcs and monsters variety, memory management problems, etc)
So if you wan't to buy it, do it, but don't expect a D2 killer at all, it will NEVER be that.