Loki
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Publisher: Focus Home Interactive Genre(s): Action, Role Playing Game Home Page: http://www.loki-game.com/en/
Page 12 of the RPG genre manualFollowing yet another RPG tradition, weapons can be reforged or overlaid (for additional damage or defense) or combined with runes (for enhancement). A blacksmith takes care of these tasks, but it's up to you to collect the raw material, such as iron and bronze, and runestones (which are considerably easier to find than raw material). The reforge and combining processes are simple and give a clear look at the outcome of a potential action. Dissembling combined items to reclaim original items is possible, but rarely necessary given the frequency with which items can be found. Creating specialized weapons for certain situations - for instance, a two-handed axe with fire damage for an icy dungeon - makes life tenable when the fighting ramps up in difficulty.
Even though Loki borrows heavily from its predecessors, it misses the mark with some elementary features. The game world - both outdoors and underground - is partitioned off into distinct sections, but individual sections aren't very large. Contemporary action RPGs are known for massive levels, and the levels here are small in comparison. Level design is generally uninspiring, though the dungeons do offer more variety than the open squares which comprise the above-ground world. The mini-map is useful for finding the location of nearby enemies, but the full map lacks the detail of the mini-map. If the mini-map can show real-time locations, then the full map should as well, at least after already visiting an area.
Boss fights can be challenging though, and a strategy is required to beat some end-level bosses. A minor complaint is that bosses and other characters don't give up quest items automatically. Attribute this complaint to user error, but key quest items should populate a player's inventory without having to manually pick up the item. Loki isn't the only game to have this flaw, but it should be remedied. A more serious issue involves quest items sometimes not dropping at all, or a character with a quest item spawning in an unreachable error. This happened twice during my Norse Warrior's quest, and it required a restart from when loading the game. Restarting retains all character and quest data, but repopulates areas with enemies. Whether or not an enemy will be reachable is a roll of the dice; having to clear out an entire dungeon twice because of a game bug is frustrating. Not just monsters to battle against...Aside from the aforementioned control quirks involving the mouse, the other serious issue hampering combat, and the game as a whole, is the camera. The game defaults to an angled top-down view of the world, but zooming in to near-ground-level is possible. When the action heats up, the swooped-in view is useless, and the top-down view is only passable. While the camera can be zoomed and rotated, it would be nice to have the ability to adjust the camera angle for a better view of crowded situations. Finally, the way in which the engine creates a transparent hole when a or other object would otherwise block the player's view is disconcerting. A better approach would have been to entirely erase the nearest wall to provide a complete view of the surroundings. Because this doesn't happen, the camera must constantly be manually rotated in dungeons.
Cyanide Studios delivers only a brief 19-page manual with Loki. There is an in-game bestiary, but nowhere is there a comprehensive list of weapons, skills or an item chart. A full reference manual should be de rigeur for any title which bills itself as a RPG, even if it's just a digital copy in the install. Another area which could have used more resources is QA. Even with an upgrade to the latest patch at the time of this review (version 1.06, which corrects a few bugs and addresses some minor balancing issues), the game crashed to desktop more than a few times. This occurred on a number of test systems with various combinations of hardware, which leans toward a bug in the game. A quick look at Cyanide's forums all but confirms this.
In a few situations, it was also possible to get the hero stuck on rocks or other scenery, requiring a restart to remedy the situation. This happened regularly when passing to one area in particular – every time I entered the map, the character would be stuck on rocks. Surely these issues should have been caught during testing. Glitches requiring a restart wouldn't be so bad if the game would auto-save on a regular basis. Alternatively, a manual save would be nice. Because saves only occur at level changes, large chunks of the game have to be replayed after a crash.
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