Loki
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Publisher: Focus Home Interactive Genre(s): Action, Role Playing Game Home Page: http://www.loki-game.com/en/
Simple looks do not mean simple specs
Looking good, but a few more polygons would be nice.
The hack 'n' slash genre isn't flooded with releases, but there are enough great-looking titles to make Loki's graphics seem underwhelming. Environments in particular suffer from a lack of detail, made worse by the foliage – grass is a repetition of the same 2D sprite, and for some reason the numerous trees fade out so and don't clip against characters. Character models are hit or miss; the larger bosses are well-done, but most enemies and NPCs are low-polygon. A visual anomaly which crops up regularly is a hitching in a characters animation, particularly in monsters' and NPCs' idle animations. The protagonist's actions, from fighting to running, are believable, but when zoomed in the character modeling isn't noteworthy. Texture work in dungeons is rarely striking, and above ground entirely uninspiring, even at the highest quality settings. The light model adds to the atmosphere, but lights don't cast dynamic shadows; only the main light source casts shadows. The glow effect from torches and spell effects would be more convincing if an option existed for full dynamic lighting. Spells and skills do cast some great-looking effects, though, but only if the shader quality is set to "High". But when compared with contemporaries such as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Titan Quest, Loki feels dated.
There is certainly room for improvement with visuals, and the audio needs work as well. Ambient sounds are very repetitive, and the game's background music is forgettable. There is support for hardware audio, but what API Loki uses isn't clear (in other words, DirectSound or EAX - Ed). Even with the in-game speaker configuration set to a 5.1 speaker system, it was hard to tell whether or not positional audio was working. And, of course, the game's laughable voice acting is enough to wish that voice acting had been left out altogether.
Given the average graphics, it follows that Loki should run on average hardware. While this is certainly the case, the publisher's recommended minimum hardware will barely run the game at 800x600 with the lowest settings. For instance, a GeForce 4 Ti with 64MB of memory may very well run the game, but even on a 128MB GeForce FX 5200 the game never topped 15 FPS. Moving to an
To move beyond the 1024x768 resolution and crank up the visuals to full, a newer GPU with at least 256MB of memory is required. An older NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or ATI Radeon X1950 will certainly suffice, but with current prices a more forward-looking DirectX 10-capable GPU are more appropriate purchases. For the value-minded, both
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