Lords of Xulima Review
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Article Index
Combat
Luckily, LOX also has combat, which works well. About half of the enemies in the world show up on the maps, so you know where they are. The other half sneak up on your while you're exploring, so you have to be prepared for battles at all times. Each map is divided into zones, and it's possible to clear each zone of random ambushes. In fact, if you play at a high enough difficulty setting, then you have to seek out the random battles to build up your party enough to survive the fixed ones.
The battles in the game are turn-based, but they don't have rounds. Each character has a certain cooldown after each attack, and if they're fast enough then they might attack multiple times before their opponents get a chance to do anything (that's why the Speed attribute is so important). Characters can miss with their attacks, and those employing weapons can also critically miss, which means they hit themselves instead of their target. Critical misses seem like an odd feature for a game, but at least it seems to stop happening when characters max out their weapon skill.
Your party and enemy parties get two rows of combatants. The front row protects the back row, and the back row can only make attacks using spells, ranged weapons, or long weapons like spears. Different kinds of weapons have different bonuses, so maces can stun enemies (increasing the cooldown before their next attack), swords can cause extra bleeding damage, and axes can cause wounds (which reduce the target's combat ability). Along with making attacks, characters can also consume items (like potions) on their turn, or they can move to a more advantageous position on the battlefield.
LOX doesn't use any sort of level scaling, so there are definitely difficult battles and easy battles, with more of the former than the latter. Unfortunately, while enemies do a lot of interesting things in combat -- like thieves who rob you and mushrooms who put your party to sleep -- there are only about forty types of enemies in the game (not counting basic variations), and you repeat battles all the time, especially if you have to track down each and every random encounter. It took me about 90 hours to complete the game (using the middle "old-school veteran" difficulty setting), but the extreme repetition wore me down. I probably would have liked the game better at about half the length.
Other Activities
Along with towns, the 14 map zones in the game also include castles, caves, magic towers, and temples to explore. These sites are usually enjoyable, as they always feature traps, secret doors, and puzzles. The puzzles are creative given the basic nature of the game's engine, and they require you to do things like answer riddles, map teleporters, and rotate statues. The game is friendly in that it keeps notes for you so you don't have to write many things down, and it also allows you to annotate maps so you can remember where the important places are.
The thief activities in the game are performed using mini-games. For unlocking doors and chests, you have to map a sequence of gears from a starting point to an ending point, with the tougher locks requiring longer chains and eating more lock picks when you make a mistake. For disarming traps, you have to click on gears when they're green (as opposed to red or yellow), with tougher traps having more gears and changing colors more quickly. The mini-games are effective because they're easy and difficult at the same time, and because they do a decent job of actually recreating the activity they represent.
Interestingly, the enemies you defeat never drop equipment. They only drop horns or eggs or other things that you can consume. You only find equipment on corpses or in chests, or buy it from merchants in the towns. Characters can wear up to ten items at once, including boots, helmets, and rings. All of the equipment in the game is random -- there aren't any unique items or set items -- and it's frequently difficult to find items with actual magical bonuses attached to them. As a result, the equipment is rather basic and uninteresting, and it's not all that much fun to go searching for it.
Graphics and Sound
LOX is a budget title, and as is the case for almost all budget titles, the low cost of production is most evident when it comes to the graphics and sound. There isn't really anything wrong with the graphics of LOX -- and it's easy to tell what everything is supposed to be, which is the most important thing -- but all of the graphical elements from the colors to the animations to the spell effects to the cut-and-paste environmental objects are very basic. This isn't the type of game where you're going to wander around and ooh and aah at the visuals.
The sound is also basic. Very little of the dialogue is voice-acted, and the few actors involved are either humdrum or iffy (like the completely inappropriate voice for the arena master). The dialogue in the game gives a double whammy of dull writing paired with dull performances, which is never good. Meanwhile, the background music and the sound effects get the job done, but they aren't anything to write home about, either.
Technical Issues
During the time I spent with LOX, I didn't experience any technical problems. The game never crashed, none of the quests broke, and none of the skills or spells did anything other than what they were supposed to. Better yet, the loading screens were so fast that I rarely had time to read the gameplay tip that they included. About the worst thing I can say about LOX is that sometimes the spoken dialogue didn't match the subtitles.
Conclusion
I don't want to make this sound like an insult, but LOX is an okay game. It's a budget title that isn't trying to do anything too out of the box, and it mostly hits its marks. LOX is definitely a grindy game, but as long as you enjoy building up a party and fighting monsters -- and you don't require much in the way of quests or story to encourage you along -- then it can give you dozens of hours of entertainment. LOX is worth a flier at its price.
