Loki: Heroes of Mythology Review

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Written by BuckGB on December 31st, 2007

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Loki claims to be a non-linear action RPG that combines Aztec, Egyptian, Greek and Norse mythologies. The truth is this game is more linear than it leads on. Chain-quests are quite common. Most of the quests are typical chores that involve fetching or killing things. Being asked by a "healthy" town NPC to go out into the woods to acquire wolf meat serves no other purpose than to lead to another quest. You will literally ask yourself "why do *I* have to out into the woods and fetch wolf meat? Can't you?"

But all is not so bad. Loki does a good job recycling interfaces from popular titles. The isometric perspective, akin to Diablo and StarCraft, will seem familiar for many. Those accustomed with World of Warcraft will recognize Loki's interface. The radar and name of location sit in the upper-right corner while the bottom area is used for hotkey icons. Also customary is the inventory, character profile, quest log, and talents (a WOW feature that's overtly copied in Loki with surprisingly good results). Uniformly, Loki's interface is uncluttered so that anyone familiar with action RPG games can launch the game and start playing without reading the manual.

I would also like to laud Cyanide for offering player versus player action. I've read this service is really cool. You take you character, stats and all, online against other gamers. Unfortunately I've yet to experience it. Cyanide's GameCenter software bans Yahoo e-mail accounts during registration. They also ban e-mail accounts from Hotmail and Gmail. I'm going to assume all other free web-based e-mail services have been banned as well. In retrospect I wonder how many actually play this online?

Here's where things get tricky. This game is being billed as a premium title at $38 ($18 for our European friends; more or less elsewhere), as opposed to a $20 budget title. Charging this much for a game brings up several problems.

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