| Loki's Review by Maruk |
It's been roughly three months now since the first release of Loki, the latest Hack'n Slash, developed by the French studio Cyanide, and published by the French publisher Focus Home Interactive in most countries to date, except Germany where it's been published by Crimson Cow. So, why this late test? First of all, because GameGrob was not yet started for the release of Loki... Then, because lots of events before and after Loki's release require some perspective to talk about objectively. Hence why this test will be conducted with a somewhat "chronological" approach.
Before Loki
Loki's (re)birth
The least we can tell is the project was very ambitious. Press releases made by Focus Home Interactive - too rare or too late for the fans -, and the interviews of the charismatic spokesperson for Loki, aka Thomas Veauclin (Lead Designer) have from the get go asserted the close relationship of Loki with Diablo II. And indeed lots of characteristics of Loki remind us of the best in the genre...
Starting with a feature which were missing in all recent Hack'n Slash games: a random level generator for most of the game, with the exception of few specific places like the end bosses' levels. Which each new game, the player will hence have to explore new maps, different of those in the previous games.
Additionally, the player can choose between four really distinct characters for as many acts with mythological background: Egyptian Sorcerer, Nordic Barbarian, Greek Amazon and Aztec Shaman. Two men, two women then, which you can't customize. It is however a choice made by the development team who preferred to focus on giving them charisma and personality. As Loki has been released one year after Titan Quest, some could blame it for a lack of originality regarding the mythological theme, but it is to be noted that Loki's development started before the announce of Iron Lore's Hack'n slash. In a few words, here's the setting for Loki: Seth is back. To satisfy his needs of power and revenge, he will break all the rules and enter other mythologies to make some allies. This is enough to give us a large variety of areas and monsters to slay.
The other key feature in Loki is the "closed" multiplayer mode, which we only had in Sacred and Diablo II. One important note though: here it won't be a multiplayer mode à la Battle.net... In fact, only character saves will be stored on Cyanide's servers. Everything else is hosted by the players, which means that if the creator of a game gets disconnected, every other character in the game will be thrown out. But conceptually, and considering the difference of financial power between Cyanide and Blizzard, it's better than nothing.
All in all, Loki wants to be a "brutal" hack'n slash. Unlike his recent competitors, blood floods everywhere, swords and armours are rusted, etc. We're quite glad to see that back.
Loki, the sly God
Nice characteristics on paper for Loki then, but this is not the end of it. Loki offers several innovations. Like its competitors, it offers three progressive difficulty modes, each requiring to have completed the previous one with fiercer and fiercer monsters. What's new here regards the story which is meant to be evolutive. This translates in the game with variations in the story across the three difficulties. To discover the true end planned by Cyanide, the player will hence have to go through all three difficulties.
Another new mechanism is the experience system. There is still the classic XP bar, which will bring the player up to level 200 (!) and gives us attribute points to spend at each level, between strength (physical damage), dexterity (dodge), intelligence (magical damage), vitality (health points) and energy (mana points). Though, right below this bar, a new experience bar appeared: the Faith bar. To be bale to use new spells or skills specific to a god, the player will have to worship a god, which will take 25% of the experience he will earn. To get more specific on this feature, let's talk "numbers"; each character can choose between three gods. Thor, Odin and Tyr for the Nordsman; Athena, Artemis and Ares for the Greek; Rà, Horus and Seth for the Egyptian; Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca and Miclantecuhtli for the Aztec. One thing to know: the player can worship only one God at a time, but he can go from one to the other and multiclass. Each god offers a skill tree with 12 active skills and 5 passive talents. Each tree is limited to a maximum of hundred points, and each skill can be upgraded up to the level twenty-five. At any time, you can respec your skills in paying money. However, you can't move skill points from a God to another. Lastly, the player can offer magical items to his God, in order to increase his Faith bar, and hence get more skills. That is quite original and interesting.
Let's go on with numbers, but regarding items this time. Cyanide planned twelve types of weapons for Loki, and each character has his preferred weapon type, like claws for the nordsman, or the sceptre for the Egyptian. Ten different models have been made for each item of death. But that is not all: thanks to the smith you can find in the starting place of each act, players can disassemble/combine/improve/assemble your equipment. You can forge your favourite weapon with fourteen different materials.
Let's take a look at the multiplayer component now; Four multiplayer modes are offered to us: coop and an arena with duel, team deathmach or challenges. First mode is crystal clear for everybody; however the other three can use some explanations. The arena is a kind of coliseum where players meet to fight, one versus one or team versus team, up to height players in a game. The fight will start only when each team will have pulled a lever. Challenges can be played solo or up to four players. All happens in a closed room where players will have to face waves of monsters with increasing power.
Loki announces numerous other key features like, in no particular order, gorgeous graphics, twenty massive bosses, a free camera with zoom, an innovative tab system for the inventory, transparency around the character when it goes behind the scenery, etc. Just enough to trigger our chauvinism, being French. However, while talking about French pride, I can't avoid highlighting a communication problem which has been particularly frustrating... Before the game was released, the lack of informations given by Focus and Cyanide forced the impatient fans to go on the website and forums of the German publisher for Loki, Crimson Cow, to keep in touch with the latest informations. That beats all for a game developed by a French developer and for which the main publisher is French as well.
During Loki
Hack'n Slash Jubilation...
After two years in development, Loki is finally announced for June, 12th in France (June, 4th in Germany). Some lucky people can get it on June, 9th during the preview at FNAC Forum in Paris. Then comes the shock for lots of players: "StarForce" has been added to the game as a copy protection scheme. I won't detail here the numerous negative effects of such an intrusive copy protection scheme, but the sure thing is that it cast a chill among the players and several buyers have encounter problems preventing them to play. Though, the first reviews in the specialized magazines and the first feedbacks from players are rather positives. The pleasure to hammer ones mouse for a game with a 100% fight oriented gameplay is there. Monsters are as many as planned, French voices are convincing, skill effects pleasant, and although there's many "small" bugs, the game seems to have a great potential. Few days later...
Loki, the malicious
Here comes the drama; bug reports and complaints start to spread all over the official forums. Gameplay is the biggest deception... For example, several parts of the main quest required for the advancement of the player are bugged, and the only solution is to restart the game, which would force to reinitialise the quests and portals and do everything again hoping the bug would not happen again - it's been modified since, the quests and portals no longer reset now. It's not even really possible to work off our frustration with side quests, as there's way too few of them.
Quickly, players realize that outside levels are always square, and that dungeons and monsters in them are always alike with only some minor variations, even though the graphics are supposed to be different and the levels randomly generated. Good bye, desire to explore. Some textures are really average, and the joins between tiles are sometimes quite visible. Loading times between areas, abusive cooldowns, the very concept of some skills like stances for casters, and the progression so slow that we have the impression to play a Korean MMO are as many bad points which have no place in a Hack'n Slash in the first place, and completely destroy the game pace.
Wait wait, don't go, we're not done yet, far from it... Let's talk about the enemies. With the autolevelling, those follow the progression of your character. Forget the feeling of power when you reach the next level, because you won't ever feel it in Loki. What's more, there's absolutely no challenge at all. Bosses are just massive monsters graphically nice, but are no real danger with only loads of HP and gets eliminated quite fast. Mini-bosses are in the game, but there's too few of them. And regular monsters? Well, there's three types of them: those you kill in one hit, those you kill in two hits, and those you kill in three hits. Their AI is artificial more than intelligence. When they see you, monsters will simply run towards you in a straight line, if ever there's nothing on their way, as they won't know how to get around. Such pathfinding problems had not been seen in the last ten years! When the monsters are fighters, they will come to fight you at melee; else they won't move and will just fire at you from the distance. With those using next to never any special technic or skill and those are simply dull makes fights monotonous after only a few of them.
Items now. Here again, the least to say is that the announced promises didn't stand when facing important conception issues. First of all, you will only rarely find any unique item, and those are always very much alike. Weapons and armours change every five levels exactly, and all weapons of the same required level will require the same attributes, two-handed and one-handed weapons alike, with all two-handed weapons having the same attack speed. Overall, items are at best not very good, and most of the time completely uninteresting: their bonus are dull, and you will never will a real increase in power after equiping the last weapon you looted. Unlike Diablo II where each unique items would raise some excitement upon identification, items in Loki subject us to no emotion, except maybe boredom. Forget as well the full sets giving additional bonuses, as there's absolutely none of them.
On top of that, you'll find several unusable skills like ambidextry, the targeting of the monsters to be a pain in the fights, no possibility to affect skills on the left click, no possible configuration of the 4 and 5 mouse buttons, you have to click once for each potion you buy (you can buy several at once, but you still need to do one click per potion) while you need to buy loads of them, there's no penalty when you die, as you just respawn at the beginning of the area, and a cruel mess when you want to offer items to your god, as you have to do the offerings one item after the other... It's clear that Cyanide clearly lacks experiences with this kind of game, or at least that they don't really have played their own game at all.
Graphics wise, it gets a bit better, although not everything is bright. Indeed, there's plenty of collisions between characters and the environment. When you play Mythos which was at the time of Loki's release between alpha and beta stage and compare with Loki, you can't believe what you see in Loki. Settings for rotation speed of the camera are not saved; moreover, the view itself is a bit too much from above, we would have liked to see a bit farther than our own nose. Don't look for options to choose the brightness, contrast or gamma settings, there's none... Cyanide must have signed a contract with some optician because they would make all Loki players need glasses after few days playing. Simply put, if you don't manually change the settings of your screen, you probably won't see anything in some of the very dark levels. Like in many games, the use of ALT-TAB will generate some display bug... But it's really nothing compared to the memory leak problems which will cripple your computer after only one hour playing.
The worse part is the multiplayer component of the game. List will be long, but if you've read up to this point, you will be able to bear this as well. Loki is the first game where everyone plays singleplayer in multiplayer. For the "closed" multiplayer, which is, just as a reminder, not a real closed mode like we knew on Diablo II or Sacred, you have to use the Game Center. This is an external application which is not embedded into the game. You have to install it (and download and install the latest version as well), register on it, but only with an email address provided by and ISP, join the Loki room, join a Loki server, and then find a game where the creator didn't put a password you don't know. When you find one, chances are you won't have the level to join it as you can't be distant of the creator of the game by more than 10 levels, and the game as 200 levels. But what's worse is that only the host of the game will register the quests and the portals ! That's a great coop mode, don't you think? Of course, it works the same for the PVE challenges in the arena. Additionally, you don't see the health and energy bar of your friends in the game, as there's no display of the group in multiplayer. There's no trade system, and no stash either. When a player join a game created by a friend, he will be forced to stay in the same area as his friend. He won't be able to go back to town alone, nor go to another act if he wants to... Last thing, the lag is horrible when there's two or more people in the game.
But lest go back to the "closed" multiplayer mode a bit. We already know that only the characters are stored on the GameCenter and hence protected from any direct modification. But as the games stay hosted by the players, they just need to use local cheat programs (any client mod on the host) to alter the game experience. For the open multiplayer, you don't use the GameCenter and do it directly in game (ouf!), however you need to first know the IP of the host, as there's no open multiplayer lobby. For the sake of exhaustivity, let's mention an incident which happened two or three weeks after the original release: all character saves had been corrupted on the GameCenter. Cyanide couldn't recover them, and they had no redundancy system, so they recreated it with the level mentioned in the ladder. However players lost all their items; and most of their Faith levels, as they recreated the characters with 25% of the experience in Faith, completely dismissing the fact that all players had offered items to their god and had a Faith level close to their main level (and not at one third of the main level). Speaking of the ladder, it borders on the ridicule: characters which doesn't show properly (apparently it is a mix of ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 encodings), completely bogus statistics (it is not even capable of showing the playing time right...).
When there's life, there's hope...Not much.
Despite all this, fans keep hoping, and the presence of the developers on the French boards during the month following the release was reassuring. Hence, several patches get released quickly, and fans are happy to see they're not forgotten. However, each patch adds more bugs than it fixes. Facing an increasing dissatisfaction from the players, developers start a beta-patchs system. The objective is to let players help developers to find bugs to improve the game. Good initiative, sure, but not this way. Indeed, beta-tests are completely public, and usable on the live environment for closed servers. Hence, lots of players abuse of some changes of the beta-patches, and reach the level 200 in a few days only when others were only level 80 after three intensive weeks. Between standard patch bugs, new features added in deplorable conditions, and bugs added by the new patches, and no word on what's supposed to be tested in the various beta patch builds, people get lost. For example, the Ambidextry talent had been corrected (for the first time) in the 1.0.5.1 beta patch, but by the time the patch becomes stable a couple days later, it's once again unusable in the 1.0.6.0 patch...
Lots of bugs persist then, and three violent hits from a Nordic club will come stun the few remaining fans. It started with most devs taking a month of vacations (and same thing for the support team), two months after the release of their game, while bugs known for a while are still not fixed. Egyptian characters have consequently been unplayable for a month, as the latest stable patch (1.0.6.0) prevented them from moving after using and Area of Effect skill. Then we learn that most of the dev team now works on other projects... and that only minor bugs would be fixed and there would be no major changes for Loki, which meant no more hope to see an improvement of the game pace, the random level generator, the multiplayer, the autolevelling, and so one. Ouch, that hurts! Revolution is in the way, but repression strike back: the international forum is closed (no new topics can be created) without a word because they had no moderators left... And on the French boards, the most active and constructive disgruntled players get banned for no reason.
After Loki
After such events, what else is there to say? Well, we shouldn't have to wait too long to see the international reaction, now that Loki has been released in the United Kingdom on August, 24th... There's rumours about a potential add-on for Loki, but I don't believe much in it. Anyway it would be quite a provocation for them to do so. We know on the other hand that Cyanide is now working on Blood Bowl with the license of the board game from Games Workshop. Their official website have even announced that they were now working on a MMO. When you consider the state of Loki's multiplayer, it makes you wonder... Of course, lots of bugs have been fixed, like some of those blocking the main quest, and there's still a small team still reading the forums (mostly interns) and working on Loki. But as in no way in the future might the black points of Cyanide's game be fixed, we can safely guess that the game won't be much remembered by the Hack'n Slash fans (at least not positively). Let's close this with a quote from Patrick Pligersdorffer, Cyanide's CEO, who were giving some tips to the players in an interview by JeuxVideoPC: "Don't fall for the marketing sirens: test demo versions of the games (but read reviews and players views as well) and judge by yourself
". At this I would sincerely answer: Ha-ha, you can count on me for this in the future. Your Hack'n Slash told me to be suspicious. Even more considering that the demo version has been released several weeks after the game, and demoed it very badly... For example, the demo had support for Ageia PhysX, while it was not in the final game.Verdict
Gameplay: 5/20 --> Too many bugs and conception mistakes ruin the game. You get worked up, then bored, then you hope for nothing, and finally you realize you should quickly reinstall Diablo II or Mythos beta to cool down.
Graphics: 14/20 --> Characters are rather well designed, as well as the monsters and skill effects. Unfortunately, the environment, although presenting some relative variations, lack some polishing and are way too uneven. Additionally, the graphics engine is relatively greedy.
Sound: 10/20 --> The soundtrack is correct, but not more. Dubbing are however quite convincing and up the overall level.
Duration: XX/20 --> It's hard to judge the duration of the game, as it will much depend of the players: either they are wannabe hardcore gamers (and they are the only one who might eventually have enough patience to get to the end of Loki), either they are fond of bug exploits and cheating and will level their character quickly, or they are fans disappointed by the false pretences of the "Hack'n Slash of Legend".
Story : 11/20 --> The overall theme is original and varied, and the main quest is globally well-laid-out. However, there's not enough side quests to keep the player spellbound, and the pathetic rewards doesn't make us want to keep going on the "Hunt for Seth".
Global: 8/20 --> It is not because developers are French and we are too that we should forgive such a massacre... And it is not because they appear to be nice that we should be in return. Loki clearly didn't fulfil its promises, and we will most likely never know why.. Anyway, the game borders on misleading advertisement and thief considering how the announced features have been scamped, badly thought, or simply badly integrated into Cyanide's and Focus' Hack'n Slash. No game should be allowed to be released in this awful state. Consequently, it's very Likely that Loki will quickly fall into oblivion, except in the memories of some spiteful gamers who won't forget soon this (mis)adventure.
Translation made by Gorkk, September, 10th 2007.
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