Nox

Genre: RPG (Action)

Developer: Westwood Studios

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Released: 2000

Zolgar paid: $5.99

Beaten: Yes, been a while though

Zolgar's rating: 7/10

Replayability: Moderate.

Nox is a game I actually had on disk ages ago, and one that I occasionally lamented the fact that I no longer had the disks, as it was a game I wasted many hours of my 'youth' on. I was never sure though if it was really that good of a game, or if I just had fond memories of it.

Well, as I was pondering what to review this week, GOG released Nox. Instabuy. Installed it and started playing.. yep, it was really a good game! It's not without it's flaws of course, but all things considered it has actually aged extremely well when compared to other like games of it's era.

When I did my Sacred review, I closed it by saying that Sacred is Diablo for 'real' RPG players. Nox is the reverse, it's a 'real' RPG for Diablo players.

The story of Nox is a fairly simple one; you play Jack Mower, a 20^th century redneck who lives in a singlewide with his wife, who just happens to own this weird orb that the necromancer queen Hecubah needs to conquer the world of Nox. When Hecubah opens a trans-dimensional portal to recover the orb, it also happens to suck Jack through, too.

In a moment of deus ex machina, Jack just happens to land on the deck of an airship, piloted by a slightly crazy old codger who decides he has need of Jack. From there, the gameplay begins, and the story will change depending on your class of choice.

Each of the three classes starts out with a completely different and unique introduction, before being put on to 'more or less' the same storyline (but for perhaps different reasons) as the other two. Your final goal? Stop Hecubah from taking over Nox.

Normally this storyline would be two strikes for me. I don't usually like the 'modern day dude sucked in to a portal' cliché, and I outright despise the 'you are the chosen one' cliché. Nox somehow makes it work though, partly because the game does not take itself seriously at all. It's not a 'comedy' game by any means, but there's a lot of humor to it.

As I said, Nox has 3 classes, Warrior, Wizard and Conjurer, not many by today's standards but this is an almost 12 year old game. The classes are pretty self explanatory, but I'll go ahead and give a brief rundown.

• Warrior: Pretty obvious, melee master. Swords, maces, thrown weapons, special skills like charging foes. The closest to magic you'll get is enchanted weapons and armor, and bows are for pussies. Unlike Wizards and Conjurers, you will gain your special abilities as you level up.
• Wizard: Also pretty obvious. No armor, only able to use staffs as weapons.. but also able to produce all manner of spells. Wizards will find spell books throughout the game, or buy them from NPCs, and use those spells to produce basic utility effects, defensive measures, or pure raw damage. Wizards also gain the ability to make spell traps, which they can drop and have up to 3 spells go off when a foe triggers them.
• Conjurer: Kinda like a cross between a ranger and a wizard, conjurers summon animals, charm animals, and have a mix of offensive and defensive spells. They're also the only class that can use a bow and can wear light, but not heavy, armor. Like wizards they learn their spells from books they find, as well. Conjurers also have the ability to summon 'bombers' little units that will charge at the nearest enemy and explode, setting off up to 3 spells.

Gameplay wise, there's a few things that will throw off ARPG veterans. Right click moves, left click attacks or interacts. If there's no interaction, you attack.. this sometimes leads to wasted arrows on a conjurer.

Special abilities/spells are activated using the ASDFG keys, while ZXC will activate recovery items. For Wizards and Conjurers the mouse wheel will scroll through the spell trays.

The game is hitbox based, as opposed to accuracy. So at times, aiming a ranged weapon can be very awkward, and the projectiles will often go right past your target until you get used to what you're doing. It seems hitboxes are very small. However it also means if you keep moving ranged foes are less likely to hit you. Warriors can also use their shields to block incoming attacks (so can opponents though), but blocking only works at attacks from the front.

In addition to potions to restore mana, there are also 'mana crystals' throughout the world, which provide extremely fast mana recovery. While this is really nice in some ways, it leads to a lot of backtracking, and forcing fights to happen in certain areas, especially on a Wizard you will find that you spend, in my opinion, too much of your time running back to the nearest mana crystals, because you never know where the next one will be.

The main detractors to the game, for me, are:

No character customization. A warrior is a warrior, the only real customization you get is choosing what weapons and armor to use. Wizards and conjurers get to 'customize' their spells, sorta.

Arrows are not plentiful, and vendors do not restock.

Massively linear gameplay. Highly restricted on where you can go, how much you can explore.. and backtrack? Yeah, right.

Not so much a detractor as something of an annoyance to someone who's grown used to modern action RPGs: Death means game over, so you really have to remember to hit F2 and often.

A note one multiplayer:

The multiplayer of Nox threw out the norm for Action RPGs and went closer to FPS of the day. Offering such things as Capture the Flag and King of the Hill, later they introduced a PvE multiplayer mode as well. The servers have long since been shut down though, meaning the only option these days is LAN.

Short review I know. Nox is an easy game to cover it seems.

Screenshots shamelessly stolen from here.

TL:DR

“Can you take me home? My wife made bacon...”

“Bacon bound we go Imp, but first....”

Price and availability:

GOG: $5.99

Amazon (physical): $13+

Ebay: $~5+

Borderlands

FPS/RPG hybrid

Developers: Gearbox Software

Publishers: 2K games

Released: 2009

Zolgar paid: $7.49 for Game of the Year

Beaten: No, ~50% of the game

Zolgar's rating: 8/10

Replayability: Decent to high

Borderlands is one of those games that I held off on getting for a long time, due to to my general dislike for First Person Shooters, especially after my epic disappointment at the last game that was billed as 'Diablo with guns' (Hellgate: London). When I finally broke down and got it though, I was pretty much instantly hooked on borderlands.

The story of Borderlands is simple:

On the alien world of Pandora, there are legends of an ancient vault filled with alien technology. You play a mercenary who's out to find it, with the help of a “Guardian Angel”, and of course you have to contend with the giant corporation that believes that the Vault belongs to them.

Seeing as this is a video game, we know the Vault is real. Wouldn't be much fun if we got there to the end and found that it wasn't, eh? (It'd be a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan though!)

Seeing as this is a FPS, there's lots and lots and lots of things to shoot on the way to the Vault.

Seeing as this is an RPG, there's lots of people who want you to do stuff for them along the way, too.

For the RPGers, Borderlands offers us 4 classes (which I'll cover in depth later), each with unique abilities and skill trees, gun skills that go up with use, increased health and armor over time, Diablo-style loot drops, and a somewhat simplified gear selection:

4 guns (start with 2, unlock the others throughout the game), 1 shield, 1 Grenade Mod, 1 Class Mod, and 1 Elemental Artifact.

For the FPSers, Borderlands offers us simple, intuitive controls with fair customization, enough weapon options that you're sure to find one you like (which I'll cover later), minimal equipment to worry yourself over, minimal stats to worry yourself over, and only one skill you need to activate per class. And headshots. Mmm headshots.

There's a few points of problems in FPS/RPG hybrids though:

One of the major ones is accuracy. RPG players want accuracy to be based off of their stats, and don't want to have to have a steady hand and fast reflexes. FPS players don't want to have to worry about those silly numbers, and want the bullet to go where they're pointing.

Borderland's answer to this one leans towards the favor of the FPSers. Guns have an accuracy stat, which simply put, determines how close to right where you're aiming the bullet will hit. The more a gun is fired in quick succession, the less accurate it will become (anyone who's fired a real auto or semi auto will understand why). The loss of accuracy with repeated firing though, can be reduced by characters skills, and gun proficiency. (More information on accuracy can be found here)

Another problem is FPSers aren't used to always having to run back in to town to sell stuff, to turn in quests, to buy stuff, etc. RPGers wouldn't know what to do without it.

Answer? Borderlands is an RPG, sorry. You're gonna need to run back to town and do all that annoying stuff. Thankfully though most of the side zones (I keep wanting to call them instances, because that's what they'd be in an MMO), have ammo and medical vending machines near the entrance, so you don't have to run far when you run out of ammo. Also nice is that most of the 'non essential' quests come from a mission board, so you don't have to try and remember “who gave me this mission again?” and only have to return to 1 place for your side quests.

Difficulty. Most FPS players like to crank their game up to 'hard' or 'insane' or 'Damn, I'm Good'. To be fair, many RPG players like that too, though the standard Action RPG answer is 'beat it, then play it against with tougher foes and moar loot!'

Answer? Borderlands goes the Action RPG rout here. Beat it once, you go on to Playthrough 2 where things are harder. Beat it again, and you can move on to Playthrough 2.5, which has levelscaling and can get pretty bloody insane. There is otherwise no difficulty slider that I can find, and many FPS players complain about that fact due to the game getting too easy once they have good gear.

There are a few other more minor issues in the FPS/RPG hybrid camp, that of course lead to some people saying “bleah this is too (FPS or RPG) for me.”, but most of those are much lesser ones, and in so far as I can tell, Borderlands handles all of them fairly well.

Over all? We've got simple FPS gameplay with some nice action RPG elements.

Run around shooting everything that moves, pick up what it drops, and run back to town and sell it for a profit! So you can buy better gear, to shoot tougher foes, to get better loot! HUZZAH! The never ending Action RPG cycle!

Though when you get bored of that, you can always team up with up to 3 friends for 4 player co-op, which runs remarkably well, and should soon be supported by Steam, too.

In true action RPG fashion, your drops are conveniently color-coded:

• White: trash, you'll stop using these pretty soon. And unless you're an addict like me, you'll even stop picking them up by the time you're level 20.
• Green: Eh, OK. In a fantasy game this would be 'magic'.
• Blue: Decent, for most of the game this will be your staple.
• Purple: Really good, probably only becoming your staple on your 2^nd playthrough.
• Orange: 'Legendary', these items are the 2^nd best in the game, likely only to become your staple late in the 2^nd playthrough. (though there are no legendary shields.)
• Pearlescent: O. M. G. is all that can be said about these. They will only become your staple after countless hours of farming high end content on your 3^rd playthrough, and much gnashing of teeth and probably sacrificing your first born son. *Only available with the DLC: Secret Armor of General Knoxx

All orange and pearl items are 'unique' in the sense of unique items from a typical action RPG, that is to say named items with pre-defined stat ranges.

There are also some unique items, also with a special name, flavor text, and only select modifiers available, which can be found at certain specific times of the game. These come in green, blue and purple flavors.

For gear drops you have:

Shields, which offer you limited damage protection, that recharges over time. Basically? More health. Shields can also come with a few minor, helpful modifiers such as a health boost, or health recovery.

Grenade mods, which take your normal boring grenades and make them do fun things, like life leech, or stick to things, or act like clusterbombs.

Class mods, AKA COMs, these tend to provide bonuses to your skills, or certain bonuses that have a strong benefit for a specific role your class plays.

Elemental Artifact, provides bonuses to your Action Skill, usually in the form of damage improvements.

Weapons, are obviously weapons, which come in 8 flavors:

• Revolvers: fair damage, slow firing speed, low capacity, higher accuracy.
• Repeater pistols: Fair damage, fast firing, decent capacity, lower accuracy.
• SMGs: Low damage, full auto fire, good capacity, low accuracy. “Spray and pray”
• Shotguns: Massive damage up close, slow firing, accuracy? What's that? Scatter shot, making them do less damage at range.
• Combat Rifles: Well rounded with a good mix of damage, accuracy, firing speed and capacity. These come in two main flavors 3-round burst, and full auto.
• Sniper Rifles: Do you want to blow someone's head off from half a mile away? I knew you did.. Sniper rifles are slow firing and have low capacity, but they make up for it by having high damage and great accuracy.
• Rocket Launchers: Boom. Slow firing, iffy on accuracy, craptastic capacity, but man it's satisfying to blow shit up.
• Eridian: Extremely rare alien tech (rarer even than Pearlescents in some cases) with infinite ammo (but what is essentially a heat meter), these come in the form of other weapon types, and take on the traits of that weapon type. I only list them separately due to them having their own proficiency.

Interestingly though, there's another step in the weapons department.

Manufacturers:

• Atlas - Above average damage and magazine capacity.
  

• Dahl - High recoil reduction, at the cost of accuracy.
  

• Eridians - Alien weaponry, deals generally high damage with unlimited ammunition but often suffers from slow recharge.
  

• Hyperion - Very high recoil reduction and accuracy.
  

• Jakobs - Never manufactures elemental weapons. Very high damage, but with lower fire rate and recoil reduction.
  

• Maliwan - Only manufactures elemental weapons, which have much higher tech regeneration rates. Also benefits from marginal increases to accuracy and reload speed.
  

• S&S Mnitions - Very high magazine capacity. Usually manufactures elemental weapons.
  

• Tediore - Extremely fast reload speed, with a slight compromise on damage and accuracy.
  

• Torgue - High damage and slightly higher fire rate, but suffers from much lower accuracy and recoil reduction.
  

• Vladof - Very high fire rate, good recoil reduction, but suffers from much lower accuracy.
  

The 'shopkeeper' (a recorded voice on all the vending machines), will often spout off something about one brand or another.

Obviously this makes for a lot of customization when it comes to exactly what you're looking for in Borderlands. If you're a firm believer in '1 shot, 1 kill', a Jakobs Sniper Rifle is your best friend. If you're more fond of spray and pray, Torgue or Vladof SMGs are a nice choice.

Of course, an Atlas is always in style, as they tend to be good all around.. if you can find, and afford, one!

And now for the classes!

As I mentioned before, each class has their own specialties, as well as an 'action skill', which is kinda like spells/skills from most other action RPGs, except they only get one, and then 21 skills, in 3 different trees, that are either passive, or auto activate when a certain condition is met.

A quick note on Action Skill cooldown: Cooldown begins when the skill duration ends.

Brick:

And you, beef stick in the back... I'm not going to make fun of you. Your burps smell of blood, and you growl like a rabid animal.

Brick provides us, in theory, with the requisite melee guy. Unfortunately Borderlands is not meant for melee, so he really tends to end up more like a durable tank who likes to tote close range, high damage guns. His Action Skill is 'Berserk', which provides him with a short duration boost to health regeneration and damage resistance, while making him only attack with his fists.

His skill trees are:

• Brawler, focused on melee damage dealing, and boosting Rage. With the Brawler tree, Brick can go from an 18 second berserk with a 60 second cooldown, to a 27 second berserk with a 30 second cooldown. Not to mention other benefits such as improved damage.
• Tank, focused on damage soak, with such things as increased health, increased shield, resist boosts on killing foes, and a shield recharge spike when your shields are depleted.
• Blaster, mainly focused on dealing explosive damage, Blaster provides benefits mainly to rocket launchers, but also any weapon that deals explosive damage, and has a couple of skills that benefit any weapon.

Siren:

And what's your story, young lady? What can you do? Perhaps you can bake us all a wonderful cake, haha!

Siren or Lilith. The only female class, and as is typical of RPGs, the female class is the 'rogue' or 'assassin' type. Focusing on moving fast, avoiding direct confrontation as much as possible, she does best with an SMG, or any weapon that deals elemental damage. Lilith's Action Skill is 'Phasewalk' which make her invisible as well as providing a major boost to her run speed, and ends with an energy burst dealing good damage to those around her.

Her skill trees are:

• Controller, a mixture of self support abilities, and the chance to daze foes. Abilities include a cooldown reduction for Phasewalk (from 36 to 20 seconds). Health regeneration while Phasewalked, and the chance to daze with certain attacks.
• Elemental, a mixed bag tree, which is focused mainly on elemental damage and resistance, but several other tricks. Skills include increased firing speed, increased damage for the energy burst at the end of Phasewalk, elemental resistance.
• Assassin, This tree focuses mainly on causing death, mainly melee death, the the final ability granting her an epic sneak attack (capping out at +800% melee damage while phased), the tree also includes a skill that increases phasewalk duration (from 36 to 40 seconds), one that recharges Phasewalk a little bit for every kill (up to 6 seconds per kill), and one that increases your resistance after Phasewalk ends (up to 70% for a few seconds.)

Hunter:

You with the sniper rifle and the crazy mask? You look like a Truxican wrestler moonlighting as a dominatrix, man.

Hunter or Mordecai. In the FPS world Mordecai would be called the 'sniper', in the Fantasy world he would be called the 'ranger'. His main focus is shooting things in the head from halfway across the map. He also supposedly likes revolvers, but I'm more fond of something scopes with a high fire rate as a sidearm (and a shotgun for blowing heads off at close range). Mordecai's Action Skill is 'Bloodwing' a predator that drops in from the sky attacking his target.

His skills trees are:

• Sniper, focusing on damaging foes, most specifically, blowing their heads off with a sniper rifle, and doing it better, faster and longer between reloads than anyone else. With skills that increase damage, increase critical hit damage, decrease sniper sway, and give a chance to ignore Shields.
• Rogue, focusing primarily on the Bloodwing, with a side order of generic utility. Mainly the skills buff Bloodwing by letting it attack more, do more damage and increase loot drop.
• Gunslinger, focusing mainly on pistols and general close in damage. Skills include a chance for a 'double tap' with pistols, improved critical hit damage, improved pistol damage, and one that makes you an even better killer when you kill someone.

Soldier:

And you, soldier man? Are those armor pieces from the Crimson Lance you're wearing?

Soldier or Roldand. The basic, well rounded grunt. His specialties are shotguns and assault rifles, but he does good with just about anything in his hands. If you utterly ignore his Action Skill, you because a fairly durable, fairly self sustaining build that does fair damage. His Action Skill though, the Scorpio Turret, while having the longest recharge in the game (100 seconds, to a 20 second up time), can be boosted to be outright insane. Sadly the best uptime you can get it is 20 seconds up to 50 seconds down, with an extra 5 seconds off every 2 seconds when you shoot a foe.

For Roland, I'm going to do a different format for his skills, due to the trees being split between turret and non, in each tree.

His skill trees are:

• Infantry, for the Turret, this offers a damage boost, a cooldown reduction per enemy shot, and the ability to shoot rockets. For normal weapons, this offers a global damage boost, an improvement to assault rifles, a shotgun improvement, and a skill that makes you a better killer, when you kill a foe.
• Support, for the Turret, this offers an ammo recharge for those nearby, a supply drop (up to 1 every 30 seconds), increased recharge, and increased shots fired. For normal weapons, this offers shield improvements and Grenade recharge.
• Medic, for the Turret, this offers health regen for those nearby, and the chance to revive crippled allies on deployment. Otherwise, it's offers Rolland bullet resistance, more health, increased health regen on kills.. oh and the ability to heal allies when he shoots them. No, I'm not kidding.

Further, there's also the driving portion of the game, which is mostly optional, but quite entertaining and a good way to cover long distances of map quicker, especially when you're exploring new areas. There's something disturbingly satisfying about just bowling through anything that comes after you.. until, that is your care explodes and you die.. >.>

Which leads in to death. Like modern ARPGs and even many FPS, death is not the end. It's merely an inconvenience that leads to you losing money, and getting laughed at by your friends due ot dying to Skagzilla. In Borderlands there are New-U stations, which you upload your DNA to the first one you find, and then, should you die.. for a small fee (I believe a percentage of your money), you get resurrected! Well, cloned, with all your memories and experiences intact is more fitting.

Now that your DNA is registered, you have the best in horrific death and dismemberment insurance! Should an unfortunate fatal incident occur, you 'new you' will appear at the nearest station.

What happens if you don't have the money? No clue, and since you start with $80, and the first death takes $6, and each successive one takes less... I'm not about to spend that much time to try and find out.

Then of course, there are achievements, always..

There's two types:

Steam Achievements, which are standard Steam achievements. A mixture of generic bullshit ones, mixed in with a few that are really achievements.

Challenges, these are ingame, and not exclusive to Steam, which are awarded for meeting certain numeric conditions. Killed X skags, shot X bullets, etc. These are not so much achievements as rewards for how long you've been playing. The only two that are real achievements are 'the 12 days of Pandora' which requires 1-12 of 12 different kill types, and the 'airtime' one, for the jumping car.

As an added note, there are also 4 DLC packs, which come with the Game of the Year edition (making it very much worth the extra money):

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned: Opens up a new zone which has been over run by zombies.

Mad Moxxies Underdome Riot: Opens up the Underdome, which is an arena full of baddies, but no real story.

The Secret Armor of General Knoxx: Endgame content, bringing us an expansion of the story, level cap increase, and lots of new shit.

Claptrap's Robot Revolution: More endgame content, with an even more humorous bent than the rest of the game. The Claptraps are revolting!

My only REAL complaint though about Borderlands, is that without modifying the game, you cannot skip the 'opening sequence' for new characters, and it takes a good 3 or 4 minutes. No real problem, but really annoying for someone who likes experimenting with new characters.

TL:DR

"All right back there, time to wake up! It's a beautiful day, full of opportunity!"

Availability and price: (despite being over $20, the GotY is listed, simply because the DLCs are $10 each)

Steam: $19.99 GotY: $29.99

Amazon (physical): ~$9 GotY: ~$28

Amazon (digital): GotY: ~$28

Impulse: $19.99

D2D: $19.95 GotY: $29.95

Sacred Gold

Genre: RPG (Action, 'Click Fest/Diablo Clone')

Developer: Ascaron Entertainment

Publisher: Strategy First

Released: 2005

Zolgar paid: $9.99

Beaten: No, ~30-50% of game

Zolgar's rating: 7/10

Replayability: Moderate to High

Sacred Gold is another one in my never ending quest for another epic time sink of an Action RPG. It ranks pretty high for me, too. In fact I would say it is in my top-5 all time Action RPGs (In no particular order: Diablo 2, Titan Quest, Sacred Gold, Sacred 2 and, Torchlight, all for different reasons). Sacred Gold is on that list because it's a good hybridization between a "real" RPG (like Fallout or Arcanum) and an "action" RPG (like Diablo or Loki).

Sacred Gold is a combination of:

• Sacred
• Sacred Plus
• Sacred: Underworld

All rolled in to one nice neat package. Sacred was, of course, the original game, Sacred Plus was a free add on which added a small amount of content to the game (these days it would be a $5-$10 DLC), and Sacred Underworld was the requisite expansion that added another campaign, 2 new classes and a few fun shinies, and a lot of side quests.

Now unlike almost every other expansion out there, Underworld didn't add more endgame content, but adds a new mid-level+ campaign, that I've honestly never played (despite having this game for several years and logging far too many hours in it), so bear that in mind with this review.

There is one thing Sacred does extremely well, that few other RPGs of it's sort can even try to boast: Open World, and I do mean open. There are a few places you will find, early on, where they won't let you go there until you've furthered the story, but they are few and far between (according to one source, approximately 70% of the world is accessible at level 1). This makes it very easy to forget about the main quest as you're sauntering around the world, killing things and taking their stuff.

I will be honest here, it is actually too easy to forget about the main quest and get distracted by "ooh someplace to explore, things to kill, ph47 13w7z." (Fat Loot, for those of you who don't speak 1337), especially because the story is not put forth the way it usually is in video games of this sort. Normally a game of this sort is "I'm a Big Damn Hero, and I'm going to destroy the evil!" Sacred though, treats you more like a normal RPG of the era. "I'm a nobody who got roped in to this and proved to excel in combat so I get trusted with more important missions and eventually save the world."

The main storyline of Sacred is:

A great Sakkara demon was conjured into existence by the necromancer Shaddar. The conjuring went wrong, and the Sakkara demon is now loose in the world of Ancaria. The heroes must find the five elements of Ancaria (wind, fire, earth, water, void) and use them to defeat the monster. Each hero has different objectives along the way, but eventually, they all lead up to this one final quest.

But, I didn't even know that until I read the Wikipedia article. Seriously, despite all the hours I've put in to the game, I didn't know the 'goal'. What I knew was more like:

Some mage botched a demon summoning spell (in a cinematic reminiscent of the one from Diablo: Hellfire), which seems to have nothing to do with the fact that there's war in Ancaria and the Hero gets roped in to aiding the King for one reason or another (which depends on your character of choice). It's probably going to end up with me killing the demon.

Of course, there are also side quests. In total there are over 300 quests in Sacred. That's a lot of pointless distractions. These are the typical RPG quests of "Kill 15 Orcs"" or "My sheep ran away, find it for me" or "bring me my Dingerwhipple". Side quests award Gold, runes, XP, Items.. they're well worth doing, and also very distracting.

Between quests and for quests, and probably just because, you will be killing things. Lots of things. Combat is simple, click/hold foe until it's dead. Right click to use special ability to make things dead faster. If you kill enough things in one 'zone', without leaving the zone (or game), a special zone boss will spawn. Unfortunately 'enough' is between 5000 and 8000 depending on the zone (you can tell by hitting Tab look at your map), and I'm a little too ADD to do th- Ooh shiny!

On combat, I've heard many people say "Kiting is king", I.. don't agree. Even on horseback, I found Kiting to be slow and ineffective, especially when compared to a melee fighter who can travel long distances quickly. My preferred method of mass slaughter is herd and AoE. Although I'll admit for some fights (like Dragons) kiting could be useful if you don't have a powerhouse build.

A quick side note: Some foes actually feel down right epic. There are giant spiders that are considerably larger than your horse (which is done to a good scale), and Dragons! Dragons are few and far between, but when you fight them.. you know it! Dragons are massive, destructive powerhouses. Though if you learn their pattern you can melee them with ease.

For it's era, Sacred had a lot of nice little 'convenience' features over it's competitors. Such as 'click and hold', instead of 'click click click click' for attacking. Horses for quicker travel (and combat.. sorta). A 'collect all' button, that will have you walk around the screen and grab everything on the ground. Level-Scaling foes (which ties very nicely to the open world).

It also offers 8 character classes, a number which I believe is only beaten by Titan Quest (45 classes), and these aren't your generic classes either, while some definitely have the flair of "warrior" or "mage" or "paladin", they all have their own unique twists and styles.

• BattleMage, Male: This one is pretty straight forward, a mix of melee and magic. Two main playstyles exist for him, using magic to buff, killing with weapons, or explodinate enemies with copious amounts of spells. The BattleMage has a total of 20 Combat Arts, dispersed in 5 'pools': Earth, Fire, Air, Water and, Life. If those aren't self explanatory to you, please stop playing video games.
• Deamon, Female: One of the two classes with Underworld, the Deamon is an interesting, and fun, class. She is a hybrid melee fighter/spell caster, whose spells tend to focus on fire damage and general mayhem. The Deamon has a total of 12 Combat Arts, broken in to 2 'pools': Transformations and Hell Magic. Hell Magic is your run of the mill attack spells, while Transformations each put the Deamon in a special form which provides resistances and a special attack.
• Dark Elf, Male: "Assassin" suits the Dark Elf best, he is a mixture of fast melee combat, poison, and battlefield control. He's a bit squishy, but he makes up for this with speed and the ability to stop foes from hitting him. The Dark Elf has 16 combat arts, broken down in to 2 'pools': Combat Arts and Traps. Traps are battlefield control, mostly, providing such things as AoE stuns, blinds, etc. While Combat Arts are a series of weapon attacks and defenses.
• Dwarf, Male: The other class from Underworld, the Dwarf is another odd one. He's a mix of melee and ranged combat, with a side order of crafting, trading and item-hounding. They're also the only class that can use guns, and can't ride a horse. Dwarves have a total of 15 Combat arts from 2 'pools': Combat Arts and Dwarven Technologies. Dwarven Technologies is a mixed bag of tricks, land mines, item finding, flame thrower.. too much to try and put in to a few words. Combat Arts are once again defenses and weapon attacks.
• Gladiator, Male: The 'warrior' or 'barbarian' of the lot. Touch as nails and hits like a Mack truck. Give him heavy armor, a big weapon, and a few health potions and watch him go. The Gladiator has 11 Combat Arts, all of which are focused around one simple thing: Kill. He has exactly 2 Combat Arts that cause no damage, one that's an AoE knockback, and one that's a self buff.
• Seraphim, Female: "Paladin" or some other sort of holy warrior comes to mind with the Seraphim. Much like the Deamon, she is a mixture of spell casting and melee abilities, though her playstyle is quite different. The Seraphim has 17 Combat Arts, coming from 2 'pools': Her pools are not named so I will call them 'Combat Arts' and 'Celestial Magic'. Celestial Magic is a mixture of Holy attack spells, and defensive spells. While Combat Arts, I'm sure you've figured that out by now.
• Vampire, Female: Thank the FSM, she doesn't sparkle. Possibly the most unique class in Sacred. She is a dual-form melee fighter/summoner. She has a Human form, in which she's a Knight, competent in melee combat and fairly durable, and a Vampire form, where she becomes a melee powerhouse, stronger, faster, and progressively dealing more and more damage, of course, she also takes damage if she is in the sun. She has a total of 16 Combat Arts, in 2 'pools': Combat Arts and Vampire Arts. Vampires arts provide a mixture of summons, specialized attacks and Control effects. Combat arts.. Yeah, you know the drill.
• Wood Elf, Female: A Ranger with a side order of Druid. A very squishy character, but the best at fighting at range, she specializes in bows, and only uses melee combat if she is desperate. Extremely weak initially, later in the game she gets some wicked capabilities. She has 16 combat Arts, broken in to 2 'pools': Combat Arts and Magic. Her Magic is a very mixed bag, a self heal, a summon, battlefield control, buffs, makes for a very versatile character, when you learn to use it all. Meanwhile, her Combat Arts actually warrant a comment: Most of her Combat Arts are bow-only, creating extra damage through special arrow types, one of which summons spiders when it hits. Seriously.

In order to progress your Combat Arts, you need to find Runes, these work in a similar fashion to the Spell Books of Diablo (oldschool reference), you 'use' them, and increase the listed combat art by one, making it do more damage (or whatever it does), but as a trade off, it takes longer to regenerate.

You can also create Combos, which allow you to activate multiple Combat Arts with one click, however, this often leads to a greatly increased regeneration time, and has a few annoying quirks. I've personally never been very fond of the combo system in Sacred. (Now the combo system in Sacred 2... well that's for another review.)

In Sacred 'Mana' doesn't exist, all combat Arts have a set Recharge time, which is often ties to other Combat Arts recharges, too.

Each character also has an assortment of Skills, such as Weapon Lore, Armor Use, Dual Wielding, etc. These skills are chosen by the player as they level up, alter the characters capabilities by doing things such as decreasing recharge time, increasing defense and resist, increasing damage, etc. Of course, there are also your stats, as well, which obviously do things like increase your max Hit Points, increase your damage, decrease poison effects on you, etc.

These factors mean that the odds of two players creating identical characters (unless they're using a guide) is pretty slim. Even 2 Dual Wielding, Battle Deamon focused Deamons, are likely to end up very different based on the desires of the player in question.

Then, of course, we cannot forget the gear. Gear is why most of us play these games. Kill, get gear to kill more to get better gear to kill more to get better gear... you get the idea. Sacred offers the gear hounds plenty of treats, like many of it's competitors you can tell the 'quality' of a gear by it's color:

• White: Normal.
• Blue: Magic, common.
• Yellow: Magic, rare.
• Gold: Magic, unique.
• Green: Magic, set.

I will, once again, assume you've never played a game like this.

Normal items are, just that, normal. At low levels, these are what you're mostly using, a blue drop is a good drop!

Common magic items will become your staple pretty fast though, these only offer a few attributes, but they're still better than normal ones.

Rare items will become your staple mid-late game, providing a good number of benefits, ironically, Rare items are actually more unique than Uniques, and often surpass them.

Uniques would be better listed as 'Named' items, these are items which have a 'lore' to them, if you will. Or atleast look like they should. Often Uniques have many, powerful attributes on them.

Set items are, as it sounds, items which are part of a set. On their own they flucuate between Common and Unique in power, usually hovering in the Rare range, but as more items from the set are equipped, you gain more benefits, making them often the most powerful pieces of gear in the game. Set and Uniques will only become your staple after many hours of gameplay, and several playthroughs.

Really though, that's not enough, because the items also have sockets in them, the number and quality of the sockets is randomly determined, and allows you to vastly improve your gear by dropping things like Runes, Rings, and other items in them. This leads to it often being the case that an item with weaker stats, but more sockets is actually the better item.

Unfortunately, in a game where many of the items dropped cannot be used, there is no means to transfer items between characters. There is only one way to do it, and that requires starting a new game, which is obviously exceptionally vexing if you're playing multiple characters side by side.

Lastly, like other games of it's ilk, there's a system of "beat the game, start over in a tougher difficulty." Unlike most, there are 5 settings however:

• Bronze, 'easy'.
• Silver, 'normal'
• Gold, 'difficult'
• Platinum, 'hard'
• Niobium, 'insane'

Bronze and Silver are both unlocked at the start. Beating Silver unlocks Gold, and so on from there.

Each progressive difficulty level, of course, the enemies get harder, but also the drops and XP get better. If you have far more patience than most human beings, you can reach level 216.

A word on the Bronze/Silver thing:

The difficulty level between Bronze and Silver is a little irritating. Bronze is stupidly easy to the point it's boring. Yet Silver is a bitch to start out in for most classes.

Many say that you should take Bronze to 20ish before venturing in to Silver, I could see that, maybe.. except for the fact that leveling in Bronze is annoyingly slow, and the foes are no challenge at all. Personally, I suck it up and deal with the early problems of Silver, or at most hit level 10 in Bronze.

I almost forgot, Multiplayer! Sacred Gold does support Multiplayer, when it was released it had a system much akin to Blizzard's Battle.Net, however this is no longer around. The only options for multiplayer now via LAN (real or virtual).

TL:DR

"A reviewer once called this 'Diablo for masochists', I say it's 'Diablo for real RPG players'..... wait, same difference."

Availability and price:

GOG: $9.99

Steam: $9.99

Amazon (digital): $9.99 ($4.99 at the time of writing.)
Amazon (physical): ~$8.00

DotEmu: $9.99

Warlords BattleCry III

Genre: RPG/RTS hybrid

Developer: Infinity Interactive

Publisher: Enlight Studios

Released: 2004

Zolgar paid: $9.99

Beaten: No

Zolgar's rating: 8/10

Replayability: High

Did you ever play a game that you were like "This would be so awesome if you could just combine it with X game!"? Well, Warlords Battlecry III (WBC3) is at once both one of those games, and one that is often the X.

If you could combined WBC3 and Warhammer 40K: Dark Crusade, you would have the bestest, most awesome RPG/RTS hybrid ever. As it is, WBC3 is kind of like what you would get if you combined Warcraft III and Dark Crusade. If that means something to you, you probably already know if you're going to like this game or not. If it means nothing to you, read on!

WBC3 released at the height of the 'Hero-Driven RTS' run, and it was unfortunately competing with some really heavy hitters in the RTS genre. Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War had just come out, Warcraft III's expansion was still fairly fresh, Age of Empires III was just about released, and that's just the heavy hitters.

To most people, myself included at the time, Warlords Battlecry III was just another game jumping on the RTS craze. Amazing what marketing and name recognition does for the industry, isn't it? In truth, it's probably the best RPG/RTS hybrid on the market, and it definitely was back in 2004.

Like any good RTS, you start off by choosing if you want to play the campaign, or a Skirmish. Either way you go, you're presented with selecting or making a hero first. When you make your hero, you will be blown away by the options. 16 races and 28 classes, which equates to 448 potential heroes! Four Hundred and Forty Eight! I'm sorry, there's such a thing as 'too many options'. And no, all (insert class) are not the same regardless of race. An Undead necromancer will be vastly different from an Orc Necromancer, for example.

Your hero playstyle will be determined by your race and class, letting you play the game how you want to. Want to tuck your hero in a corner and leave them there getting passive buffs from them? You can do that. Want to charge in to the fray and attack your opponents head on? You can do that. Want to stand with your army and support them? You can do that. Want to be a diplomatic merchant who doesn't care what's going on in the world and just has an army to protect him as he hunts down valuable stuff? You can even do that.

Unlike other games, the race of your hero doesn't determine the race of the army you're going to be playing.

If you go for a Skirmish, you choose your hero, and then you choose the race you're controlling, plus of course picking a map, special rules, etc.

If you're playing the campaign, while you start out playing the race of your hero, but as the campaign goes on you will be able to choose other races.

It's noteworthy that you can use the same hero, with the same progression in a Skirmish or campaign.

The campaign seems a classic Fantasy RTS campaign of "OMG DEAMONS!!!111one" when you fire it up, however it progresses much differently than that, and is a bit of a sandbox in where you go and what you do. The campaign itself does not change much by what race you're playing, a few missions will be different, and your diplomatic relations with X race will be different.

To understand the campaign's gameplay, you need to imagine an overworld map. There are points on the map we will call 'locations'. Each location will have 1 or more missions, and possibly merchants and mercenaries.

Some missions are 'optional side quests', giving magic items, changing diplomatic relationships, offering money, anything like that. Others, of course, exist to tell the main campaign story. In a given location, you are likely to find that the competition of one mission opens up another mission at that location. Occasionally you get a repeatable mission, allowing you to run it multiple times for extra XP/money.

There are two main kinds of missions, both give you a set amount of points (which can be boosted by your hero's stats) which can be used to bring regular units or units from your Retinue along:

"Hero missions" which you take your hero and a small band of soldiers to complete a task. Hello, I'm playing a frelling RTS, not Diablo. I wanna build shit.

"War missions" which are what we play RTS for. You know, building fortresses and smashing your enemies under your army.

WBC3 does an excellent job of giving us a true 'war' feeling, as opposed to so many modern RTS which feel more like a tactical assault. The hard unit cap is 250, most units take 1 maybe 2 points, and the highest is 5 I believe. While the unit cap is increased by buildings, it's not some worthless building that just adds +5 or something. Every building you build ups your army cap, even towers.

It also doesn't needlessly restrict the number of any building you can build, or arbitrarily make buildings cost more, the more of them you build.

Given the time to build up, you can create a massive force to sweep in and crush your foes without them standing a chance. The problem is, your foes are building the same force! The AI is actually intelligent enough to send small strikes against you, while amassing a larger force to crush your assault with.

It's also interesting that not only does your hero gain XP and level up.. so, too, do your units. Each kill grants your units XP, leading to them getting better, making healers much more valuable, especially when the mission ends. Units which have surpassed a certain level may become available to select as part of your retinue.

This is the part where for a normal RTS I would break down the differences between the races. I'm sorry, I don't love you guys enough to break down the similarities/differences between 16 races. Especially when not one of them is a complete re-skin.

Due to it's age, some of the races do share a few units or buildings, and of course with that many races, there's some that share playstyles. Every race however, has enough unique about it to make it not seem like you're playing a carbon copy of another race.

Until you start dealing with the air units. I swear, the developers got lazy when it came to the air units. Almost every race uses one of the same two air unit buildings, and some of the air units are barely even re-skinned. 16 races, all of them with fairly unique buildings, and even the races that have similarities (Dwarf and Dark Dwarf) have slightly different skins on all their buildings.. and then you get the air buildings. It's like they just stopped bloody caring.

Anyways, aside from the air units, every race has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Just for some examples: Fey have an extremely high demand for Crystal, and are fairly heavy on the use of all resources but if they hold out for a good amount of time they are epic. Undead use a hefty amount of crystal and iron, but have the ability to create a massive standing army and change it to what you need. Wood Elves have limited resource needs, but their builders can't increase resource production. Empire has a high demand for gold and with time and resource expenditure is actually able to surpass the 250 hard cap.

Simply put, there is a playstyle for you. With 16 races to play, and 28 classes for your hero, you are bound to find something that fits your playstyle. Unless your playstyle is a sampling of everything, at which point your head will probably explode.

TL:DR

"Orc Necromancer? Fey Paladin? Imperial Deamonslayer? Demon Warrior?Knightpriest?swarmdefilerbarbarianchief..... Graaaaah *head explode*"

Availability and price:

GOG: $9.99 (note: GOGs edition has the unofficial patch that fixes a lot of problems with the game.)
Amazon (physical): $7.91

Amazon (Digital): $19.99 (Seriously Amazon?)

Impulse: $9.99

Direct2Drive: $9.95

GamersGate: $9.99

Special update: Aleph, an in-development indie RPG

I bring you another special edition of The Budget Gamer today, to point you in the direction of a Kickstarter project for anyone who is a fan of oldschool Final Fantasy style RPGs.

Aleph

Planned release: 2012
Planned release price: $20ish w/ pdf book, more with physical book. (Pledge $20 or more to the Kickstarter project on or before July 14th and you will get a copy of the game, and something special and silly.)
Developed and published by: PVGames

So I know what you're thinking "But Zolgar, that's $20 for an indie game, most sell for $5 to $15!" and normally, I'd say that you're right PVGames, however, has some very impressive plans for this baby.

First thing to mention is this is an RPG in the styling of the 80s and 90s RPG epics, many hours of gameplay to drive an epic story. So, if you're a lover of the JRPG genre, you'll get more than your money's worth out of it. (And you get the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie game developer!)

That, alone, however is not enough to get me to do this special update. That's more what got me to share it on my Failbook. PVGames has some plans that put many modern games to shame.

World size: You think Final Fantasy has big worlds? Hah, the overland map would take upwards to half an hour for a player to walk from tip to tip, if they could do it in a straight line. Fear not though, players will be able to obtain a vehicle that will do the trip much faster.

Realism: Aleph will have such mechanics as players requiring food and water, being able to break bones and be infected with diseases. It makes progressing the story feel like far more of an achievement than some little pop-up that says "you took a poo."

There is also a rather in-depth Crafting system planned, but PVGames has not made any announcement pertaining to specifics.

The game also sports a rather massive back story, to give you more of a feel of what's happening in the game world, and make you feel like what you're doing has more of an affect on the world than a fly sneezing. If you'd like to read the general back story, it can be found here. It will also be revealed over time and through finding things in the game world.


The game world itself will be a rather impressive feat, as well, the goal is to create a fully organic, 'real' world. Borrowing a quote from PVGames 'promotional material':

It is a large open world, meaning everything is to scale and persistent. There is a day/night cycle which can effect a number of game elements, as well as a weather system. Townsfolk do not exist just to spout one-liners and are highly interactive. In fact, the whole world of Alpeh is interactive. If something is not nailed to the floor, you can pick it up and bring it wherever you wish. This offers a large myriad of opportunities for you to create housing, bases, storage areas for your equipment, and so forth as you see fit. Although you do get an official housing area, there is nothing stopping you from taking any number of locations in the game as your base of operations. Libraries are overflowing with books, many of which offer relevant or helpful information to the player who can utilize it right. Aleph is a living, breathing world, but only if you can protect it from the scores of hideous creatures out to destroy it!

This leads in to what is perhaps the most ballsy move for an indie developer:
Moral choices, and the consequences thereof.

Yes, you can kill anyone, you can take anything that isn't nailed down.. you can even amass an army and send it to destroy towns on a whim. You can become the ultimate Evil Overlord! If you do so, though, you have to live with the consequences. Followers may abandon, or even turn on you, other cities will hate you, you may even get heroes gunning for your head.

Most games use a 1 or at most 2 axis scale. "Good/Evil" and maybe something like "Law/Chaos" Aleph uses a 7-axis scale, which ames things far less clear-cut as good and evil.
Cowardice/Tenacity
Ignorance/Wisdom
Apathy/Empathy
Artifice/Sincerity
Arrogance/Humility
Indulgence/Restraint
Blasphemy/Piety

And almost every action in the game will move at least one scale. You might find your 'champion of justice' is an arrogant son of a troll. In most games, that's to be expected, but in Aleph.. you're facing an evil entity which is made up of all of man-kinds negative traits, so that arrogant streak gives it a hold on you.

The two 'main endings' are the 'pure good' and 'pure evil' endings. However, there are numerous other endings available depending on your 'alignment' and how you handle numerous things throughout the game.

Oh, and did I mention that you can raze towns? This is the mechanic that really sparked my interest.

So you can steal, murder, lie, cheat, and so forth... but what is really the most evil thing you can do? How about wipe out a village with your own personally-funded army? From within the designated player housing area, you can at one point in the game begin to build your own small army to do your bidding. You talk with your strategist and send the troops to designated locations for differing reasons. There are two primary functions (so far) to raising an army: Securing dungeons and razing towns. If you send your army to secure a dungeon, the troops will clear out the top several levels of any monsters that might live there. This allows the player to explore at his liesure and not worry about encountering any creatures until the lower levels. If the army is sent to raze a town, then that town will be destroyed, but all of its plunder will be yours!

So few games let you get even close to that! The only complaint I have with that mechanic is there's currently not plans to allow you to send your troops in to re-build the town and have it be re-populated but under your control.

If you're not willing to back it, come back sometime in 2012 when I give you my review of it!

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

Genre: RPG, Action (Isometric, Real time, 'click fest'/Diablo Clone)

Developer: Cyanide Studios

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Released: 2007

Zolgar paid: $14.99 (for a 3 pack that included Loki)

Beaten: Not yet.

Zolgar's rating: 7/10

Replayability: Decent to High

I am always on the hunt for new Action RPG/Diablo Clones, looking for my latest fix. Diablo defined the genre, and Diablo II raised the bar, making Diablo II the mark which we compare all others to. Loki measures up semi-favorably. In some ways it greatly surpasses Diablo II, in others it falls short.

Loki offers us 4 character classes, each one with 3 skill trees to work up. The classes are traditional Action RPG fare: a big burly fighter, a dex-driven ranged or melee fighter, a classic spellcaster, and a summoner. I'll cover the characters in more detail later but, in the modern scheme of things 4 classes is a little weak. (Diablo II had 5, 7 with the expansion, Sacred had 6, 8 with the expansion, Sacred 2 had 6.)

Otherwise as far as mechanics go, it's fairly standard fare. Run around, click to attack, right click to cast a spell, hit a number key to change spells, etc. the same controls as any other Action RPG, making it very easy for a new player to drop right in to. Well, after they customize their potion hot keys.

Loki offers us a very basic story, in fact if you change a few key words it's Diablo II's story. Set as been resurrected and is on a path to take over the world! So you must follow him through a jungle, a desert wasteland, a frozen tundra, temperate planes, and even outside of time itself! One thing that is nice for both replayability, and continuity however is that in Loki each class starts in a different area, making the chronology of the story different depending on what class you play.

As I write the rest of this I will try to assume that you've never played Diablo II.

Basic gameplay:

There are 5 areas, each containing a base city and multiple zones filled with monsters. You use the city to shop, offer sacrifices to your god (I'll explain later), and receive/turn in quests. Once you have a quest you venture in to the wild to kill everything that stands in your way (and of course, take it's stuff) until you reach the quest objective, then you go back to town.

When it comes time to return to town, you activate your Teleportation Stone, which gives you a list of zones you can transport to instantly. Unfortunately, there's no portal directly back to right where you left from, but instead only the start of the zone.

The plot line is, as I expressed above, very simple. Much like (most of) the rest of the genre, the plot exists simply to keep you killing and moving from one place to another. The real motivation in a game like this is to kill awesome baddies, get awesome loot and become more powerful. Once you've beaten the game, you can turn around and start it again on a harder setting with tougher foes and better loot. Once you beat that, you can do it again!

Critters scale in level as you go, so always be a 'proper challenge' for you. That said though, the game is pretty hard for a game of it's style. In most games of this style, at first most foes are 1, maybe 2 shots to take down for the lowest damaging classes and the only way you will die is if you're stupid. Loki? Not so, all but highest damaging characters are going to have at least 3 hits for most foes, and your foes? They hit hard, have special abilities and, come in swarms. The start of the game feels more like the endgame of most other games in this genre.

As you fight, you will notice a 'rage' bar creeping up, once this is full you get 'Revitalized' (a short lived state of extremely fast regeneration). Even with this though you're probably going to die a lot, depending on your character and build choice. Death is only a minor inconvenience in Loki though. When (and not if) you die, you simply respawn at the start of the zone you are in, all the foes you killed stay dead. In so far as I have seen, there's no real penalty for dying, unless you count the 2 minutes to run back to what killed you.

One very nice feature of Loki, is when you reload your game it gives you the choice between 'continue' and 'restart'. If you continue, the world is exactly how you left it when you last played. If you choose to restart your character and quest progress remain the same, but the world respawns. So if you're big on following the plot, continue! If you just want the most XP and phat lewt, restart!

A major complaint I have with it, however, is it doesn't have a 'shared stash', or anything that allows for easily transferring items from one character to another. When almost all of the gear in the game is class specific, this kinda sucks.

Loki also is currently the only game I have found to date that made me wonder how the heck to sell items. Once you figure it out, it's actually a very nice system though. Your inventory is divided in to 4 sections: Weapons, Armor, Objects and Kiosk. If you don't understand the first three.. I can't help you, sorry. Kiosk though, nothing automatically goes in there. Instead, when you right-click an item from one of the other 3 sections, it's sent to the kiosk. When you visit a vendor, you go to Sell, and then the Kiosk tab, and there's a 'sell all' button.

Basic inventory management while you're hunting makes selling a snap.

Characters:

In Loki, each of the four characters comes from a certain mythology and each of their three skill trees is represented by a deity they worship.

One strange mechanic is that your skills are independent of your level. In each town there is an altar which allows you to choose which deity you are worshiping at the moment. If you have a deity selected, 25% of your XP goes instead to your 'Faith'. Faith is basically a second XP pool for your skills, and when that fills up, you get a skill point for the deity you are currently worshiping. While this mechanic makes it more challenging to play a character with multiple skill-trees, there's another mechanic which helps.

At the above mentioned altar, there's also the option to sacrifice unwanted magic items to your god. Each magic item is worth 5% of it's sale value in Faith, so if an item would sell to the vendor for 1000 gold, you will get 50 Faith for it. This does lead to you being able to indirectly buy skill points, with very weak returns though. The resale price of an item is 15% of what you paid for it and you get 5% of that. So for 10,000 gold, you get 75 Faith points. As a reference, to go from Faith level 13 to 14 you need about 3300 Faith.

While you can reset your skill choices any time you feel like it (for a sum of gold based off of your Faith level), you can only reset as far as your skill tree. Skill points earned in one tree are forever in that tree.

OK, so before I got slightly distracted by that little rabbit trail of a weird mechanic, I was going to give you a rundown of the classes.

Norse Hero:

The Norse hero is the classic barbarian. Tough as nails, strong (and dumb) as an ox, purely focused on melee fighting.

His skill-trees are:

Thor: Two-handed weapons, lightning damage and a lot status affects.

Tyr: One-handed weapons (with dual-wielding later on), speed focus, and a lot of self buffs.

Odin: Spear focus, ice damage, and some traditional spell casting, including summons.

While the Norse hero has a lot of hit points, he has to choose between hitting hard and slow, or light and fast. This tends to lead to hitting healing potions as fast as they're available. Although due to his high HP, he does tend to be able to hold out for his Revitalized state better than most.

Greek Hero:

The Greek hero is the 'dexer', choosing between ranged combat or high speed melee combat and focusing on being harder to hit.

Her skill-trees are:

Ares: Fire, poison and status traps.

Artemis: Archery, with regular, poison and ice arrows.

Athena: I like to call Athena the 'Xena' tree. 1 handed sword or chakram and shield.

The Greek hero has two distinct options for play style. Melee, relying on a high parry and good defense to avoid dying. Or kiting everything and shooting it with a bow. Both options are viable, and an assortment of traps can make both options even more viable. If you choose melee, be prepared to die a fair bit early on, and spend a lot of money on health potions.

Egyptian Hero:

The Egyptian hero is the spell caster, choosing between raw damage, damage with a summon, or damage and debuffs.

His skill trees are:

Ra: Fire, fire and more fire. Mmm fire.

Horus: Lightning damage, and a Mummy pet that deals poison damage.

Set: Dark damage and debuffs.

The Egyptian hero plays like a spellcaster should, blast and run. However, he seems to be the most powerful class at early levels, a basic fire blast 1-shots most things, and the game seems to pretty much be built for kiting things that aren't dropped in 1 shot.

Aztec Hero:

The Aztec hero is the hardest to classify as a classic archetype. Druid is probably the best fit for her, choosing between summons, shapeshifting and Spirit magic.

Her skill trees are:

Quetzalcoatl: Summoning, able to summon a mage, giant praying mantis and giant spider.

Tezcatlipoca: Shape Shifting, Jaguar and Spirit forms.

Miclantecuhtli: Spirit magic, a strange buff/debuff/damage set.

I will confess to not having played the Aztec hero much.. honestly, the only set that really appeals much to me is Teza... the shape shifting set, and at low levels.. that set sucks. The Aztec hero decidedly lacks the durability to be in melee, which both her alternate forms are built for. It seems however, if you can put up with the repeated deaths of early levels, by the 20s a Shape Shifting Aztec hero will be a powerhouse.

In regards to her other two sets, the summon set has an interesting trait, requiring you to take skills for your pets to have, and essentially choose which skill they will have when. The Spirit set looks like it has a lot of potential, but also has a pretty sizable weakness as well, almost all of it's abilities require being within a certain range of a totem.

Over all, I find the balance of the character classes far more skewed than is normal for an action RPG, and even with the minimal penalty for death, the amount you die on some builds, even early on, is extremely frustrating.

As a final thing to mention, the multiplayer:

I didn't give the multiplayer a try, however Loki's multiplayer uses your Single Player characters. This means it accesses characters stored on your hard drive, which means that, like oldschool Diablo, multiplayer will be full of cheats and hacks.

While most of the cheats I found didn't work too well, I didn't look a lot. The infinite gold bug worked well though. (I don't normally cheat in these games, but I was hoping to give a better idea of the different skill-trees without playing 12 characters in total.)

TL:DR

“For a blatant Diablo II rip off, it's not that bad.”

Availability and price:

Impulse: $9.99 (Or $29.99 with a 3-pack)

Steam: $9.99

Amazon (digital): $9.99

Amazon (physical): $7.99

Ebay: $2+