Loki - German Review @ 4Players.de

With the recent release of Cyanide's mythological action/RPG Loki in Germany comes the first review we've heard of and some cause for modest hope for those interested in this title. My German doesn't go beyond following the "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…" opening line but the score is a reasonable 83%.
Thanks, Nokturnal!
More information.

Well, I found the German lovely to look at and beautiful to see, but unfortunately other than "Diablo", Blizzzard", "Titan Quest" and ??"von Crimson Cow"??, I'm afraid I didn't comprehend much. I have to admit that Action Rollenspiel sounds a lot more dignified than ARPG, though.

I suppose there's always babelfish.

argh… once again Level-Scaling

The Classes sound a bit interesting though… aegyptian Battle-Mage, northern Barbarian, atzekian Shamaness, greek Amazon… though the later two are underpowerd as I unstand the review… the Game-Levels are at least mostly random-generated.

btw "something is rotten in the State of Denmark" is one of our stranger Proverbs

At least the German version of this game has StarForce copy protection so as far as I am concerned, they can put this game in a warm place near their lower spine .

Level scaling + StarForce = Screaming "Please, whatever you do, but don't buy me!"

Pass. Next. Please.

Starforce? Was this mentioned in the review?

Originally Posted by Fenris
btw "something is rotten in the State of Denmark" is one of our stranger Proverbs

I might be wrong, but isn´t this a quote from Hamlet?

I don't know if StarForce was mentioned in the 4Players review but I read about it on the World of Players (same network as where World of Gothic is hosted for those who don't know) forums. I then did a Google search with the German title of the game + StarForce and there are quite a lot of references in various articles (mostly previews and fansite news) that are confirming that Loki ships with StarForce.

Probably… Hamlet is/was the Prince of Denmark so you might be right

In my total ignorance of classic theater I don't know, I even had to confirm the above Sentence with wikipedia

Edit:
Since I couldn't get the last Starforce-protected game to run on my System I certainly won't buy this game now… at least this saves me some money, the game sounds like a mediocre Diablo-Clone anyway…

Yes, a line from Hamlet.

Originally Posted by Fenris
Probably… Hamlet is/was the Prince of Denmark so you might be right

In my total ignorance of classic theater I don't know, I even had to confirm the above Sentence with wikipedia

Shakespeare is great! Watch some of Kenneth Branagh´s (sp?) movies.



Loki indeed uses Starforce. Something else is very positive though. Crimson Cow decided to check the disk only ~every 3 days. You can take it out of the drive between the checks.

Do you know me, my lord? - Excellent well; you are a fishmonger!

There have been reported problems concerning the installation routine. The game does not install correctly.

I have seen word of a patch somewhere … Oh, it was on Blues and one link is here.

Also have seen definite Starforce confirmation notes about.

So what is the supreme evil of Starforce? I don't think I've had the dubious pleasure of encountering it.

Originally Posted by magerette
So what is the supreme evil of Starforce? I don't think I've had the dubious pleasure of encountering it.

Some people have issues with the invasive nature and others claim to have had computer issues related to it.

As you know I go through loads of games, and have had many StarForce games and never had any issue outside of hassles - games asking for a CD when it is in the drive and whatnot.

Originally Posted by magerette
So what is the supreme evil of Starforce? I don't think I've had the dubious pleasure of encountering it.

Well, back in the Days I bought a little Starforce-protected game called the Fall - I installed it on my computer, that was a bit outdated and it started without problems, but thanks to my old hardware it was a bit to slow… than I bought a new machine and the game simply wouldn't start at the new system - but since the game was boring anyway no big loss…

Originally Posted by Fenris
a little Starforce-protected game called the Fall

… apparently the 'last days of Gaia' finished up before the game managed to get a US release

I have never had a problem with StarForce either… I think… I once had a very weird problem with my system where a partition just disappeared when StarForce was installed but there's no way telling if it really was SF alone or if there was some other problem involved with it.

Anyway, the reason why I consider SF a "supreme evil" is that they are complete assholes. Anyone remember the Stardock affair (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6145864.html)?
Stardock is the developer of Galactic Civilizations. They have no copy protection on any of their games at all but are still very successful thanks to great product quality and superior support of their games.
When the makers of SF were confronted with the fact that games without copy protection can be very successful as well, they posted links to torrents of Stardock's games (Gal Civ 2) to their forums to make a point how/where games without copy protection end up.

Sorry, but I'm not even indirectly ever going to support these fu… again by purchasing a SF-infested game. That was as low as it gets.
Besides, there's always a minimum risk left of a system/hardware failure since no one really seems to know how "bad" SF is exactly.

Thanks for the link, Mo. I agree that is pretty abysmal behaviour. An apology after the fact is too easy to make much difference. I liked this quote:

GS: Why did Stardock opt not to use traditional industry-accepted forms of copy protection?

BW: It's only industry-accepted in the PC game industry—the industry that people are regularly saying is "doomed." Most of our business is in the application software market (the market that no one argues is "doomed"), and such copy protection measures are not used. I don't have to keep my Adobe Photoshop CD in the drive to use it.

Stardock doesn´t use copy protection - but they do use product authorisation. You need to install their Steam equivalent. What´s it called, Stardock Central ?