Cyanide Studio's Loki is the latest in a long line of action RPG titles attempting to capitalise on the immense success of the genre. We've seen a lot of these over the last few years, so can a company previously responsible for releasing Horse Racing Manager come up with the goods?

The premise is simple - Seth, the Egyptian god of the desert, chaos and caravans, is causing mayhem and destruction in the 13th Century BC. Those of you who have been stuck behind a caravan on State Highway One during Labour Weekend will immediately recognise the seriousness of the situation. You can choose between a Greek fighter, an Aztec shaman, an Egyptian sorcerer or a Norse warrior in your attempt to rid the world of this dark power, each offering a different experience during your journey, and obviously different attributes and weaponry. There are plenty of additional mythology subplots, so those of you who like to converse in Tokien's Elvish will be right at home, but it has no effect on the gameplay and seems to have been included just to pad out the cut scenes and provide hard drive manufacturers with an excuse to ship a few more units.

Like any good RPG, you'll find the prerequisite health/mana/experience bars, an assortment of potions, character status windows with traditional health/dexterity/intelligence, etc. Unlike any good RPG, you will also get one of the most confusing and unnecessarily complicated inventory systems ever designed. There is no direct comparison between the weapon you have equipped and what you've picked up, and as you don't have a character avatar to lay weapons over you're subjected to manually ticking the item you want to equip and trying to detect what changes, if any, have been made to your character stats. It’s about as efficient as eating an apple through a letterbox. The only redeeming quality is that it is a truly enormous inventory, which is unusual considering you have to kill quite a few creatures to be rewarded with any item at all.

The good news, however, is that these issues don't detract from the gameplay at all, which is a smooth and generally polished affair. I like some aspects, such as any type of clipping changes the scenery to transparent, and the camera angles (despite a bit of necessary practise) render the randomly-generated landscape in more than sufficient detail. Sound effects are clear and wonderfully detailed, although the use of an American actor to voice some deities is a cause for concern. The AI isn't the best, sometimes creatures spawn on top of unreachable cliffs next to tantalising treasure chests that will never be opened, but if you've ever listened to talkback radio you'll be fully aware that intelligence is overrated anyway. I don't see anything inherently wrong that probably won't be corrected with a future patch or two, so one can purchase this safe in the knowledge they're not opening themselves up to a buggy mess. It even works well on Vista.

Loki has drawn heavily from the masters in the field - A libellous accusation would be to insist that Cyanide lifted the money-jingle-in-inventory sound bite directly from World of Warcraft, so obviously I won't be mentioning that. You'll also get the same "floating DPS" stats each time you swing, and they've even incorporated a nifty "deity" bonus attribute you can apply, although to be fair this is really just a skill tree in a rather unconvincing disguise. You'll either love or loathe the Warcraft-inspired delay between the click of the mouse and the actual deployment of your weapon, and considering you'll come across hundreds and hundreds of extremely similar creatures before you change level, my money is on the latter.

Replayability is high, with three difficulty levels and an online ladder system offering a vast array of weapons, many of which appear to be character-specific with a great deal of diversity. You don't seem to get the same loot filtering options as, say, Titan Quest, but a blacksmith in town can re-forge your weapons to add yet another layer of variation on what already seems like a bewildering array of choice. There is more than enough micro-management of character stats and equipment to keep the ardent RPG fans happy, although I can't but help think that for this very reason, newcomers to the genre would be better to start with the classics.

You see, there is always some kind of hook in any good game that hits you, usually within the first couple of hours of game play, and makes you want to keep coming back. Whether it's the first time you discover an enemy in Civilization, the first headshot in Counter-Strike, or even the first real quick lap you do in Gran Turisimo, you're pulled into the game and for many people it can be years before they put it down. Loki is exceptional in that it has absolutely nothing like that at all. Oh sure, it's not a bad game as such, some would venture to describe it as "solid", and "enjoyable", and even "better than Two Worlds", but there really isn't anything that sets it apart and elevates it to even an approximation of Diablo II, or even Dungeon Siege if we're being honest. However, if you just can't play anything but RPGs and you've played everything else, then by all means you probably won't feel like you've wasted your money.

Is there really room in the increasingly cramped confines of "hack 'n' slash" for yet another madcap, awe-inspired romp into a mythical world to defeat a deity who has stolen your winter supply of goat meat? You bet! Is Loki the one to take you there? Probably not.