Lords of Xulima Review
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Introduction
Lords of Xulima (LOX) is the debut effort from Spanish developer Numantian Games. It takes place in a world where the gods have mysteriously disappeared, but where one of them contacts your party in a dream, and asks it to purify the eight temples of the gods, which have been converted into prison camps -- or worse -- by the renegade god Yul. The eight temples are scattered throughout the world of Xulima, and each one can only be entered after acquiring a key from a boss creature, and so accomplishing your divine task requires hundreds of battles against dozens of different types of enemies.
In other words, LOX is a grind-it-out RPG, somewhere in the same vein as the King's Bounty games, and its focus is much more on honing the fighting skills of your party than it is about story or questing or interesting characters. But is it the right game for you? Keep reading to find out.
Characters
When you start a new game of LOX, you have to create your party of six characters. One of these characters is required to be Gaulen the Explorer, who is the only character who can be the Explorer class. Your other characters can choose between being an Arcane Soldier, Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Divine Summoner, Mage, Paladin, Soldier, or Thief, where each of these classes does about what you would expect. For example, the Paladin mixes melee combat with healing, while the Bard can buff your party or debuff your enemies.
Each class gets a selection of skills and spells, including weapon and armor proficiencies, combat maneuvers, offensive spells, and healing spells. Most of the skills and spells are for combat, but there are also Thief skills for detecting hidden items, disarming traps, and picking locks, and Explorer skills for easier traveling, better herb gathering (where herbs can be used to improve character stats), and camouflage (which allows you to avoid unwanted combat). Many skills and spells are shared amongst multiple classes, but the improvement costs are usually different. For example, Barbarians only have to pay one point to improve weapon skills while Clerics have to pay three points. Each character gains four skill points per level, and there are numerous other ways to earn skill points as well (including herbs, trainers, and magic fountains), so you don't have to agonize over where to put your points or worry about respeccing your characters.
Each character also has five attributes: Strength (damage and carrying capacity), Constitution (health), Agility (hit chance and defense), Speed (battle quickness and evasion), and Energy (power points for spells and combat maneuvers). Characters get to improve two attributes per level, but sort of oddly, Speed is by far the most important one, especially early in the game, and so it's just a matter of choosing which attribute to advance along with Speed each level.
To round out your characters, they also get a name and gender (which don't make any difference in the game), a preferred weapon (which gives them an extra point in the associated weapon skill), and a god (which provides a small bonus). Characters also get a portrait. The game includes 32 portraits for you to choose from, but you can also import your own.
Gameplay
LOX is presented in 2D using an isometric view. Your party is represented by Gaulen, who also does the talking for you. You move Gaulen around by clicking where you want him to go, or by using the WASD or arrow keys to usher him along. You can toggle whether you want Gaulen to walk (which is good when you want to avoid traps) or run (which is good otherwise).
The world of Xulima is divided into 14 map regions. Four of these maps include towns, which are all but identical. Each town includes a priest to heal wounds and cure debuffs (like curses and diseases), a food merchant to sell you food for your travels (you can also pick food from various bushes in the world), an equipment merchant (who sells a little bit of everything), and a trainer (who gives you quests and sells you skill points).
Your party requires food and rest as it travels. Each step you take costs a little bit of food, with the tougher terrains (deserts and tundras) requiring more than friendly forests and roads. If your party runs out of food, then it takes an immediate and nasty debuff, and it also starts losing health, where the longer the starvation goes on, the more damaging it becomes. Fortunately, you can buy town portal scrolls, which return you immediately to a town where you can buy food. There are also dimensional portals in most of the maps that let you travel around easier.
The quests in the game are very basic, usually just requiring you to find missing people or collect items from foes. None of the quests add anything to the story, and you're not given any options for how to complete them. Some of the quests are also "bad," where the items you're tasked to turn in are worth far more than the reward.
The story in the game is also very basic. The premise about the missing gods and their temples is pretty much everything. You're also not given any options in the conversations you have. They're entirely scripted, where you just have to press the "continue" button to see the next line of dialogue. So there's only one way for the story to go, and it's not a very interesting way.
Combat
Luckily, LOX also has combat, which works well. About half of the enemies in the world show up on the maps, so you know where they are. The other half sneak up on your while you're exploring, so you have to be prepared for battles at all times. Each map is divided into zones, and it's possible to clear each zone of random ambushes. In fact, if you play at a high enough difficulty setting, then you have to seek out the random battles to build up your party enough to survive the fixed ones.
The battles in the game are turn-based, but they don't have rounds. Each character has a certain cooldown after each attack, and if they're fast enough then they might attack multiple times before their opponents get a chance to do anything (that's why the Speed attribute is so important). Characters can miss with their attacks, and those employing weapons can also critically miss, which means they hit themselves instead of their target. Critical misses seem like an odd feature for a game, but at least it seems to stop happening when characters max out their weapon skill.
Your party and enemy parties get two rows of combatants. The front row protects the back row, and the back row can only make attacks using spells, ranged weapons, or long weapons like spears. Different kinds of weapons have different bonuses, so maces can stun enemies (increasing the cooldown before their next attack), swords can cause extra bleeding damage, and axes can cause wounds (which reduce the target's combat ability). Along with making attacks, characters can also consume items (like potions) on their turn, or they can move to a more advantageous position on the battlefield.
LOX doesn't use any sort of level scaling, so there are definitely difficult battles and easy battles, with more of the former than the latter. Unfortunately, while enemies do a lot of interesting things in combat -- like thieves who rob you and mushrooms who put your party to sleep -- there are only about forty types of enemies in the game (not counting basic variations), and you repeat battles all the time, especially if you have to track down each and every random encounter. It took me about 90 hours to complete the game (using the middle "old-school veteran" difficulty setting), but the extreme repetition wore me down. I probably would have liked the game better at about half the length.
Other Activities
Along with towns, the 14 map zones in the game also include castles, caves, magic towers, and temples to explore. These sites are usually enjoyable, as they always feature traps, secret doors, and puzzles. The puzzles are creative given the basic nature of the game's engine, and they require you to do things like answer riddles, map teleporters, and rotate statues. The game is friendly in that it keeps notes for you so you don't have to write many things down, and it also allows you to annotate maps so you can remember where the important places are.
The thief activities in the game are performed using mini-games. For unlocking doors and chests, you have to map a sequence of gears from a starting point to an ending point, with the tougher locks requiring longer chains and eating more lock picks when you make a mistake. For disarming traps, you have to click on gears when they're green (as opposed to red or yellow), with tougher traps having more gears and changing colors more quickly. The mini-games are effective because they're easy and difficult at the same time, and because they do a decent job of actually recreating the activity they represent.
Interestingly, the enemies you defeat never drop equipment. They only drop horns or eggs or other things that you can consume. You only find equipment on corpses or in chests, or buy it from merchants in the towns. Characters can wear up to ten items at once, including boots, helmets, and rings. All of the equipment in the game is random -- there aren't any unique items or set items -- and it's frequently difficult to find items with actual magical bonuses attached to them. As a result, the equipment is rather basic and uninteresting, and it's not all that much fun to go searching for it.
Graphics and Sound
LOX is a budget title, and as is the case for almost all budget titles, the low cost of production is most evident when it comes to the graphics and sound. There isn't really anything wrong with the graphics of LOX -- and it's easy to tell what everything is supposed to be, which is the most important thing -- but all of the graphical elements from the colors to the animations to the spell effects to the cut-and-paste environmental objects are very basic. This isn't the type of game where you're going to wander around and ooh and aah at the visuals.
The sound is also basic. Very little of the dialogue is voice-acted, and the few actors involved are either humdrum or iffy (like the completely inappropriate voice for the arena master). The dialogue in the game gives a double whammy of dull writing paired with dull performances, which is never good. Meanwhile, the background music and the sound effects get the job done, but they aren't anything to write home about, either.
Technical Issues
During the time I spent with LOX, I didn't experience any technical problems. The game never crashed, none of the quests broke, and none of the skills or spells did anything other than what they were supposed to. Better yet, the loading screens were so fast that I rarely had time to read the gameplay tip that they included. About the worst thing I can say about LOX is that sometimes the spoken dialogue didn't match the subtitles.
Conclusion
I don't want to make this sound like an insult, but LOX is an okay game. It's a budget title that isn't trying to do anything too out of the box, and it mostly hits its marks. LOX is definitely a grindy game, but as long as you enjoy building up a party and fighting monsters -- and you don't require much in the way of quests or story to encourage you along -- then it can give you dozens of hours of entertainment. LOX is worth a flier at its price.
