In days gone by, pen and paper role-players referred to a combat-oriented adventure as a hack-and-slash affair. With the success of Diablo, the videogame world received its equivalent; the click-and-slash, where the emphasis is on combat performed by pointing and clicking on the enemy. A lot. Until your index finger feels like it's going to drop off, in fact.

Loki is built very much along Diablo's simple and streamlined philosophy; click and bash the monsters, grab the loot and level up. There are a couple of twists, naturally, the fact that the game is inspired by multiple mythologies being the obvious one.

The four playable characters and their quest lines are drawn from Greek, Aztec, Egyptian and Norse mythology. Become the Egyptian sorcerer and you'll face scorched deserts and deities such as Isis and Seth, whereas the hardy Norse warrior has to contend with Ragnarok (not a Scandinavian heavy metal festival, but the brutal winter and colossal battle at the end of the world).

Extra spice is introduced in the form of the levelling system. The player can concentrate solely on getting experience points to level up and improve their character's statistics, or they can elect to spend a quarter of their points worshipping a chosen God, which grants them extra powers via a skill tree. Moreover, rather than selling your valuable loot, you can offer it to the Gods to progress further up this skill tree, so there's an interesting balance to be struck between levelling, skills and money.

Loki also boasts that it features random level generation, so the landscape will never be exactly the same from game to game, boosting its replayability. In practice, however, this gives the levels a rather faceless aspect. They're fairly long swathes of very similar and largely dull environments, populated by the same monsters over and over again. Progression through the run-of-the-mill quests is linear, too, and one of Loki's biggest let-downs is this plodding lack of variety.

Another is the unwieldy interface. By now, we're used to World of Warcraft's slick inventory features such as equipment compare (when you mouse over a sword in your backpack, this automatically displays your current weapon's statistics so the effectiveness of both can be easily compared). There's none of that here, in fact Loki prides itself on great clunky scrolling lists of items and irritating confirmation prompts.

Combat itself also suffers from a certain imprecision. The hit boxes of some of the bigger monsters seem smaller than their graphics, so in the midst of furious combat it's easy to miss them and click the ground instead. We often found ourselves doing this in crucial large-scale battles, where the lost seconds spent accidentally running around really don't help. And if we had a health potion for every time we clicked to fire an arrow at a distant beast, and ended up running towards it instead, we'd... well, we wouldn't be dead.

Fortunately, Loki isn't a particularly difficult game (dying just means being sent back to the start of a level, but the monsters don't respawn so it's not a big deal). This means that these control niggles don't become hugely frustrating, although they're still annoying at times, without a doubt.

Despite its problems, the mythological slant, character advancement and loot systems are interesting enough to make this RPG a playable experience - just about. The developer has also included co-operative and PvP (Player versus Player) multiplayer modes, which is good to see.

Click-and-slash fans will find enough RPG meat here to get by on, but it's no feast in the hall of Valhalla, that's for sure.