I was entertained. For about 40 hours or so. Which is a very low number of hours for me to finish a game. And that included doing all the side-quests plus looking in every damn corner for those bloody artefacts. Oh, another word of warning: There are bugs in this game. Some rather annoying ones, like the one where you can't actually fulfil one of the relic collections because the relic is in a place where the only way out is by dying. Also, there are missing graphics, missing text, wrong text ("Error: Must never be displayed" popped up where it should have said "Throne", and one quest was simply called a six-string number), and you may have trouble with the videos. I did. Two of the most important story-related videos never showed. Like, the last one. So the game ended very abruptly for me, before the almost never-ending credits. JoWood, you should definitely consider commissioning a song to cover the whole of the credits roll instead of putting that blasted tune on loop. Six and a half times I had to listen to that song and then no reward at the end of the roll.
Still, I had some fun playing the game, once I stopped crying after realising it had very little to do with the Gothic franchise. Nor was it a RPG. What it did do, however, was letting me win quite easily. Think "hack'n'slash". Or simply "hack-until-they're-up-against-a-wall-and-then-slash-like-crazy".
At one point a near-invincible and very forgiving rabbit started following me. It continued to do so throughout about 25% of the game. It was cute at first, but it soon became very annoying as it kept ending up in the middle of fights and I tried not to kill it. Which is where I discovered it was near-invincible. And forgiving.
You want to know what the story is like? Well, something about a king who's become very evil all of a sudden and then your village is burned down and revenge is the only way, so you go on a trek in the woods. As you do. The English voice-acting is so-so, but I have to admit I prefer reading the subtitles and just clicking my way through conversations anyway. Speaking of conversations, you don't really get much say in, well, what to say. The story is linear and there aren't that many side-quests, so they could have done away with the "conversations" and made some more of those lovely videos instead. Those I didn't get to see.
Crafting is easier in ArcaniA than in other Gothic titles; you can craft anything anywhere as long as you've learnt how to and own the right ingredients. Loot is not random either, so the whole thing gets very linear in that it's basically a matter of crafting using the flora and fauna in the current part of the world as well as equipping the latest weaponry you found.
I did have fun playing the game, and I learnt to quick-save often (you never know when you'll fall off a cliff because you couldn't time your jumping); that way it was quite enjoyable, but about 75% into the game I just wanted to get it over with.
Definitely not worth its steep price tag until they've sorted out a lot of issues, and not even then, to be frank. It's worse than Two Worlds, I'd say, so if you didn't like that one (I'm one of the few who did), you know you wouldn't enjoy this game.
What others think
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
NOW Gamer (X360)
GamesRadar/XBoxWorld (X360)
GameSpot (X360)
Metacritic
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