Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

I can understand why people might enjoy this game, I enjoyed this game for a bit but it really just does not work for me. -The build everyone wants to play in a steampunk fantasy is completely unviable, the gunslinger. -It looks terrible, and I mean terrible, not terrible for it's time, absolutely horrid. Planescape: Torment came out around two years prior, Fallout 1 four years, and both these games look infinitely better, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 even more so. You might think, "Well, I wouldn't be playing older games if I cared that much about visuals", trust me, they are really bad. -Now, people always talk about how good the writing is in Arcanum, okay, what? Maybe it gets better later, because I didn't play it through and through but I think I played it a significant amount and I can really find nothing redeeming about it as far as I played which was about 10 hours, which might not be a lot to you, but, if there's nothing enjoyable in a game after even 5 hours I usually quit it but I put more mental effort into playing this due to the overwhelming love I see for it and it did not end up being enjoyable I'm sorry to say. -Some people say, "Oh yeah, the first bit of the story starts off slow", ahem. WHAT? My man, I've played through quite a bit of slow story-ness, e.g. Peragus Mining Facility & Telos, Shin Megami Tensei IV, etc. and nothing comes even remotely close to this game. +Character creation is fun. I really wanted to like this game, I enjoyed VTMB, which was kind of why I wanted to go back and check this out but yeah, didn't exactly work out.

I really wanted to like this game. I liked the setting, the ambiance, the music, the character portraits (the best I have ever seen) and what little I could grasp of the story before I realized that I had wasted about 10 hours of my life trying to master an unbalanced, frustrating, counter intuitive, graphically ugly, repetitive and utterly boring turd of a game. I'm sorry. I'm a full blown retro gamer, but nostalgia can not redeem this mess.

Skiddily

Why they let you be a gunslinger, why? Every RPG I play I stick with the mage class. This one I noticed you could use guns! How awesome! How many medieval fantasy RPGs let you use guns? So, I choose to use guns. Terrible mistake. Being a gunslinger in this game is terrible horrible. You'll waste ALL your money buying bullets which you'll lose in around 5 enemies. Even if you learn how to craft bullets, it's not enough! Nothing will stop the money sinking. And when the money is gone forever.... game over. The irony is that by looking around the web I discovered that being a mage in this game is god-mode. Now I'm too pissed with all the hours wasted to start again. If someone actually read this, I hope you cast your vote, for good or for bad.

The story is probably really good. The developers clearly put tons of thought into the game world, because there are tons of unique backgrounds. Character creation was so detailed that I was smiling with joy when I was making my character. However, that joy was crushed when I started playing. There are severe balance issues that make the game literally unplayable. The skill system is clunky and makes no sense, and pretty much any character you make sucks too hard to live more than 5 minutes. You can't play the character you want to play, essentially. This is one of those games that kills you arbitrarily. You will spend more time on the character creation screen desperately trying to make a character that can survive than you will actually trying to survive with that character. A good role-playing doesn't punch the player in the balls for exercising free will. It's hard to be immersed in the game world and take the game seriously when you have to min/max or use "uber meta" or die after 30 seconds. It sort of defeats the whole purpose and appeal of role-playing games. To me, this game is a hack n' slash. It is Diablo 3.