Arx Fatalis

good price to quality. Best spell system all time

The game is very good- its much like the Elder Scrolls Series. The Good: World is interactive. Variety of Enemies. Unique casting System (hold ctrl and draw glyphs w/ mouse in certain order and release to cast) Fits its own story (there are few people because the sun has burned out and they all live underground). Cooking of raw meat by putting it by a fire. Combination of equipment to create new items is very unique and responsive. The Bad: You will get very very very tired of seeing rocky walls and torches. Almost (if not all) of the game is set underground. In order to access inventory, it is necessary to switch in to "cursor mode" where your mouse can move freely through your field of vision but only when you press it against the sides does your field of vision move. This causes a sort of mismatch in control and is very hard to get used to. Thousands of Rats. I'm tired of killing them and my character can really enjoyed the cooked meat all that much. There are only 4 character models in the game, that gets a bit repetitive. Overall the bad cannot mar this game too badly. Still a good title for those who enjoy an Elder Scrolls experience.

I really wanted to play this game as it reminds me heavily of Morrowind, but in a massive cave system. My initial feelings were positive and I was digging the idea of introducing point and click style puzzles into the rpg gameplay of a typical fps-rpg. Then they added magic into the mix, which is sadly not optional. You have to use the magic system in various situations. The problem? The magic system uses mouse movements to cast. You trace a rune and cast the spell. This DOES NOT work at all for me, ever. I'll trace the symbol exactly and I get the 'fail' sound. Right from the start of acquiring magic, which you need to use to progress, I was hit with this bug/issue/whatever. I can't progress any further and I'm very disappointed. Is it my mouse? the game? I have no clue. I looked for a magic mod that maybe turned them into hotkeys or something, nothing like that exists, so as for now, I have to give it a low rating. The system is janky regardless, I get trying to implement unique gameplay, but man, this seems like a very poor choice for something that has to be used to make progress in the game.

On Windows 7 64-bit, with a Nvidia GTX 550 and Intel Quad-core CPU, the game's frame-rate takes a very crippling blow whenever text is on the screen (ex, when you're clicking through the game's mouse driven menus). I'm aware that this is an old game, but since this game's release on GOG, there has been an official patch that was supposed to fix issues with modern OSes and even a release of the game's source code, but despite all that, this problem still persists. It's a shame, since what little I played of this game before giving up in frustration seemed quite good - though I thought the magic system was needlessly cumbersome (precision rune-tracing is even more difficult with a low frame-rate). If you don't have a modern computer and feel like an atmospheric dungeon crawl, you might want to check this out.

Spellcasting is the best element in this game. But I hate that diary and puzzles. Diary is very disarrangedand and most of times useless. Sometimes I do not know what to do. I had to use walkthrough after many years! Very frustrating.