Gothic 2 Gold Edition

You got it. The way modern games do it, is let you click your way happily through without hardly a thought for what's going on. The way this game does it, you have to be on your toes and thinking hard every step of the way. The only way to feel truly rewarde is to be well challenged, and this game does it beautifully. No grinding. No spawning. One hit by a woman with a sword kills you at the start, and you feel like a scrawny wimp getting slapped around by a harsh and uncaring world. Beautiful.

The combat system is poor and difficult to control. It seems to randomly attack and spasm. The Bow and arrow mechanic are quite useless and nearly impossible to aim. Even when a shot is on target, no damage is done.

While I have hundreds of hours of playing TES3: Morrowind and the other TES series games, I have even more playing the Gothic series (especially Gothic 2 Gold, which includes the Night of the Raven wonderfully exquisite Add-On). Now don't get me wrong, I love The Elder Scrolls series! My personal favourite is Morrowind, of course, as it was the first I played, and also came out about the same time as Gothic 2, but I also loved Oblivion and Skyrim. Personally, from best to worst I'd rank them TES3>5>4, and I do believe the perfect TES game would be Morrowind with Skyrim's gameplay :D Returning to the game at hand though, Gothic 2 Gold's combat may seem clunky and awkward in the beginning, but once you master the "action" in the "Action-RPG" side of it and learn the different attack patterns of the encountered opponents, man is it satisfying to slay a tough, more powerful foe by managing a "flawless victory! Overall the magic and casting system, as well as the melee system are better than their Gothic 1 counterparts (and definitely better than Gothic 3's in my opinion). On a side note, you can find a somewhat similar (if actually improved) system in Risen 1, a system which, in my humble opinion, would have made Gothic 3 the perfect game, had it been implemented in it. In conclusion, a hard, but satisfying game, that I most wholeheartedly recommend!

I had never heard of the Gothic series when I picked this one up on sale. Since buying it I have managed to win or buy about 10 other games, and none of them have so much as been loaded. I just keep coming back to this and playing the hell out of it. It reminds me of the Ultima series in the level of interactivity with the world, and stands alone in so many other ways.

I was pleasantly surprised to be adding this to my list of favourite RPG's. ...I liked it better than almost any I've played, and I'm a big player of RPG's. It may be a little old, but still very good. There is a lot of depth to the game. There are many, many, many sidequests, with a lot of variety, so they don't get too stale or repetitive (and really, who doesn't want to track down a pot dealer or lead a bunch of pirates for a while?). There is still a fair bit of the standard kill-these-people-and-come-back style questing, but I didn't get bored with it. Actions taken in game have consequences (I got a prostitute killed. ...Oops). There are three different major factions you can join as well, so there is some room for replay from a different perspective. I downloaded this game, then promptly spent the next several weeks glued to my computer. I have also infected my husband, who is playing it now. The early levels can be extremely challenging if you haven't read up on tips on how to spend your experience. I made some poor decisions off the start and felt like I wasn't accomplishing much until around level nine. ...But once you get the hang of making yourself capable and start getting new equipment, things progress fairly quickly. The difficulty was definitely much easier towards the end of the game (though not without challenge still, which was nice). All the way along, they tend to include some things in the world that are SUPPOSED to be difficult or impossible to kill at that point, but they generally also warn you to about them in game. ...Sort of a refreshing idea, that the puny beginning adventurer can't easily slaughter everything he encounters. I haven't played the other games in the Gothic series, but got the strong impression that there would be some added benefit to trying Gothic I before this one, as they reference it often. It's definitely not required, though. That said, I will definitely be checking them out now that I've finished Gothic II.