Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

The game has rough graphics and unsettling soundtrack, but I guess the latter is by design. I like it, but not everyone does. Also the game seems a little imbalanced, but it boils down to "you need also a skill to make money", which is unusuall. You wont be showered with prizes for quests, little loot, you need to know how to steal, gamble or you'll end up cleaning trash (random cheap stuff appears there every day) just to buy potions/bullets to your gun/cash to repair your armor. And stealing is cool. You can steal everything from every shop, but they are heavily guarded and getting in, opening a stash and getting out alive is tricky. Much more rewarding than "max the skill and click". Now to the story and world: Story is AMAZING. There's multiple unforseen pivots, where everything you thought becomes something else than you thought. There's several Sherlock Holmes investigations you conduct, several Indiana Jones-like legends. The amount of content is even bigger than in Fallout 2, like 10x more than in modern games (maybe except Witcher 3). If you have enough imagination to suffer ancient graphics, this is a feast for an RPG fan.

I wanted to love this game. I'm a big fan of their other games, especially Fallout 1 & 2. I've played those through many times, and though those games have a few minor bugs, they are not bugs that ruin the game experience. If you could cut out the horrendous number of bugs in this game, this game could really be a great game. However, I've been playing this game for a few days now, probably put in about 20 hours of game play so far, and I'm not sure if I even want to finish it. I love RPG's and this is nothing against the actual base of the RPG itself. The leveling system and everything is interesting and the concept drew me in. The bugs started the very minute I started playing and continued growing throughout the gaming experience. For example, my character, being a mage, summons an orc champion to fight; after fighting, I decide to rest to recover my experience, and my orc champion disappears, but his icon remains in the upper left hand corner. No big deal, I think, a minor bug is all. Well, I continue playing and realize, not only will that icon never disappear, it affects my other characters. My NPC's will not fight, not even retaliate when being attacked. They would not walk with me, but would just magically appear by my side every few minutes. I could talk with them, whenever the computer decided. Later on, I manage to figure out that though invisible, I could still kill that orc champion spawned at the beginning of the game, which I do, and voila! My NPC's start working again! Ok, that's fine, I think, but even more bugs pop up, I put on a magical invisibility ring, and turn invisible; take it off again, and I remain invisible, unable to talk to any shop owners or finish my quests, because the people think it's a ghost! Some quests, when they become broken, remain in the journal, while other quests get marked as broken quests, correctly (Bring the ale quest, 1 example). Sometimes, when summoning a creature, my other NPC's get angry and start attacking me without provocation. There are tons of bugs like this. My character is a level 22, almost level 23, half-elf mage. He will probably stay that way, unless I can muster up the willpower to go in and suffer through till the end. My advice: If you haven't played the Fallout series, you're missing out. Go try that one instead.

I'm giving this game 5 stars, even though it's not necessarily a 5-star game, at least as you might imagine. It certainly lacks some polish, and hasn't aged that well. This is somewhat offset by a couple of easy community patches (check the forums), but Arcanum is still a rough diamond. Why does it deserve 5 stars then? It's because this is the quintessential classic RPG. The amount of freedom is staggering. You can approach any probelm in any way you want. Seriously - there are almost no dead ends. The story is also excellent, and there is a great twist on the whole "Chosen One" trope that really pleased me. Arcanum is like no other game - exceedingly ambitious, and it trips up several times along the way. But what it does achieve is incredible, and for that it deserves a place in every RPG fan's library.

Such a great rpg with beautiful soundtrack. Play it. Its a true good old game. Difficulty is not too hard. The world building is exellent. Its one of my favourite isometric rpg,s to this date.

This is one of the most conceptually original RPGs ever made, and I wish its ideas had had a bigger impact on subsequent developers. However, a lot of design errors ranging from bugs to major game balance issues prevent the game from rising to its full potential. Well worth the GOG.com price, but more for an appreciation of what it could have been than for the game itself.