This game has much of the look of a Diablo-alike, but it isn't ... quite. This has pros and cons. Movement can be extremely balky at times, but being able to pause the game and set movements and attacks to execute on unpause makes up for a lot of that. It doesn't necessarily make up for some of the downsides of the oblique-third-person view — for instance, several times I've had to restore from saves because my party member died during a fight because I couldn't see him to heal him because there was a tree in the way. That gets irritating fast. There's also omissions such as, there's apparently a fairly rich set of cooking recipes to make healing and (possibly?) buffing food items ... but if there's a way to learn the recipes for them other than total blind trial and error, I've yet to find it. Hey, guys, um, a recipe book or two might be nice...? Now, these downsides aside, it's a very inexpensive and fairly engaging game that seems to have a certain charm to it. The graphics really aren't bad at all for the genre, certainly better than Diablo's or Diablo II's. It's not really the Diablo-alike that it first appears, having almost more in common with classic paper-and-dice RPGs, but without going to the over-the-top slavish mimicry of every tiny aspect of the paper-and-dice RPG metaphor exemplified by, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online. (Hey, DDO guys, I hate to say this, but if Gary Gygax saw what modern computers can do, and then saw how blindly and unthinkingly you have mimicked the mechanics he came up with because he didn't have modern computers, he would probably slap you upside the heads and call you a bunch of idiots. It's like you found a +6 Holy Avenger and decided to use it as a shovel.) Getting back to pros and cons, this more RPG-like mechanic shows up again in the way combat works. Combat is very simple, and you really don't have a lot of control over combat except which target which of your party members is fighting at any given time. This can be bad in that you really can't take much of an active hand in winning a fight, it is really very much down to your character vs. the enemy rather than you vs. the enemy. On the other hand, the upside of this very limited combat is that you won't have to mouse-spam or keyboard-fandango your way through a fight. You really aren't taking part in combat, you're just directing it. Whether this is a good or a bad thing probably depends on your tastes. Myself, I prefer to be a little more directly involved, but hey, your mileage may vary. So, overall ... yeah, it's limited, but it's cheap and has its own kind of charm. Give it a try. It's probably worth the money, especially when on sale. But don't expect Skyrim or even Diablo III levels of engagement from it.
I'm not really sure how to put this diplomatically ... OK, sorry, but, this game is just terrible. If you find the original, old, legacy iD Software DOOM! too complex and cerebral for you, this just might be your game. But other than that ... there's no plot, no storyline, it's just mindless explore-and-kill-things with no real goal or objective except to live as long as possible, and not even the thin excuse of a competitive "deathmatch" mode. I gave it about an hour or so of trial, and that's it, I'm done. It has no engagement or depth whatsoever and essentially no redeeming qualities. It's not even a good "magic FPS" because all of the weapons are so inaccurate (so much dispersion) that you can hardly hit anything beyond point-blank range, except using the alt-fire modes that chew through your four different kinds of mana like it was going out of style. About the one good thing I have to say for it is that, given away free, it was worth the price. Make of that what you will.
The game concept looks basically intriguing, as does the world setting. A good steampunk game ought to be a lot of fun to play. (Although a really good steampunk game ought to have Jagermonsters ... but i digress.) Unfortunately, "ought to" is the most I can say for Arcanum, because I cannot get it to work. Oh, it installs, it runs, I can create a character, the introductory video cut-scene plays, and from the end of that video onward, the screen is hopelessly messed up. I'm running a 27" Asus monitor at 1920x1080 via an nVidia 980Ti, and Arcanum just doesn't know what to do with it. All the dialogue text is overlaid over the text before, the screen isn't properly drawn ... I can't see a thing. Sadly, it's completely unplayable.
