Made by an indie studio from Italy, the game really has one clear: be a tough survival horror title with hardcore mechanics. You play the role of a mercenary sent to clean up a shady lab experiment gone wrong and have to defend yourself against the classic Resident Evil threat, zombies plus a few more surprise enemies. The main hardcore mechanic that sets this game apart is the ammo management that you need to do on the intended Daymare difficulty. You have finite magazines to put inside your weapons and each magazine has their individual ammo count that is tracked in your inventory. You can then manually load your magazines out of combat if you manage to find spare ammo boxes laying around. Also there are 2 reloads, a slow one that retains your mag on the weapon, and a fast one that drops it on the ground. You can then later go back and search the ground for your dropped mag. The game also includes some classic survival horror puzzles, they aren't too easy or hard, I think they managed to balance them pretty decently. A puzzle might take you 5-10 minutes to figure out. Some enemies have very goofy/janky looking walk animations, which I can forgive. But the writing and dialogue can be extremely weird at times. I have my suspicions that the game was written in Italian and was just Google translated into other languages. The English translation was difficult to understand and the Turkish translation was just outright nonsense, gave me a good chuckle to be honest. Anyway, if you aren't scared by a bit of broken English, or happen to know Italian and are a survival horror fan, then by all means check this game out. I hope some of these hardcore mechanics make their way into more mainstream titles in the future.
I have a full video review covering Single, Multiplayer and Elite Force Mod. Link is here: https://youtu.be/nzqXRosBVaY For a TL;DR version: -Base game AI is worse than SWAT 3 -Multiplayer is very unique and still active in 2022 (Requires a fix to play) -Elite Force Mod is a must to improve the AI and enjoy the single player campaign
TL:DR Still a fascinating game after all these years and hold up pretty well. Has some technical issues but these can be solved, you can find more details about the fixes in pcgamingwiki. I have a more detailed video review about the game here: https://youtu.be/E2OEx4JBm-Y
This expansion is quite honestly a synical cash grab from the publishers when the original devs went on to do their own game. Using the leftover unfinished game code they pumped out a cash grab which did not fix any bugs with the vanilla game, messed up the lore of the game and killed off the Gothic franchise for good. The fact that Piranha Bytes is still selling this horrible expansion is baffling, it hurts their reputation as a game developer. Do not buy under and circumstance.
I leave this as a warning to players who might think that the first 2 games are good and thus the 3rd is also good. Unfortunately it is not, the game development was rushed and the game was shipped in an unfinished state. Even the community patches can't save the broken state this game is in at. The only thing this game is good at is giving a good scenery and an amazing sound track. If you are looking for a spiritual Gothic 3, try Risen instead.
