I played this for 10 hours hoping it would get better. It didn't. This is a mostly mindless "strategy" game that barely requires any thought and is barely connected to Arabian mythos. The trade, the focus of the game, is barebones. Trade items are divided into 5 different categories, with each town having a value for each category from Very Cheap to Invaluable. At random intervals, merchants get restocked and the value of the categories is randomly changed. There's no discernable rhyme or reason to why prices change or where things are in supply or demand. Trade is a matter of constantly checking the map for nearby deals rather than figuring out good trade routes. If you have high enough Haggle stats, you don't even have to do that: you can just buy goods at a 20% discount, then immediately sell them back at 20% above the market price. Haggling and combat checks are similarly mindless. Each character has 3 different stats, and the actual results are determined by a Rock-Paper-Scissors comparison of which ones are higher, but all you really need is a higher stat total than the enemy. Although there's 5 different types of companions, 98% of your haggling and combat checks will be made by a single Mercenary (highest combat stats) and a single merchant (highest haggling stats). I rarely felt any actual strategy was needed to win these checks. Traveling itself quickly gets boring. Each route between towns has 1-3 random encounters, and there's only 1-2 dozen different encounters in the game. Expect to repeat each encounter 15+ times before you finish the game. None of them are particularly interesting or make it feel like an Arabian setting. Even the main questline barely uses the Arabian mythos. The only mythological creatures are ghouls and djinn; the ghouls act like zombies, and the djinn spend most of their time possessing people. It doesn't feel like a Sinbad or Scheherazade tale. I spent the whole game waiting for it, and the game itself, to get exciting.
