The music isn't memorable, the combat is glitched and poor; it has little story; and the ending, victorious image feels like a hollow reward. There's some copy-pasting going on in that ending picture, too. (Two of the men, on the left, have raised elbows which look identical.) It had many issues which made it annoying, and I didn't enjoy it. The ground-combat was the most flawed. Reserving TU to do burst shots didn't work. Hiding behind cover was often pointless. Shots went more than half-way across the map for the aliens, and they had impeccable aim. Meanwhile, my battle-hardened soldiers had trouble shooting aliens at all. They'd often miss an alien that had no cover, and was only a few tiles away. Sometimes my soldiers would go berserk, and even miss their allies next to them. Morale was supposed to stop their mental breakdowns, but its depletion didn't show like health loss did. The morale bar always looked full. I even had one solider whose morale was 99+ at full: it'd show as full while he went under alien control, dropped his weapon and ran, panicked, or went berserk. What makes all of this especially bad is that ground combat is a major part of the game. Its issues become irritating over time. Air combat was also problematic. Auto-resolving gets worse results than fighting the battles out. This could make sense since it forces the player to play. However, these air fights are repetitive, frequent, and dull. The temptation to auto-resolve was high, but a player would likely lose if this was done. For example, I could manually take down 3 heavy fighters with 2 interceptors and with ease, but auto-resolve showed that I had almost no chance to win. To progress well I had to constantly micromanage the planes. Furthermore, if a battle goes sour, you have to wait and watch while your planes head for the edge of the grid. You can't simply hit a button and cancel out. Even if there's no chance of the enemy catching your retreating planes, you have to watch it try.
Glitches, nonsensical crafting, unfinished writing, permanent death, no save feature, a lack of realism, preaching to the player, and unbelievable quirks ruin the game. Examples/explanations: --Glitches: [1a.] Good glitch: Want to keep your stuff safe from raiders? Don't loot one of the cabinets in your base. As long as something stays in it at all times, you can use it to hide your stuff. [1b.] Bad glitch: If you board up your base entirely, it sometimes won't register that you did. --Nonsensical Crafting: [2.] Finding things to barricade doors and windows wouldn't be difficult: they'd litter the ground. It's a city full of ruined, wooden buildings and furniture. The effort you have to go through to collect them often seems unrealistic, and it cheapens the gritty feel of the game. --Unfinished Writing: [3.] Donating medical supplies to the hospital deletes them from your inventory, but does little else. Donating doesn't appear in the what-you-did slideshow at the end, etc. --Permanent Death and No Save Feature [4.] The game auto-saves when a night is done, and if a night-time raid fails due to a character death. Since there are many glitches/issues in the game, this is an irritating problem. --Preaching to the Player [5.] Characters disdain violent actions, and monologue text about how bad they are. --Unbelievable Quirks/Lack of Realism [6a.] Addictions depress characters if you don't indulge them. [6b.] Item weight isn't considered. For example, 10 inventory slots could = 20 pieces of lumber or 100 sugar cubes. (The sugar cubes would weigh about 0.66lbs total. The lumber would obviously be heavier/cumbersome.) [6c.] If a character becomes "broken", they're unplayable and unable to move due to depression. Shortly, they'll flee, robbing the group and leaving them to die. The person will somehow do this even if too sick/weak to flee. The sudden betrayal makes no sense: they gave up on life, but then they're motivated to survive at the cost of everyone else?
A text-based game with occasional typos ("he are devastated"), foolish group dynamics, irritating encounters, a lame ending, and poor game-save options. I was also disappointed that the ending is nothing but a few, dismissive lines of text. Main problems: 1. You get your group to like each other by spreading a rumor from a list of five, dull options. Team members work better/worse together depending on their relationship statuses. Your success hinges on that. It puts the user into the role of a childish gossip who can talk once per game-day, and it makes that a major thing. 2. Random encounters stink. They often go like this: #1 total party kill, #2 sacrifice a single party member, or #3 get screwed over but live. There's little cleverness or strategy involved when these encounters happen: you're pretty much boned in one way or another. The encounters are more irritating than they are challenging/fun. 3. Saving is the last major issue. The menu has the "save game" click right next to the "return to main menu" click, and so it's easy to screw up and save if you don't mean to. Furthermore, once you die or win, your save self-deletes itself. It no longer appears on the main menu. Not easily being able to return to a save point was annoying. It was primarily annoying because of the random encounters.
Arcanum seems like an RPG which will let you be creative. Initially that excited me: an RPG with lots of options and this kind of design would be really fun! The excitement quickly turned into disappointment. Despite how it looks at first, it's quickly apparent that Arcanum's choices are irritatingly narrow. You're given many tools, spells, and hints at possibilities. However, the tools/spells don't effect much, and the hints lead nowhere. I had to adhere to the set story-line in a bland way, and even the side-quests were bland. Meanwhile, the NPCs were boring and the game was annoyingly misogynistic. At first, I was thrilled with the possibilities. I decided to play a mage, because I thought that spells could potentially effect the game. Resurrection, speak to dead, and mind-domination are all spells which could be fun to play with if they effected story elements. Yet they don't at all. I also took the trait “extreme personality” for my mage, because I thought that'd get interesting responses from the NPCs. This didn't affect much either. In Arcanum, you can take a tech or magic path, but they seem to ultimately do the same things. Using magic didn't give me an edge outside of battle. For instance, even when resurrection is useful for a potential party member's story-arc, there's a scroll of resurrection nearby in a barrel. Putting points into the spell doesn't change the game or even prove interesting. Most of the corpses the player encounters (not ones the player or party makes) can't be resurrected. Instead, you get the generic message, “This life cannot be replenished.” When they can be, the game tends to glitch or it doesn't notice (I raised an entire group of people at one point and it didn't notice/effect anything.) Speak to dead also proved ineffectual: NPC souls just cried out generic responses. There was only one exception, in a side-quest, but it wasn't necessary or enjoyable. I got the same information from the soul that I did through weak dialogue with the living. So, it wasn't a useful spell either. Mind domination turned out to be useless as well and, at one point, taking a dominated NPC to another part of the world managed to crash the game. So it doesn't matter what kind of character you play, techie or mage. It's not just the character abilities which lack depth, either. As a player I was severely limited in my choices. At points, I thought the game hinted at depth and options. I thought it was trying to coax me to recognize decisions which laid outside of character abilities/spells. When I saw what I thought were hints, I followed up on them. This also led to disappointment. For instance, at one point, there's a murder you can solve in a side-quest. Attempting to resurrect the dead elf leads to information about how some poisons can prevent resurrection. Well, “aha!,” I thought, “I'll just go to the NPC who was earlier mentioned as a specialist in poisons.” He was in Black Root, I went there, and I couldn't even speak about it. The poison specialist exists in isolation. He's for another side-quest, and is useless for the rest of the game. There's also a newspaper article on using fingerprints to solve crimes, but that wasn't an option to pursue either. The game is filled with such hints, but following up on them is useless. And as a player, this made me feel like it was a waste of time to keep trying to explore the game. Too much of the content led nowhere, and the quests had the narrowest of solutions. The theme of uselessness was pervasive. Plot points in the story – the major quests – tended to work the same way. There's often only one way to do things, and when there are options it doesn't matter. For instance, at one point you need a ship. To get one, you can either gamble for one, buy one, or help out a ghost. I chose the ghost option. I gave some treasure to personality-free NPCs, moved a rock, and put a sword in a furnace. None of this seemed to particularly matter. The dialogues were equally pointless. They usually gave limited choices, if any at all, and this held true even when I maxed out persuasion (and mastered it), charisma, and beauty. One sentence was often all I could select. At other points, my choices were: say something sane, threaten the NPC, announce I'll attack the NPC, or walk away. There were minor exceptions – like getting 2 NPCs who didn't get along to party with me, because of my persuasiveness – but these exceptions were boring. For instance, in the example I just gave, it didn't matter to me if these 2 particular people came along or not. It didn't matter to me because the NPCs didn't matter, and that's the next gripe I had with the game. They weren't well-developed, and so I didn't care about them. With the two just mentioned, one was a good elf and one was a bad elf. They each got some initial dialogue when I met them. After that, they commented about the area we were in, if I asked them about it, or screamed for healing if they got hurt in battle. Exceptions from this norm were rare for all of the NPCs. And when they did get development it was weak. One party member's easily interchangeable with another, and battle considerations are more important than plot ones. There are few exceptions to this. The main one comes at the end of the game: there's an NPC you can recruit who gives you an opportunity to talk your way out of a big fight. (You can also get a slightly different “ending” with another one, Magnus, but the ending's the next gripe.) Otherwise, one NPC's as good as another. Since I felt detached from the NPCs, and the world itself, the half-assed ending was lame to me too. Arcanum's ending consists of a slideshow while a narrator says what happened after you beat the game. You hear about how your actions influenced SOME of Arcanum's cities and people. You don't even find out what happened to everyone. In my party I had 3 elves, 2 dwarves, a lizard man, Virgil, and a dog. I got to learn about what happened to the dwarves, and about 1 elf burying somebody. The others didn't even merit a sentence. Instead, I got to find out stuff like how a random bartender NPC got a swanky new place, because I'd destroyed the local crime. The bartender was a minor NPC. I'd had a sentence or two of dialogue with him. I had more interest in the dog's story-line. I was serious when I said I wasn't invested in my party members. However, I found it stupid that a random NPC factored into the ending, but my own party didn't. That'd be like watching the end of Star Wars, finding out what happened to the Cantina owner, and never knowing what happened to Chewbacca. It's not only lame but kinda weird. As for the misogyny... well, it's mainly an issue of contrast. For one, there's the romance issue. Men can woo Raven but women get no love interest. This is fine on its own, since that romance is weak anyway. However, men can have sex with about 8 gorgeous women in the game – a widow, a voiced NPC (Raven), a priestess, prostitutes, and so on. A man can even convince a house-keeper that she'd make a great prostitute, and she'll go to the brothel and offer to let the PC try her out. Women get 2 slobbering, short, greasy fat men. Worse yet are why women get these options. If you're a male character, you can woo your way into panties or pay for it, but you don't get harassed. A female character will be propositioned. If you ask the brothel owner about work (which is common to ask NPCs in the game – they send you on errand quests), she suggests you go to a gross man to prostitute yourself for a couple hundred gold. If you tell her you changed your mind, she'll even say she understands, since he's a gross person, and she's fine with it. The option's so bad even the NPC mocks it. A male PC isn't told any of this; he's not bothered. And if you try to get into the Gentleman's Club and you're male it's fine, but if you're female then you come across the other slobbering idiot. You need an invite since women aren't allowed in. The only way to get the invite other than pickpocketing, murdering, or lying, is to sleep with the nasty owner. The programmers were also “kind” enough to put in the option for a female player to repeatedly bang that slob for fun. Then there's the tavern interactions. No matter how high of a level you are, if you're a female PC then there will be tavern patrons who harass you. These men can offer to let you make-out with them or their shoes. If you insult the NPCs harassing you and they attack (or you decide to attack them first), then the town guards will help them try to kill you. Your alignment also goes down from killing the guards. Apparently it's evil for a woman to defend herself from attempted murder when she tells a jerk off, and he doesn't like what he hears... Design-wise, the graphics are passable. The music's beautiful on the soundtrack. Otherwise, I can't think of much else positive to say. For $6 it was worth playing while I was bored, but only because I had no better games to play and it took a while for the game to severely irritate me. It was cheaper than seeing a movie, at least.
