Gameplay : 1/5 You have literally nothing to do. No health bar, no inventory, no resource management, no platforming, etc. The game lacks every component an horror adventure should have. Of course you also have no weapons to fight your enemies. it is just a glorified walking simulator. Also the levels are totally linear, nothing to explore. Music : 2/5 The music is creepy and makes you feel uneasy. So it does it job. But it is too loud and they overuse it. The whole game you are tormented with the "danger music". Which makes you believe that the next jumpscare or enemy is just about to happen. Unfortunately it gets old really fast, and then it is just annoying. Atmosphere : 3/5 The only saving grace for this game. Its atmosphere is dense and creates a horrifing world that you just want to escape somehow. Graphics : 2/5 The game shows that it had a limited budget. Outdated graphics and poor visual effects. It is still okay for an Indie game. The enemies : 1/5 Often time these horror games have frightening foes, that will stay in your memory for long. The alien in Alien : Isolation, or the Nemesis in Resident Evil games. In this case, your enemy is a mutated walking pig! It is not scary, its A.I. is horrendous and it poses no threat at all. It is just annoying and you wish you could just kill it to end its misery and spare you all the annoying future encounters. Story: 1/5 unfortunately the story is also dull and boring. Presented only in form of letters and diary entries you couldnt care less. For me it was pretty annoying to read a whole page of cryptical nonsense. I just left the letters on the ground after a while because i didn t wanted to be bothered to read a long text again. Some dumbed down frankenstein story about creating pighumans. Price : 1/5 Sorry the price is too high, only get this Indie game if its on sale for less than 5 euros.
The game is good. i used to play it a lot in my childhood. It is a relaxing little strategy game. Unfortunately the version that GOG. com delivers here does not work with my Operation Sytem Windows 8.1 When starting the game you will be send to a blackscreen with only the music playing. I am pretty sure, some of the fixes and/or 3th party software will make the game work one way or the other. But i did that for a lot of games on GOG already and it is getting a bit old. I expect a game that is sold here to work after the installation with just a simple mouseclick on its icon or via the Galaxy Client.
First of all if you played the "real" Gothics (1-3), then do not be fooled by the name of the game. It is NOT Gothic. And it is NOT a Roleplaying game. The game is very linear, you are forced into very narrow areas where you can move around but you can not find any loot/secrets/chests/extra quests. Once you cleared one area you can go to the next and even though you can go back to older areas, there is no reason to. The gameplay is repetetive. There are no NPC with an interesting story, your main hero is a dumb shepherd who speaks dull one liners all the time and wants to kill the king. At the start of the game you have a girlfriend which luckily dies together with her father before you can marry her, or i would have liked to killed them myself. Gameplay: 3/10 simple Hack & Slay Story: 1/10 Normal random dude safes the world ( and this dude rly sucks man) Graphics: 7/10 they spend basically everything into it so it looks at least fine Gothic Flair: -1/10 The game was called Gothic4/Arcania because of marketing reasons Quests: 1/10 grinding mobs/ collecting loot all you have to do RPG-elemts: 2/10 simple slider improvement of either Defense/Attack or Magic This game was the worst computer game i ever played!
Unfortunately this version here on GoG.com does not run on my Windows 8 system. I tried various troubleshootings/settings and patches but unfortunately none of them works. So well unplayable game 1/10.
As you can see most of the Reviews are very positive. Unfortunately i myself was very dissapointed with the game. Let me breakdown a bit in depth why i did not enjoy the game. The Gameplay is a mixture between Diablo (Grinding for Level up and Gold, and looting Rare Items from Chests) and Morrowind (Open world, tons of NPC) . I expected a Turn based fight system like in Baldurs gate or Icewind Dale or at least something similar with some strategical depth. Unforuntaly the very old Engine and the poorly designed Combat System do not allow any real strategy. The fights become tedious and repetetive very fast. Sometimes you have to use heal or another cleric spell to remove the insignificant status changes that affects one of your heroes. That is about it. The story starts promising you win a castle with a village in the middle of 3 rivaling kingdoms (Elves ,Humans and Dwarves). The empires are on the brim to war. WIll you be a warmonger (evil path) or can you restore peace (good path). But then very fast after 1/3 of the game, the story totally starts to suck very hard. The FInal Missions of the game are (at least for me) a total disaster and absolutey horrendously written. Especially the last 2 dungeons are so insanely bad that it nearly hurts, I do not want to spoil the end but it really sucked. Feels like they had to rush the game out due to a deadline of the producer. The rest of dungeons are also pretty boring, just some tunnels filled with random mobs and some easy and annoying puzzles. No real Boss fights, you have to pay attention to even see the boss, before you kill him because he has the same model as mobs and only slightly better stats. Big minus. Dragons and Titans are basically mobs, running around in groups of 3 or 4. You kill them in the end like you killed goblins at the start. Very dissapointing!!!! The 3D graphics have a poor art style and make the game look terrible today, other older games with did age a lot better The quests are pretty basic: get item "xy", kill person"xy". Sometimes you have to search entire areals unfortunately for quest items with no hint where it could be. Very tedious. Good things: - Nice loot (feels a bit like Diablo, just see what is around the next corner) - Interesting skill system where you have to search for teacher / guilds to gain access to your skills. - The monsters do not scale with your level, so you can come back to areas where you got smashed later and kick some ass big time. - The villages and cities are well done for a game of 1999. - Open world, no barriers. Feel free to explore every location if you can manage to defeat the mobs. Fazit : 4/10 . If you want to play RPG with a story i rather recommend you buying Baldurs Gate or Planescape Torment. Icewind Dale for nice tactical fights.
