The game has great potential for a "city" builder and it is very immersive. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it just yet, especially at the given price. While I had a lot fun playing what there is right now in the build, I honestly don't think it's a worthy investment, unless you have money to burn and I'll explain why. To start off, right now it's a bare bones experience, loaded with bugs, unfinished or missing mechanics. The tech tree isn't even half implemented and some of the perks you can get don't even work, but you will only realise it after wasting a point on them, leading to a botched playthrough. Workers can bug out, get stuck, or simply not prioritize the tasks you give them. On one instance several settlers got stuck inside the church after a bandit raid, with the only solution being to demolish their houses and rebuild them so new settlers can move in(which meant one third of my houses). Households will often have supply issues despite you having the market stocked with all necesarry goods, leading to drops in approval. The way bandit camps work on the map also feels unfinished. If a bandit camp spawns on the map, the only way top get rid of it, is to muster an army and march them to the camp and raid, it but the same bandits can randomply steal goods from your village simply by existing and you cannot stop or deter them, unless you destroy the camp. Makes zero sense. The worst part is that there have been no updates to the game in more than half a year. Despite the game selling like hotcakes, at full price when it was launched in EA, it really doesn't feel like the dev made good use of the money, since progress from then until now is almost nonexistent. Mechanics are still missing, bugs still present and a lot of people are starting to fear that it was a cash grab and it will never be finished, myself included. As it stands, overpriced, severely undercooked, potentially forever EA and not recommended. Buyer beware.
There is some potential here but it's a far cry from being Gothic. The character movement and controls feel far too cumbersome and slugish, like there is a delay between input and action and the control depends heavily on animation execution, meaning you can only move as fast as the character is able to animate. This is particularly noticeable every time you interact with something, like a chest, or to pick up something. Performance is absolutely terrible and I get that it's just a demo but it's still unacceptable. If this is how the demo runs, the final, open world game will run even worse if they don't optimize it. Graphics look pretty but it's a little too much if you ask me. Too much fidelity detail, too much clutter everywhere, it just feels overwhelming and stressful to watch. My eyes felt tired after playing just a few minutes. I think they went too much on the fidelity scale instead of artistic expression. The UI is terrible and and far from the simple and intuitive inventory menus from the first 2 games. It also looks very generic and again it misses that artistic expression the old games had. Character designs are also very generic and bland looking, since they tried to make them look as realistic as possible. Voice acting is all over the place, with wierd name pronuntiations and accents, kind of like how it was in Gothic 3, like the actors didn't actually know how the names were pronounced in the first 2 game and pronounced them like they thought they should sound. I'm not pretending like the first 2 had great voice action but at least it was consistently decent enough. As it stands it looks like a generic, modern, action/ RPG game, in the Gothic skin suit. I'm sure plenty of people who haven't played the original games will find it fun and entertaining but for me, being a huge fan of the first 2 games, this just isn't it. Hopefully they improve on it and optimize it better for the final game, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
