Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Unlike the other well known CRPGs this one isn't loved just for it's story and dialogue and in spite of a "good enough" gameplay system. This is all about the gameplay. The lean story and biting dialogue are just there to keep the atmosphere up while you explore an amazing world with numerous and diverse mechanics. You have 16 skills with 5 levels and 3 expertises (aquireable abilities/bonuses that require a certain skill level) each. And only 4 or 5 of these are combat skills There's 16 schools of magic with 5 spells per, filled with useful cantrips and even the 3-4 combat focused ones have some oddball stuff like raising back any deaders to talk to them. Then there's also 8 tech trees with 7 schematics each and another 30-40 recepies in the wild. Recipies for practical contraptions, queer drugs, mechanicals. The game is real time and done properly so (though it also has a turn-based mode for old people). Got high dexterity and a fast weapon? You will attack very fast, visibly. You can throw anything you can hold. Items in your grid based inventory have both size and weight and big things are big, I mean fill your whole inventory big, and it's a big inventory. I sometimes open the game just to listen to the menu music. You have deep lore with continent spanning mistery quests and occasional tongue and cheek moments but it's mostly serious. The culture of the world is real. Real people who do real things. Who show self-interest and don't care about you. Who are sometimes cruel but never villainous. Who don't drown you in exposition just because you're the player, excluding Virgil but like all characters he can be ditched or killed and the story adapts. I find it hard to tolerate a lot CRPGs because they're mostly dialogue and combat. Options given to you, options thought out by someone else. But this one is different. In this one you can be yourself.

The game has rough graphics and unsettling soundtrack, but I guess the latter is by design. I like it, but not everyone does. Also the game seems a little imbalanced, but it boils down to "you need also a skill to make money", which is unusuall. You wont be showered with prizes for quests, little loot, you need to know how to steal, gamble or you'll end up cleaning trash (random cheap stuff appears there every day) just to buy potions/bullets to your gun/cash to repair your armor. And stealing is cool. You can steal everything from every shop, but they are heavily guarded and getting in, opening a stash and getting out alive is tricky. Much more rewarding than "max the skill and click". Now to the story and world: Story is AMAZING. There's multiple unforseen pivots, where everything you thought becomes something else than you thought. There's several Sherlock Holmes investigations you conduct, several Indiana Jones-like legends. The amount of content is even bigger than in Fallout 2, like 10x more than in modern games (maybe except Witcher 3). If you have enough imagination to suffer ancient graphics, this is a feast for an RPG fan.

I'm giving this game 5 stars, even though it's not necessarily a 5-star game, at least as you might imagine. It certainly lacks some polish, and hasn't aged that well. This is somewhat offset by a couple of easy community patches (check the forums), but Arcanum is still a rough diamond. Why does it deserve 5 stars then? It's because this is the quintessential classic RPG. The amount of freedom is staggering. You can approach any probelm in any way you want. Seriously - there are almost no dead ends. The story is also excellent, and there is a great twist on the whole "Chosen One" trope that really pleased me. Arcanum is like no other game - exceedingly ambitious, and it trips up several times along the way. But what it does achieve is incredible, and for that it deserves a place in every RPG fan's library.

Such a great rpg with beautiful soundtrack. Play it. Its a true good old game. Difficulty is not too hard. The world building is exellent. Its one of my favourite isometric rpg,s to this date.

An enjoyable game made somewhat frustrating by the design mechanics and limitations of the era in which it was made. But if you can overlook that, it offers a fairly unique RPG experience. Pros: +An interesting story filled with twists and turns. +Many and varied side quests. +Robust character creation. One of the best I've ever seen, in fact. +Multiple ways to complete most quests. +The technology verses magic mechanic is more than just story filler or world building. It affects your character build greatly. +Many different NPC's to recruit. Or go it alone. It's up to you. +Lots of exploration. You can always find a back door or a window to climb through or some hidden hatch that will offer an alternative route. +Doesn't pigeon-hole you into a fixed role. Want to play as an evil character? Go right ahead. +Lots of hidden locations on the world map to find. +Lots of replayability. Without using a guide, you can probably play this game through 3 or 4 times and still not experience everything. Cons: -It doesn't do a good job of explaining certain gameplay mechanics to you. Definitely RTFM. -Can be quite buggy. The unofficial patch helps somewhat, but it's still not perfect. It's mostly small stuff though, like combat music that won't stop. -It's quite possible to build a weak, ineffective character. The game expects you to specialize to some extent and will punish you if you spread your character points too thin. Don't make a jack-of-all-trades character. -Ore Golems. These are enemies that when attacked with a melee weapon, cause that weapon to take damage. The problem is that the NPC's in your party aren't smart enough to figure that out and will happily smash their weapons against the ore golems until the weapon breaks. It can get frustrating at times and definitely shows its age. But it's also one of the most unique RPG games that I've played in years. If you can tolerate its old-school design, I highly recommend giving this one a go.