Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Everyone compares Arcanum with Fallout, and well, yes, so will I. If you liked Fallout 1/2, you'll like Arcanum. However, I feel Fallout 1 and 2 as a whole were better. Maybe it's just my Alzheimer setting in, but I can't really remember having too much frustration with those games, whereas Arcanum can be frustrating. Having said that, I should straight away mention that I feel it's worth the frustration. It's a fun game, with lots to explore and lots to do. Did I say Fallout 1 and 2 were better? Yes, but Arcanum has some (rough) diamonds which Fallout was missing. So here's my advice: Play Fallout 1 and 2 first. If you like those, you'll probably like Arcanum. It's a great game. However, if only they had gotten the interface and the graphics right, then it would have been one of the very best.

this game is very fun, i found it to be of good difficulty. take my review with a grain of salt however, becuase i have not finished the game, but i played the begginning of it and it started off good.

Imagine bigger, better and more complex Fallout set in steampunk world. Arcanum had some bugs, the battle system was flawed (why would they go with hybrid system? why?) but it had everything to become one of the greatest games ever made. The main quest is ENORMOUS. The amount of dialogues is just gigantic. EVERY of thousands of dialogues have separate lines for different intelligence levels, different races, attitudes. Technological trees are huge, you can play completely different games depending if you are a techie or a magic character. And you'd better specialize. Playing character balanced in the middle of technology/magica line, would take a lot of fun away from the game. I wholeheately recommend the game.

This game is incredible. Fans of Planescape, Baldur's Gate, and of course Fallout will love it. The charm, music, story, rpg system in general, etc. are all unique and A+

Now why did I put a one here? Well, it's to warn people. If you want to play this game, on win 10 and modern computer, you have to read and follow a rather long and quite booring and tedious instruction thread in the forum to get the game to work. That is, a stuttering, slow and crappy version that feels like it's drudging itself from frame to frame and you would think you are trying to run the game on a 386 system. After installing fan patches, widescreen support, putting miscellaneous dll's in various folders and get it all working, the mouse cursor is still slow and choppy. The game still slow and sludgy, but hey, it started at least. This feels abandoned and not much lover from GOG into the currant version, which is sad. Really sad. The game itself is a small unpolished gem of very fun world and a solid RPG with many different routes to be taken. Character wise and game progression wise. This used to be one of my all time favourites, and I believe I will try and keep my memories intact by not trying to get his POS running and ruing my memories. If GOG would do something to make the game work better and run fluent, this is a gem worthy of the 5 star reviews. Now, it is an idea lost in a poor optimisation engine...