Arcania – Gothic 4 Review

Where to start, or rather how to summarize an RPG game like this… Lets rather go with why I played it in the first place

So a year or 2 back a game called Risen was released and even though it was relatively small, the amount of game time you got from it was outstanding, and the re-playability (if you chose to try another path of skills and/or combat style) made it a great game. What got me into Arcania – Gothic 4? Well its basically the next generation of Risen, using the upgraded graphics engine and building on the already successful Risen game to bring you something new but still.. similar.

The game looks amazing first off, the detail that they put into the surroundings and the amount of detail given to lighting from flames, etc. makes it feel like a completely different world that you find yourself in. Adding to the insane environments that you are questing in and bashing monsters for loot

The way they use the day night cycle, and weather effects makes it even more life like, you can be walking from one town to another, and in rolls a storm, it becomes dark, it starts to rain, wind moves the plants and trees around, and then lightning strikes… lighting up all the water around you for a split second, and then… darkness again. But the thing that I loved the most about this system, was the sunrise. For example you’re walking through a forest during the night and then.. you see some light appearing in front of you, you turn around and see the shafts of light coming through the trees and the plants, and as the time goes by, the sun rises higher and with it the shadows move. It was really something else.

Adding to the environment, throughout the entire game I never got tired of an area, like what happens in most games these days, you could be in some fields fighting off molerats, but then you move on to a castle on a cliff and then into a dense forest, but my favourite was this giant tree that was inhabited by mages in the middle of a swamp. Sadly I didn’t take any screen shots of the area, so just trust me.

The combat was pretty straight forward, you see an enemy you fight it, and dodge its attacks by rolling from side to side. What started off as a melee basher, I soon found my way into the magic of the game, and knowing all about saving skill points in RPG’s I saved my skill points till I could pump as much as I could into the lightning spells (that stun enemies on hit, imba I know), but later found that the fire spells were stronger but ATE my mana pool, pfffft power is everything after all.. lololol

You get 3 kinds of combat in the game, the usual basher melee class, then the ranged bow / crossbow wielder, and then finally the magic, but all the skills are broken down into separate tiers of skills, which you will see in game, and many skills benefit you in different ways, for example, lightning spells gave you more spell damage, and also increasing your mana pool, while fire gives you more spell damage, and mana regeneration, and finally the frost spells, give you mana regeneration, and increased mana pool. So specializing into a field really helps with your character.
Here are some screenies to show off the ‘damage’ a fully charged fireball can do haha

Yup not much left after one of those

The game also has the crafting system that Risen had, and while exploring you will find plenty of herbs and minerals that can be used to craft potions and food. At later levels you can craft new weapons and armour and amulets etc.

All in all I really liked the game, and loved the graphics that came with it, especially the lighting. The storyline, well I can’t really say much for it since I clicked through all the dialog, but there was a lot of it, so if you enjoy a filling story this is for you. From the combat side of things, I felt it was to easy (playing on normal), well with magic it was, I’m not sure how the other styles will be to play or how difficult they will be, but for a spell caster the game was to easy on normal.

The only problem I had with the game was one small… but big thing, judging from the screenshots the game is pretty right? Well.. it can be prettier, that was only running the texture detail on medium, not because I can’t run high but because I CAN’T, the game has a bug in it that the developers need to address concerning the high texture option. What happens on high you might ask, well some textures end up black, NPC models, buildings etc. Its terrible, I got to the first castle and the upper half of it was black, was like WTF, then I googled around and read about dropping the graphics and that fixed it completely. I’m just sad that I couldn’t play the game like it was intended because of some bug.

But the graphics error aside this game was pretty solid and I thoroughly enjoyed it, how much did I enjoy it? Well I’ve only played 8h of World of Warcraft in the last week, thats how much I enjoyed it

So finally if you like RPG games that take you to places out of this world,
then give Arcania – Gothic 4, a spin. You won’t be disappointed