Complete waste of money and time. If this game had been released 5 years ago it may just have been passable.
Graphics 6 / 10 ( world )
Graphics 1 / 10 ( character models )
Sound 5 / 10
Stability 9 / 10
Gameplay 3 / 10
Story 2 / 10
Immersiveness 1 / 10
Voice Acting 1 / 10
Innovation 1 / 10
Difficulty 2 / 10
Graphics ( world ):
The world graphics are pretty for the most part but hardly earth shattering even with all settings on high; and the much hyped weather effects that the marketing team mentioned at every opportunity just boil down to it starting to rain for a few minutes at random intervals. For 2010 average at best.
Graphics ( character Models ):
If real women looked this uniformly ugly the human race would die out. Seriously, I think the developers must have dragged these models through a time warp from 2004 with both male and female models repeated for various npc's and not a meaningful facial expression among them. Oblivion had better models than this and they were bland.
Sound:
Average for the genre with nothing that stands out as being particularly good or bad.
Stability:
The game scores high here and is the one aspect in which the developers should get a pat on the back. After the debacle that was Gothic 3 it is obvious that a lot of the development budget went on squashing bugs and although a couple of minor ones still crept in none of them impacted the game in any negative way.
Gameplay:
Been there, done that, bought the T shirt.
Story:
Errm! what story? Okay maybe that's a little unfair and to the games credit there isn't a damsel in distress to be saved anywhere in sight; Although if there had been you would have likely spent a great deal of time searching for a plastic surgeon ( see character models above ). The story such as it is sees your character from Gothic 3 now the king and possessed by a demon, but there is nothing in there that explains this for those who have never played a Gothic game before. So you set off first of all to complete some meaningless trials that will persuade your girlfriends father to let you marry her, which works as a tutorial level and I have seen worse. You finally complete these tasks in time to return to a burning village and a dead girlfriend, along with just about everyone else and thus your journey of revenge begins.
The major portion of the story finds you searching for a lost temple that contains a divine anvil, on which you will forge your chosen weapon of megadeath, except that the weapon you make isn't all that impressive even if you manage to upgrade it later. In my run through I never used it once so three quarters of the game were entirely pointless other than to level you up. Killing Xesha's main lieutenant nets you a weapon that is every bit as good as the one you can make and has a 100% slow proc to boot; no prizes for guessing which I used.
In that temple you also discover that your journey of revenge has just come to an abrupt end as instead of killing the king you must now help him instead or the world is screwed ( oh dear, anyone got a spare plot hanging around that they can send to the devs for gothic 5? ). To cut a long story short you eventually battle Xesha ( not the aforementioned demon ) and in killing her manage to save her opposite; at which point you get a cut scene of three mages chanting a spell that exorcises the demon and the game ends. Hold on a minute. What happened to the player character? what happened to the major npc's? nothing is explained and the credits roll. ( I wonder how many devs tried to keep their names off that long list ).
Immersiveness:
Completely ruined by the terrible voice acting and weak story.
Voice Acting:
Laughable is the best way that I can describe it. These actors must have been plucked straight out of the B movie rejects bin; And if that wasn't enough there are a couple of occasions when the npc's voice changes in mid conversation because two different people were used to record the dialogue.
Innovation:
None, zip, zero. Everything in this game has been done before and done better by someone else.
Difficulty:
Way too easy. Just button smash your way through the combat with no real need for the blocking or avoidance moves.
In short Arcania is very poor for a game released in 2010 and I suspect that only die hard Gothic fans will really enjoy it, for the rest of us there are much better rpg's out there. A waste of time and money.