Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All flash, no substance"

When I first heard that Jowood and Piranha Bytes split up and that Spellbound was going to make the next Gothic, I was expecting a disappointment.

And I wasn't disappointed.

Other than beautiful graphics, the game is nothing like the original Gothic series. There are so many things wrong with this g ame that I can't count them all. I'll just list a few of them here: there is no open world, you can't sleep in beds or use any interactions with anything, all you do is open locks with some kind of a minigame, open chests and loot them, kill enemies and craft things in your inventory. The skills are also very lacking - no trainers! Another thing that bugs me is that there are no factions or guilds in there and you can't chose a side like in previous Gothic games. It seems to me that Spellbound tried so hard to put everything from the Gothic series into this game and came up with something entirely different. You meet almost every character you've already met and they have no personality that reminds you of them.

Actually, the only thing I really liked about this game is its graphics.

The story is kind of farfetched (they even incorporated the Sleeper in!!! How's that?!?) and too linear for my tastes. The quests are also pretty linear, instead of having various ways to do them. The world while vast and still 10000 smaller than Gothic III is still empty and gets pretty boring after a while.

Bottom line, Spellbound should have kept the Gothic 4 out of the game's title, since there is no Gothic feeling in it at all. They tried to hard and forgot about the most important things that make Gothic what it is.