Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Waste of time"

First off, I've never played any Gothic titles before. I only bought this game because the screenshots looked impressive. Oh boy, what a bad mistake!

The good:

The graphics are indeed very impressive. I ran this game with everything on max at 2560x1600 and the fps stayed consistently smooth at 70. Considering how many polygons and high-resolution textures are on screen, this is not an easy thing to pull off. The game world looks gorgeous. The day and night cycles are especially impressive. The environment truly feels alive with shadows, winds, atmosphere and great sound design.

The game also kicks off with a bang. You start in a dream sequence with a nearly invincible character – slashing and killing everything that gets in your way. This is a great way to introduce the fighting mechanics of the game and what lies ahead. Combat is relatively fluid and reminded me of the latest Prince of Persia style of fighting (a slight delay between click and actual response, but it didn't bug me too much).

Sadly, this is where the good parts end.

The bad and the ugly:

The gorgeous graphic couldn't hide the dated design decisions. I felt like I was playing a game from 1995 (not a very good game at that). The tutorial mission is nothing but a bunch of stupid FedEx quests. And the goal is to please your girl's dad so he'll give you permission for marriage. Ok, so that's no too bad except the girl you're trying to marry looks like the daughter between an Orc and a Zombie. She is absolutely hideous. Anyways, it's a game so we can let this point go (besides, maybe the main character is into half orc & zombie chicks). However, the quests are extremely boring. Go to point A and come back to point B. Remember the old school days of gaming? Yup, point A and B must be separated by a long distance for no reason. How old are the designers? 12? The quests are as generic as it gets and made no sense at all. You have a big sword, shield and packed full of arrows. But instead of being assigned to fighting quests, you have to gather mushrooms. WTF?

The game mechanics feel very clunky. Nothing is smooth and lacks finesse. This ain't no Dragon Age. UI is awkward. Looking or picking up items is tedious. Just about every action feels labor intensive and frustrating.

After the tutorial level, you are forced to abandon your home island; leaving everyone behind – or so you thought. Because when I arrived at the new lands and decided to check out the local bar, I ran into my wife, her dad and just about everyone else from my home village. I was like "oh wow, you guys made it!" Then sadly, I realized it's because the game only had around 3 models for every NPC in the entire world! Yup, you read it right; everyone is in-breeding like crazy on the realm of Arcadia. Half the people in the bar are mirror versions of themselves. Are the developers this lazy? At least change their hair color or clothe….or something. This cloning of characters completely removes any immersion factor. It's like some episode of the twilight zone.

Ok, so I tried to stick with it. Guess what, every mission is still a FedEx run with no reason what so ever. Why do I need to go around collecting people's junk and delivering mail? Where is the actually "game?" Anyways, after about 5 hours, I couldn't take it anymore. This is the last time I'll try the Gothic series.

Stick with Dragon Age until Dragon Age II comes out  You are not missing a single thing by not buying this game.

Machine played on:

Intel i980
Triple GTX 480 SLI
12 Gigs DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate