Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Story: 7/10

Gothic 3 opens with the Nameless Hero and his friends sailing to a new continent overrun with orcs, arriving in the Myrtana, the central region of the continent. The hero lost all his stuff from the previous game when his ship is stolen while he's onshore with Milten, Diego, Gorn, and Lester. Presumably this is the source of the orc invasion that was launched on Khorinis during the second chapter.

The actual theme of Gothic 3 I enjoyed, the whole idea of deciding whose side you will take was interesting, and it was well done how each faction had different moods and opinions, it made you feel more involved in what was happening and giving you a better idea of whose side to take.

Graphics: 7/10

The graphics in Gothic 3 are pretty decent, however you will need a higher performing PC to be able to run these graphics at their better settings and to be able to play through the game smoothly. If you don't have a decent PC don't play the game, at first on my older PC the game suffered from so much lag and frame rate issues it was unplayable.
Having said this with a well kitted PC the graphics and scenery can look very attractive, the character modeling could improve a little bit however.

Gameplay: 3/10

Gameplay is pretty much the most important feature of an RPG's and unfortunately Gothic 3 completely fails on the combat system. This made the game basically unplayable for me and was a huge disappointment for the game since it had potential to be decent. For starters when using a melee weapon there's basically only 2 ways you can swing it, your character looks like a robot when attacking the only thing moving is his arm it just feels and looks terrible. And what makes it worse it that at first you enemy just stand there doing nothing and you're thinking this is way to easy, then all of a sudden the enemy just unleashes this burst of aggression and hits you like 5 times that you can't block and this basically kills you. The whole thing is just very unbalanced and makes the combat system feel really awkward. Using a bow however is nowhere near as bad as the melee combat but still nothing good. Even the way the characters move around looks bad, it's as if they're walking on air and just sliding across the screen.

Sound: 5/10

The sound effects in this game are also a disappointment, the sound effects of the environment aren't to bad as well as the dialogue been pretty decent. However when you're attacking something, there is absolutely no sound effects, I mean the only way to know if you made contact with the enemy is if their health bar suddenly lowers. Again due to the combat system it ruined the game.

Performance: 5/10

The performance of this game is unplayable on a lower ended system, however if you have a higher ended system even though it's a much bigger improvement, there are still plenty of bugs and glitches to come across. The game sometimes lags for no reason including some low frame rate issues.

Summary:

To sum it up, Gothic 3 is a RPG that had potential to be good, the game should not have been released till they fixed all of its problems. The combat system is appalling and completely brought down the games rating in my opinion. If you don't have a high standard for video games and are just looking to play a RPG with a decent story and graphics then you can get away with playing Gothic 3. However if you any idea of what a decent RPG feels like, you would be smart to give this game a miss.