Pros
- The game is at least somewhat engaging from the beginning.
- I kind of like the Goldeneye-era look it has going on. It's charming, in a retro kind of way.
- I like the stats screen; simple, but fairly clean and effective.
- The guy you play has a clear-sounding voice.
- Despite the age of the game, the environments actually seem kind of interesting.
Neutral
- I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious: the graphics aren't fantastic, but this game is older, so duh. This will not affect my rating of it too much.
Cons
- Don't forget to find and right-click Gothic.exe, set it to run in Windows XP compatibility mode, and run as administrator. These steps were necessary to get this game to not have an access violation on my Windows 7 64-bit.
- I try not to fault older games on things like controls, because they were all kind of egregious across the board, but this game is just absolutely horrendous. You use a combination of Ctrl + other keys to do pretty much everything, and it is a completely unintuitive mess.
- Hand layout. You can use the mouse to look around, which is typical and nice, but then you move with the arrow keys. Either it's better to play this game with two right hands, or your left hand is going to be across the keyboard to move. Or you'll use the Page Up/Page Down, etc. keys to look around. Or you'll just not look around while moving. Regardless of how I positioned my hands, I needed one hand on the left Ctrl, one on the arrow keys...and one on the mouse, for maximum effectiveness. It just doesn't work.
- It's too difficult to figure out how to do anything. You have to first look in the controls menu to even get an idea of how to do something as simple as pick an item up, at which point you throw your arms up in confusion when you see everything is done with Ctrl. How is it at all intuitive to pick up an item with Ctrl + the up arrow key? There was just no explanation for any of this.
- How do you heal?
- Click, click, click, click to attack. Very carpal tunnel syndrome inducing.
- I can't continue this game due to the controls. I can't even figure out how to talk to someone instead of punch them, or know if it's even possible, but after using more than a few minutes on it and dying, I don't want to spend more time trying to find out.