Arx Fatalis

Rating:
Summary: One of the best CRPGs ever created.
Review: Inspired by the legendary Ultima Underworld games, this game is one of the best ever created. The fighting, the dialogue, the overall gameplay. Buy it while you still have the chance.

Rating:
Summary: 5* fun(bottom line) 5* overall
Review: No hype, no flakey online dweebs. This is a serious RPG in the spirit of Ultima Underworld. Except you are a nameless one who has to find his Identity and his way. Voice acting great, graphics supurb, sound mysterious and subtle, but the game play is the feature that really stands out(and that is the bottom line). No long reviews here, go get the title!

Rating:
Summary: Fun!
Review: This is a different and fun RPG. The spellcasting system is unusual (you trace runes in the air to cast spells), but easy to learn. The game has an interesting storyline and lots of areas to explore. There's plenty of attention to detail. If you see a pig, you can kill it, then cook its ribs for a future meal! And that's important, since you heal by eating and drinking. Just wandering around and talking to people (or goblins), or just listening to them mutter to themselves, is entertaining. This is a really great and original game. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best RPG's ever.
Review: This is probably one of the most unknown, yet incredible RPG's out there. Released without much fanfair, around the time Morrowind came out. Morrowind stole much of the focus from this game - which a great game in its own right, I think this game is as good and possibly better!

A VAST and fully interactive world, with engaging characters, superb graphics, tons of subquests and plots, and intricute interactions with NPCs. Don't let the date of release fool you, this game has graphics that rival most games released this year so far!

If you, like most of us, missed this gem at the time it was released, buy it, don't wait, buy it now! You won't regret it. In this day of overused genres, poor products, and contentless games, this one stands out.

Rating:
Summary: First-person fantasy role-playing immersive simulation
Review: This is, without a doubt, one of the best games I've ever played. I haven't finished playing Morrowind or Ultima Underworld, but it's definitely similar to those. The graphics are much newer than Ultima Underworld, but not quite as new as Morrowind. The gameplay and story are excellent, regardless of the age of the game.

One particular feature that some players will doubtless find aggravating is the necessity of "drawing" magic runes with your mouse to cast spells. If you have good enough manual dexterity to be playing a first-person role-playing game in the first place, you can get used to it, but it will be annoying at first. Casting spells in combat is virtually impossible. Fortunately, you can pre-cast up to three spells before combat, then trigger them instantly by pressing the 1, 2, and 3 keys. Spells scrolls are also available that don't require any rune-drawing at all. If you really have trouble drawing the runes, you can just rely on scrolls for the few cases where magic is really required and focus your character development on combat and stealth instead of magic.

The world of Arx is amazingly interactive. You get hungry from time to time, depending on how much you've been exerting yourself. To feed yourself, you can make a fishing rod, then catch and cook fish to eat, or mix and bake bread or pies, butcher animals for meat, or throw a fireball at a chicken, resulting in a whole roasted chicken. You can find vegetables to eat and various other sorts of plants that can be ground up and used in a special apparatus to make magical potions. Your armor and weapons will wear with usage, but you can either learn to fix them yourself, pay a blacksmith to fix them, replace them, or enchant them with a certan rare magical element that makes them indestructible. You can even smith your own weapons and enchant them.

Although the main plot is, as usual, relatively fixed, the many side-quests and sub-plots are very open-ended. You can approach much of the game in whatever order and at whatever pace you choose, which is not always a good thing. You can end up in an area swarming with enemies that are too difficult for you to handle with little warning. The solution, of course, is to run away and go get some more experience somewhere else first. You'll end up playing in roughly the order of increasing enemy difficulty anyway, but it will be your own decision to do so, not a pre-defined series of keys required to open the next door. It's a subtle difference, but it makes the game feel more like you're in control.

A final word of warning is in order with regard to technical support. I had some difficulties in certain areas of the game, possibly because my sound card was flaking out. I don't know whether it was just my hardware, a flaw in the game, or some interaction of the two, because I couldn't get any useful support from the publisher, JoWood Productions. They did try, and perhaps some of their staff have a better handle on the English language (JoWood is in Germany) but after a dozen or so emails back and forth, no progress was made in diagnosing, let alone resolving, the problem, and I ended up finishing the game without ever finding out what was wrong. At least I was able to finish the game, even if I had to reboot and reload from time to time.