Rating: 
Summary: A Game for a Specialized Audience
Review: Arcanum is a game that appeals to a certain audience. If you like figuring out alternate solutions to problems, you may enjoy this game. Fans of the Fallout games will find a similarly well-thought-out setting and sense of humor. Fans of complex RPGs will be delighted by the depth and length of the game.If you thought Diablo was a great RPG, well, don't bother with Arcanum. The only thing they have in common is that you have a character that grows over time. Diablo was a linear hack-and-slash adventure with clearly defined characters and simple mechanics. Arcanum has a non-linear path and complex character options. Furthermore, if you try to bash through every situation, you will have your head handed to you, especially at the beginning of the game. Specific likes: The setting, that of a fantasy realm going through an industrial revolution (with some Steampunk-like technology thrown in), is fantastic. The character creation options are varied and give you a great deal of control. The plot is long and involved. Some of the voice acting is quite good, and the background music is very appropriate, if a little monotonous at times. The system for using technology is a lot of fun. Characters can literally take bits and pieces of things and assemble them into everything from hand grenades to healing salves. Specific dislikes: The combat system has a few odd points. Grenades and such somehow never harm you or your party, so you can throw them with impunity at folks standing right next to you. Critical hits and misses are ludicrously common, with sometimes drastic results, such as self-inflicted damage, dropped or damaged weapons, scarring or even crippled limbs. It reminds me of the old D&D Wandering Damage table some pundit proposed, with entries like, "Cut yourself shaving, consult limb loss table." Graphics are pretty bland. You can't really tell your party members from people on the street -- although the clothes they wear do make a difference in appearance, at least. The graphics seem to be at about the same level as X-COM: UFO Defense in terms of utility, although they are far more detailed in Arcanum than in that game. The interface for interacting with party members can be pretty frustrating. You can tell them what to do and what to use, but they have minds of their own, and sometimes they aren't so bright. They will quite willingly run between a gun and a target, and they pick up anything that might be lying around, including stones, old shoes, and bits of fluff. Sometimes, this is useful, but you'll find yourself scanning their inventories on a regular basis. Overall, if you are in the target audience mentioned above, you can expect a four or even five star rating for this game. If you are not, then three would probably be more acurate for the average gamer, and those addicted to different genres that require a fast mouse and a short attention span will probably rate it as a two or less.
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing, but frustrating... and macho
Review: The concept, world design, and overarching plot was as good as any game out there. It's too bad the details couldn't live up to it. The game is slow, the movement interface involves constant low-speed scrolling to get where you're going, the inventory interface is painful, combat lacks tactics or strategy, and most of your playing time winds up being spent in boring, frustrating trivial tasks like constantly taking NPC's armor off and transferring it into your own inventory so you can fix it, then transferring it back and making them wear it again. Yawn. The NPCs have so little, sporadic interaction with the world they're like a throwback to pre-Ultima days, and the characters all look exactly the same except for clothing color (even when it's in direct contradiction to the game text--you'll see a woman who supposedly has "flaming red" hair, but it will still be black). The game is also heavily, heavily geared towards male characters. A female player--or a male player who has chosen a female character--has to go back to the dry old days of watching female NPCs giving you the same "flirt" lines they give the men. The main concession to a female character is having dirty old gnomes grope you in the bars, believe it or not. There are also at least two subplots that not only fail to take sexual abuse of females at all seriously and joke around about it, but assume that YOU won't take it very seriously and don't give you the option of punishing the wrongdoers. This is not a game a lot of female players are going to enjoy a tremendous amount. Who really wants to deal with rape and incest on your leisure time--especially when you're not going to be able to cathartically kick anyone's butt over it? I wish I'd liked this game better, since it had a really good gameworld and excellent alternative solutions to the quests for players who came at the problem in different ways (something not enough games do). But it's too slow, flawed, and irritating for me to really recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: The COOLEST PC RPG I Have EVER Played!
Review: Arcanum is a great mix of the worlds of fantasy and middle-ages, and of magic and technology. The story is very interesting and kept me playing straight through. The vast customization of you character is pretty impressive. Since I don't normally play PC RPGs (or any PC games period), I highly suggest ARCANUM for everyone and anyone who likes video games.
Rating:
Summary: It's what you expect, but that's about it
Review: Having played through Arcanum, I can't really say I either love or hate it. It was definitely one of those games that inspired both feelings at one time or another. Since I think it's about average in general, I would recommend you wait until the price goes down to about $20 before getting it. Let's start with the good things: Your character is endlessly customizable. This is immediately evident from the point system, which has few restrictions. About the only thing you can't do is have magic and technology at once, but otherwise you have a free hand. There's also a lot of trait and race-specific things to explore in the game, which makes it fun to play again. The story and quests are very well done. There's a TON of things to do, and you will actually have fun doing most of it. A lot of the quests are challenging, but none are impossible, especially if you're patient with them. You should find that you get at least double the experience from quests than you do from fighting, which goes to show just how many there are. The setting is cool. Who wouldn't want to see a place where magic and guns exist together? It's definitely a unique world. I actually liked the graphics, and I think that anyone who complains about them should (a) play Fallout, and (b) start focusing on the gameplay instead. This isn't Baldur's Gate. It's not supposed to look gorgeous. It plays like Fallout, for the most part. You really can't go wrong with a game that tries to emulate that one. In fact, the only places where it DOES go wrong are where it deviates from that tried-and-true formula. I wish the designers had stuck to the program. And now for the bad stuff: Load times are way too long. They're way longer than Baldur's Gate 2, which I find odd considering the simple 2-d graphics. The game often stops to load something (don't ask me what) during battles, which is highly annoying. It also seems to load small areas one at a time, making a walk through town a pain. The game is buggy. I'm not going to complain too much about this, since it can be remedied, but the version it ships in is absolutely full of problems. You'll find yourself saving pedantically to avert disaster at various crashes. Some quests don't work right, and your followers and minions act very stupid in battle. They are especially retarded when fighting around small doors. A lot of the features don't work well enough to be useful. Among these are the real time combat (very risky until you're of godly power), your follower's skills (you can't tell a thief to go look ahead for traps), the inventory (you'll notice this right off the bat), and multiplay (it's simply lousy). The game is too easy. I'm not sure if anyone else agrees, but I found the whole thing to be a milk run. I suppose if you don't bother to do quests, you might find it difficult, but I found that battles actually got easier as the game progressed. I suggest that any veteran Fallout player turn the difficulty up to hardest if you want a challenge. When all is said and done, I think Arcanum is a pretty decent game. The thing is, it could have been SO much better. It really is a pity they didn't streamline it a bit more.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good Game Could Have Been Fabulous
Review: Arcanum was one of my most-anticipated games this year, and I bought it as soon as it came out. I wasn't disappointed at all, but it didn't blow me away like I thought it would. The graphics are fine, but a little washed out and grainy. The story is engaging, but not as compelling as (for example) "Fallout 2" (which was made by the same company). The class-free character creation system -- in which any character can learn any skill -- was a nice change from D&D-based RPGs like "Baldur's Gate." The steampunk world was well-realized, and I especially liked being able to make useful items from junk I found in garbage cans. The game did a great job of making the struggle between magic and technology affect the individual character. That gives Arcanum good replay value, because it will really be a different game for a technological character than it was for a magical one. Overall, Arcanum is a good game, even if it didn't live up to my stratospheric expectations.
Rating:
Summary: The most thoroughly enjoyable game since Half-Life
Review: THE BASICS:
I played Baldur's Gate, and found it lacking action and fun.
I played Diablo II, but became bored with constant hack-n-slash.
I played Arcanum, and fell in love with its combination of action, storytelling, and sheer freedom. THE GOODS:
This game has an original and engrossing story, complete with great dialogue and written items the main character finds. There is unrivalled variety when creating and advancing your character. The game does a great job at balancing the effectiveness of magic and technology. The game gives the player a surprising amount of control in how the main character develops. Will the protagonist become a great hero (or despicable thief)? A crusader against technology (or magic)? A hero loved by the people (or villains)? The protagonist can be some of these things, or none of them, but not all. One thing I love about this game is how, if you choose sides, there will be consequences to your choosing. Do you take the side of the wizard being disrupted by the local steam engine, or an engineer, trying to keep his machines (and self) safe with saboteurs lurking about? Or will you avoid the situation? This game offers even more freedom than Fallout/Fallout 2 did. THE BADS:
There are decently long load times, which can be frustrating if you're a person who does not like to be kept waiting. Also, during gameplay, the game paused for a few seconds if my character was casting a spell that had complex grapics. This is nothing that will keep me from playing the game, though. THE BOTTOM LINE:
Buy this game, download the patch, and enjoy, my friend!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic RPG!
Review: I was introduced to Arcanum by a friend of mine, who often spoke praise for it. I installed it, opened it, and watched the CG of the the blimp crash (loved the fanciful "heavier-than-air" machines). From the moment I met Virgil well on to going to Tarant, I found I couldn't stop playing. Why was this game so addictive? Perhaps just the replayability Arcanum has! I'm guessing there are ten different side-quests in small towns, thirty in the major cities, and each one has different outcomes depending on how you handle it. Dialogue is very flexible, and fits the personality of every one. For example, let's say you meet a flower girl in a town who offers a flower. You can respond with: - "Yes, thank you. [pay her]"
- "No."
- "That flower would look better in your skull." And no that last part wasn't put in for good humor - you actually HAVE responses like that! They're not always as severe, but if you like being a crabby old man, this is your game. Another friend of mine (one who would join the Dark Side gladly) went through the game constantly using those responses. Yes even the ones for Virgil. Character development is also a MAJOR aspect of this game, and another reason it is so replayable. Besides the fact you can choose to be a magic user, a tech user, or a bit of both Column A and B, you can also get blessed, curse, get good (or bad) reputation with towns, and also choose your "background" at the beginning of the game, which will determine your skill or disposition. I should warn you if you choose to go magic, technology users will begin to shy away from you, as it is believed high levels of "magick" will cause mechanisms to burst. One character of mine became such a heavy user of magic that they wouldn't even let me ride the train any more! So I killed them... You also get a good number of people who can join your party. You can choose to boot them or let them stay (even Virgil), and quite often that is determined on your character's Good or Evil rating. I played a character with a high Good level and was told by one person she couldn't join me because I was so "morally inclined." So with out a doubt, this is probably the most fun RPG I've played yet. It really does make me feel like I'm inside a fantasy world, and I'm pretty sure they spent a good amount of time on this. If you want to find an RPG with a different world than what you're used too, or you're ticked off they aren't releasing "Fable" for the PC, then I suggest you give this game a try.
Rating:
Summary: Spectacular
Review: I'm a fan of PC RPGs, and when I heard this one was made by programmers who previously made the great Fallout/Fallout 2 games, I figured I would check it out. It's a few years old now, but is just as good as I'd hoped. The only thing that feels a bit dated about the game are the graphics, which isn't too surprising..they're in the same isometric view as the Fallout games, and the resolution is sub-Diablo II. Nonetheless, they're good enough, and the game play dynamics are awesome. One of the great features of the Fallout games was that your character was initially class-less; you could emphasize whatever skills you felt like without getting bogged down in 'Fighter' or 'Mage' or whatever other categories some games bind you to. Arcanum keeps this great feature, but also expands it by adding Technology skills. As the title of the game suggests, the setting involves a world where magic is now forced to share space with crude but advancing technology. The classic elven magic user now has to worry about a magic-resistant dwarf who might be packing a crude automatic rifle and a protective cast-iron robot spider. Arcanum allows you to pick and choose from all sorts of skill categories, including combat, thieving, magic, technology, and various social skills. To be successful you tend to have to pick a few areas and concentrate, but even lower level skills can be worth picking up on the cheap..both the Magic and Technology areas are vast and have plenty of good low-level abilities you can take without committing your character forever to that one area. The Technology skills also require physical components (springs, metal plates, etc.) and you can even purchase or discover schematics for new technologies as the game advances, which are in addition to those you can earn in the regular technology tree. Another great aspect of Arcanum is that the land is simply vast. You can stroll about it in real time, or use a world map feature to travel between various points. According to the FAQ, the world itself is a giant realm about 3000 by 3000 areas..pretending it were empty of the many secret areas or encounters you run into, it would still take your character about *35* hours to walk across it if you didn't use the world map. That, my friends, is a *big* game. Arcanum has all the other trappings of a great RPG..it has lots of equipment and goodies to find, interesting areas to explore, and a fun sense of humor. One of the best aspects, and the rarest, is the fact that an evil character can also do well. Some stores exist only for evil characters, and many 'evil' dialogue options (such as threatening people or otherwise acting cruel) actually result in compliance rather than a fight involving the entire town. So if you've ever gotten sick of some weaselly town constable or farmer giving your 30th level claymore-wielding half-ogre a hard time, now you can actually do something about it that makes sense. I intentionally used a cursed helmet to give my latest character a -100 alignment (the lowest/evilest) from the start, because it had other beneficial effects, and it hasn't slowed him down at all. That means that the dialogue options are actually *options*, rather than being the obvious good/proper choice surrounded by a bunch of obviously suicidal choices added just in case you click there by accident. In short, Arcanum has aged well and offers a very large and detailed world for folks to explore. The replayability seems almost limitless, which is why it still seems popular after several years of release.
Rating:
Summary: A Role Playing Giant
Review: I never thought that I would find an RPG that lived up to the considerable standards set by games like Planescape and the Baldur's Gate series. Arcanum showed me the error of my ways. The Fallout influence is definitely present here, although I found that I liked this game better than Fallout. The classless character system is refreshing but, like some other reviewers, I would advise newcomers to spend some time really THINKING about the direction they want their charcter to go in rather than randomly distributing points. I did that at first myself, and wound up starting the game over at least twice, once after getting my character up to level twenty six. Right now, I am building my current character to be a Melee expert, with awesome strength and dexterity. Also, I am specializing my character in Explosives to give me that little extra edge in battle. The game's backgrounds are good, although not particularly stunning, and the character animation does appear to be a bit dated. If you are looking for a great game to PLAY, and not just to LOOK AT, then you cannot go wrong with Arcanum. Even after starting over two times within a month, I am STILL totally addicted. This game is indeed a role playing giant. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but buggy
Review: I knew i had to buy this when I first began reading about it back in 2000. The setting just sounded so great. A fantasy world, but one having an industrial revolution. In other words, your typical fantasy world, turned upside down. The game doesn't disappoint. First off, the character creation system is very cool. Completely classless, which while initially rather daunting, is very deep and fun to use. Basically, your stats determine your ability to train in skills. When you level up, you receive 1 point, and every five levels, you receive 2. These can be spent on skills, stats, spells or schematics. For example, if you want to become proficient with melee weapons, you must raise your dexterity accordingly, and the spend points in the Melee skill. if you want to hit harder, you raise your Strength stats. You can play as a Male/Female Human, Male/Female Elf, Male/Female half-Elf, Male/Female half-orc, Male half-Ogre, Male Halfling, Male Dwarf and Male Gnome. I didn't like that you couldn't play as a female for several of the races, but the reasoning is explained for some in the manual and in the game. Still, it was disappointing. If you fancy magic, you can use, it though the spells are often not as fun as the ones in D&D 3.5. Still, the spells are cool, and have intersting effects. Excpet the elemental cantrips. They make annoying constantly playing noise (especially Strength of Earth). But anyway, magic is a path you can follow; in order to use magic, you must raise your Willpower stat accordingly. High intelligence also benefits a spellcaster, in order to maintain more spells at once. Instead of having your character's magic increase in power when you level up, in Arcanum, your magical apptitude increases when you learn more spells. This makes as much sense as the D&D system, so i like it. There are 16 Colleges of Magic. If magic isn't for you... you can become a technologist. Based on your intelligence score, you can aquire schematics when you level up; schematics allow you to combine items and create new ones. You can create guns, armor, potions, etc. You can also buy schematics in stores, and learn to build equipment by using things you can already make, and combine them. There are eight technological disciplines, inclduing Blacksmithy, Electrical, Chemical and Explosives. Each have their own benefits and playing style. Arcanum also has an excellent story. You are appparently the reincarnation of a powerful elven wizard, destined to fight a great evil. All I will say is that the plot leaves you guessing until the very end. NPCs follow you around, and can be given certain instructions, like Back Off, Wait, Walk to X Location, etc. by right clicking their portrait. The commands don't always work due to some fun bugs, but this doesn't happen often. NPC interaction is not as complicated as in Knights of the Old Republic, but is still good. A few have voices, but not all. The more interesting ones generally are the ones with a voice, like Magnus, or Virgil. Some even have a story you can complete, again, Magnus and Virgil, and a few others. Combat is a mixed bag at times, but fun. In Arcanum, you can choose to use a turn based or a real-time form of combat. Stick to turn based. The real-time setting is poorly developed with no pause button, or round system like in Knights of the Old Republic and other real time games. Combat tends to favor melee fighters, which can be disappointing. Bullets and arrows are assigned weight in this game, which is realistic, but it hampers gameplay. It is also harder to play as a gunslinger, at least in my opinion. This isn't to say its not fun. The most amusing weapon to unleash on enemies is the Mechanized Gun, followed by the Pyrotechnic Axe. The sound is well done, with my favorite effect being a dying lich. The weakest effects are the "crowd sounds" you hear in bars. They say the same thing over and over. The graphics are now quite dated, but acceptable. They get the job done, but it wouldn't have killed Troika to include more character models. Even (yuck) Baldur's Gate let you customize your character's looks. There are several bugs, some of them annoying, and a few can crash the game. Save often, and you'll be fine. There is a patch available. Overall Arcanum is an excellent game, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoys RPGs, fantasy, or in my case, those who enjoy science fiction or alternate history. It has something for everyone. I got addicted to CRPGs thanks to Arcanum.
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