Rating: 
Summary: Arcanum
Review: I enjoyed the game until I got about half way through. Just following the main plot line, I maxed out at level 50 before I even got to Caladon. After that it got boring. The boss at the end is a total wimp. You dont even have to save the game to face him. Kill on try #1. Overall, the first few hours are interesting, but a lame ending.
Rating: 
Summary: Just one notch down from Balders Gate2
Review: The world is interesting and complex. The character generation system allows for a totally customizable character. You can build the ultimate theif, a kicking mage, a genius technologist, a hulking combat monster, a smooth charmer con-man or someone who is a mix of any of the above. There are tons of mini quests to keep you interested and the main quest is pretty interesting. It also has a world builder engine to let you make your own sub modules (although I personally didn't try this)There are some draw backs. Unlike BG2 all interaction is by dialog boxes. I missed having my companions characters talk to me and they felt bland and souless compared to Minsk and Boo, etc. You don't have control of your companions progression and that can be a problem if for example you really want your healer to stand in the back and use arrows rather than be up front getting clobbered. He will never develop a bow skill. I dislike the level cap at level 50. I got to level 50 and there was still a good bit of the world left to explore. But it felt kind of pointless since I had ceased to improve. When the finale takes place you are not returned to the world to continue your quests so there are still some left uncompleted. Lastly I wish they would improve the monsters as you progress. i got awfully sick of fighting ailing wolves by the time I was high level. There are lots of monsters, some of them very formidable. But each area tends to have its own types and these never change. since you do a lot of running around near Tarant with is low level monsters they get rather dull. Overall however its very orignial and well worth playing. One important thing to note. It is fairly important to get a good persuasion skill early in the game. A lot of the NPCs won't open up lines of inquiry or quests for you unless you are reasonably persuasive.
Rating: 
Summary: Arcanum is awesome!
Review: This is an awesome game. For those of you who are worried about bugs, there are patches out that will fix them. I played it through twice & then used the World Editor. While the original World Ed isn't that easy for beginners (and I'm a computer programmer), the follow-up has a very logical design and is easy to figure out. Unless you're skilled at scripting, about all you're going to make is a hack n' slash dungeon, but the people on the Arcanum forums are very helpful, and will give you tips if you ask nicely. The music is excellent, and I don't know why people think the graphics are dated, they aren't bad! But if you want a game with an engaging storyline (unlike some recent computer RPGs), where you can completely develop your character from the beginning and you're not restricted to certain skills, and has a fantasy world that has the most depth I've ever seen in a computer game, Arcanum is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent theme
Review: Arcanum is an excellent game, its biggest problem in my opinion, that it could have been even better. The technology system is innovative and a lot of fun. The character creation is nice, and the world is _really_ cool. The few objections I have include: levelling is to easy, and there is an experience cap; magic just isn't as fun as technology. Great job on the game, though.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent RPG for the enthusiast
Review: Before you approach Arcanum, you have to consider what kind of gamer you are; do you enjoy the click-kill activity and furious multiplayer action of Diablo, or the intricate storyline / character development system as seen in Baldur's Gate, Fallout, etc.? If you answered Diablo, then, please use the door marked "Exit", as you probably won't enjoy Arcanum. Still here? Good. For the rest of us, Arcanum proves to be a real treat; an expansive role playing game that allows you to customize your character in many different ways. You tweak-junkies with be pleased with the depth of character development available, although I'm still not decided on the single-point-to-distribute-per-level system. (You gain 2 points every 5th level, however, instead of 1.) One of my favorite aspects of Arcanum is the ability to solve quests and situations in different ways; perhaps you can coerce the character in question to your way of thinking, via your persuasive talents. If that fails, you might be able to pick pocket a crucial item from his or her person. If that fails, you can often resort to the more vulgar solution of violence. Lots of dialogue and original quests make this one a keeper. However, the storyline is a bit cliched... you are the chosen one, sent to battle great evil. Wow, I haven't seen that one before! In all fairness, though, the execution of the story is great, and will keep you playing late into the night.
Rating:
Summary: For the RPG enthusiast
Review: I'm a big fan of computer role playing games (especially the two Fallouts) and as a result, Arcanum has been a treat. It's rare that you find a game with such a huge world and vast variety of options in creating and developing your character. I've already put well over 100 hours into it, and expect to replay it all the way through several more times.
For casual RPG players, there are many elements of Arcanum that may make your experience less enjoyable. The graphics are probably the biggest drawback: not only do they look dated, they seem washed out with too many grays and browns. The richness of the character development system and size of the world may also make it difficult to get into the game. The interface itself can take some getting used to, and the combat system is merely adequate. If you can get past those things, though, you'll probably enjoy the game.
Hardcore RPG players won't care about most of those factors, but there are a few other things that may bother them. One is that there are some balance issues; the most notable is a weapon which you can get relatively early in the game which is powerful enough to kill almost any enemy with 2-3 blows. Even though my character wasn't combat-oriented, I never had a difficult combat after obtaining that weapon. Another issue is that money is probably too easy to come by. Finally, the game has quite a few bugs; most of them are minor and being addressed with patches, but there is one bug (obviously a memory leak) which causes performance to gradually deteriorate until the game is unplayable. I had to restart the game every few hours to get around this.
The ranking I give to a game is based on one factor alone: how much fun I had playing it, and despite some of the negatives I've mentioned, I've really had a blast playing Arcanum. I look forward to future games by Troika.
Rating:
Summary: great non linear game
Review: If you hate linear games,you will love Arcanum.You can play at
you're own pace. The different directions you can go or countless
You will spend hours and never get board.This is a must to play.
A fantastic game with great graphics.
Rating: 
Summary: Promising framework delivers minimal fun
Review: I should probably preface this review by saying that I felt that Fallout fell far short of its spiritual predecessor, Wasteland (one of my favorite games of all time). Although very similar both philosophically and mechanically, I found Fallout's story arc so much less compelling that I never actually finished the game, and never bought the sequel. Arcanum suffers from many of the same storytelling flaws as Fallout did. Although its world purports to be driven by a mixture of magic and early-industrial era technology, the former dominates the storyline completely. And although there are side plots galore, some of which are actually more interesting than the main, all the quests in the game follow the same formula set out in the original D&D RPGs of the early 90s: slay this monster, retrieve this item, come back to me for a reward (in this case, experience is generally the incentive). The roleplaying aspects of NPC interaction are similarly formulaic, as each conversation is scripted by canned lines and differentiates at most two possible PC personalities (which I've unflatteringly come to think of as "mouthy jerk" and "flowery suckup"). Now, many games have managed to succeed in spite of weak or absent storytelling (notably Diablo and, to a lesser extent, Diablo II). One can, for example, view the RP part of RPG as a framework for combat, which can be a compelling enough aspect
to carry a game. Unfortunately, Arcanum provides hardly any variety in its combat opponents. There were only one or two instances I can remember in the game where opponents used any kind of ranged weapon, and only the final bad guy used any kind of offensive magic (and even then, not effectively, preferring for the most part to engage my meleeist in hand-to-hand). I consider this last to be the single most telling flaw in Arcanum. The combat and monster AI in Diablo have spoiled me as a game player, perhaps, but it seems a huge waste of Arcanum's complex skills matrix and character advancement system to hack away at spiders and wolves for hours on end. Is this really the best they could do? I thought about playing the game through again. I really did. But even though Arcanum offers very promising flexibility in character design mechanics, the prospect of testing that character out on either the tedious combat or the one-dimensional NPC community leaves me yawning.
Rating:
Summary: A very good game, worth the effort
Review: This game is one of the rare VERY good ones that gets almost everything right.
This game could be best summned up as Jules Verne meets J.R. Tolken. A wonderful mix of technology & mage craft.
Or if you're feelin' like Conan, you can go and use neither, and concentrate on just swords & bows.
The story line is reasonably well developed, to avoid spoiling the fun I'll leave off the details. It is also quite non-linear with plenty of side quests for you to build your reputation and increase your skills on. Graphics: (B-) They look good enough to do the job, but you won't catch yourself saying "wow". If you've played Baldur's Gate, the graphics are just slightly better then that. They are definately 2D. In MANY areas it would have been very helpful to be able to rotate the perspective. Sound: (C-) not that well done. Limited in range and variety. Fidelity only average. Over all useage nothing remarkable. I get soo tired of listening to the repetative death squeels of pigs. But it does add just a little color to the game. Of course, lately I've been playing with the sound turned nearly off. Interface: (C+) Fairly typical for RPG's. Something work better then normal, some worse. Though in general quite useable. It's nice and clean and easy to figure out what's going on. However it can be extremely difficult to get items out of your "quick use" list and back into your backpack. This can take 4-5 tries. Gameplay: (B) Fairly typical for RPG's but a bit better then most. It's easy to do things. Frequent saves are easy There is a hotkey for quick saves to the auto-save slot. The over land map is easy to use, even if it is a bit cludgy. One area where it falls down is in navigating through a large city is a bit of a click fest. Since you can not just click on your destination and have your character + his/her buddies wander that direction. You must carefully navigate through the streets, around every obstacle. Other quibbles like I couldn't figure out how to attack doors and locked chests until I read the manual, I know you should read the manual first... I just seldom, if ever, bother. The biggest complaint I had with the game is that it has a huge list of skills, encouraqes you to dabble with this or that to try out different things, but the level advancement cuts off at level 50. 50 might sound like a large number, but at 50 I was less then 1/2 way through the game, and had tried less then 5% of the available skills. ... This still leaves your character having tried only a small fraction of the available skills, but lasts close to the end of the game and feels like a more natural cap then 50. I'm still giving the game a "B" in this area, since even with it's minor problems, it's better then average for the genre, and adds more to the game then it detracts. Bugs: (C-) As it ships, the game was below average. Not HORRIBLE, but not great either. In my case, the game failed to install correctly on the first attempt. I had to install a 2nd time to get it to run. There is an update which address many of these problems, but some remain. For example, if you use ALT + TAB to get back to windows and then tab back to the game, it will be either completely messed up (0-5% chance), have significant graphic anomolies (10-15% chance), the mouse cursor will be gone (80-100% chance).
The game once had a problem with saved game. During a save, it corrupted the file. I saved to a 2nd location as well just to be safe, that too was corrupt. End result is I had to load a week old saved game. The moral here? Save often. Save to a new slot everytime you make a level, so if you lose a position, you don't loose any skill levels. Fun Factor: (A-) This is the big one. This is the reason I'm giving this game 4 stars. When you get right down to it, it's alot of fun. There are so many different things to do, and different ways to do them that there is also a fair amount of replay value. Something extremely rare in an RPG.
Rating:
Summary: Most original rpg of late
Review: I am a pen-and-paper roleplayer, and I was most impressed with the way this game changes depending on what your character is: you play a different story as a male or female, as a technologist or a mage, as a warrior, a thief, a women's man, a diplomat or a necromancer. Endless smaller and bigger quests exist to suit all tastes, from sewer hunts to frauds and robberies, investigations, diplomacy, monster hunts, archeological missions... a pretty full list. You get to meet many interesting characters with complete, believable personalities, including probably the most interesting arch-nemesis, and you definitely get drawn into the technology-magic debate. A full 5 stars despite its dated graphics and occasional glitches - this is a game to play and like every minute of it. And then try it again with a half-ogre to experience racism, and again with a gnome for haggling games, and with a thief womanizer, and with that elf necromancer... Probably the best rpg since Fallout 2.
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