Publisher: JoWood
Developer: Spellbound Entertainment
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 2.8 GHz dual-core CPU, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX or better graphics card, 2 GB RAM, DirectX 9-compatible sound card, 9 GB hard-drive space
Genre: RPG
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

There is a formula that RPGs usually follow. You start at Point A with an overarching story objective. Sixty or so hours later (depending upon how many side quests you complete), you fight a massive, sometimes frustrating boss battle to arrive at Point B. Your level of frustration in that final encounter is determined by how well you’ve improved your character during the journey. Developer Spellbound’s Arcania: Gothic 4 fits into that paradigm like a glove. But whereas other games of the genre weigh you down with dozens of useless diversions, Arcania offers a streamlined version of the RPG that helps make that trip from A to B enjoyable.

Although Arcania shares some characters with the other games in the Gothic series, its situations and your main character are new. You start as a nameless young lad living on the island of Feshyr. You’ve finally gained your girlfriend’s father’s permission to wed, and now you’re in the mountains above your seaside village to ask your adventurer friend Diego for a boat ride to the land of Argaan for you and your pregnant bride-to-be. Diego sends you on an errand to the island’s resident witch, who in turn asks you to complete a quest in a nearby cave. When you finish your assignment, you emerge from the cave to find your girlfriend dying and the village in flames, destroyed by the forces of an evil king. With vengeance in your heart, you leave the island with Diego, but you soon find yourself in the middle of a much bigger conflict in which the fate of the world is at stake.

You control your hero from the third-person perspective using the mouse and keyboard. You start out with basic weapons and armor, but you can collect and equip upgrades by loot drops after combat or at merchants found in all of the game’s major destinations. Combat is simple point-and-click: you either move the character close to the target and left-click to use your equipped melee weapon, or draw your bow or crossbow (or select one of four offensive spells) and aim with the target reticule. You have a 10-slot hotkey bar in which you can assign number buttons to your weapons, consumables and spells. Identical items stack in your inventory, making your stash almost limitless. NPCs and items to examine glow when you get close enough to interact with them. You gain three skill points each time your character levels up, allowing you to increase your strength, weapon and defense proficiencies, and effectiveness with spells.

Arcania could be described as RPG-lite, since almost everything about the game is designed with the average player in mind. You can pick up everything you find in the world and not worry about maxing out your inventory, provided you visit the town merchants and sell unneeded items every now and then; in my 35 hours with the game, I never reached my carry limit, and I never left anything behind after battles. Crafting is done on the fly; you right-click on scrolls you find during your journey to learn new recipes, then collect ingredients growing all through the gameworld. An icon appears above the hotkey bar when you’ve found the ingredients necessary to craft an item; all you have to do is open the crafting window, select the item you want to create and in what quantity, press the Craft button and you’re done. A red haze surrounds the screen when your character’s health decreases to 50 percent, giving you plenty of time to quaff a health potion and get back into the fight. Enemies don’t respawn (except for one spot near the end of the campaign), so you don’t have to worry about fighting your way through already-cleared territory. You can easily avoid the most difficult non-boss fight in the game by simply sneaking around the enemy. And not only can you save anywhere you want (except while in battle), but the game also frequently autosaves, so you never have to go back too far if you die. But the biggest plus: side quests are minimal. You never get so involved with questing that you forget your ultimate goal, as is the case with many RPGs.

As fun and involving as the campaign is, there’s a boatload of problems that threaten the overall experience. The game uses teleporters as a fast-travel system, but the pads are connected in pairs only, so you can’t bring up the world map, choose a destination and click to get there, and you’re given no clue as to where a pad is going to send you. It’s possible to mark a waypoint on the world map, but you can’t annotate it, and you can only set one waypoint at a time. Picking locks on chests is so simple, there’s no real reason to lock them. You can’t use the mouse wheel to switch weapons. Descriptions of crafting items don’t appear in the crafting window, making it difficult to decide what you want to create. You have to separate the useful items from the discardable ones in your inventory because you can’t open your character window when selling items to a merchant. One campaign-long fetch quest is usually enough for an RPG (find all the hidden idols, etc); Arcania gives you four of them, ensuring that completionists will be compelled to double their play time looking for all of the hidden objects. The voice acting is amazingly bad, and the lip movements almost never match the dialogue (although English isn’t Arcania‘s first language, so I suppose that’s to be expected). The ending cinematic following the final boss battle is very abrupt and makes no sense; after finally vanquishing ultimate evil, the ending cutscene left me unsatisfied. And then there are the graphics glitches. Lots of them. Even with the settings maxed, Vision Engine 7 pushes out clean and clear graphics at 20 fps, but characters still walk through each other, enemies can pass through openings that they should be too big to enter, characters in the far distance move haltingly as if they’re a phonograph needle skipping a groove, and there are jaggies galore in the water textures as waves approach and recede.

How you’ll feel about Arcania: Gothic 4 depends upon what’s most important to you when playing an RPG. If you like a well-focused story with interesting characters, attractive backgrounds, excellent music and streamlined gameplay, this is right up your alley. But if you’re a hardcore RPGer who is turned off by all of the hand-holding and the sloppy graphics details, you might want to move along to something else. As for me, I had a blast with the game, despite its flaws, which I hope the inevitable sequel’s developer will manage to fix.

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