Reviewed: December 19, 2002
Reviewed by: John Bowlin
Publisher
JoWood Productions
Developer
Arkane Studios
Released: November 1, 2002
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature
8
7
8
6
8.0
System Requirements
Recommended System
JoWooD, currently one of the largest publishers of games for German speaking countries, has recently been able to publish some high quality games primarily developed in Europe and bring them over to gamers in the United States. Arx Fatalis is a game with a long development history by an untested developer, Arkane Studios. Arkane has managed to develop a highly immersive RPG experience that follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest first person RPG games ever developed, most notably the much revered Ultima Underworld series developed by Looking Glass Studios.
The story pits you as an amnesiac adventurer whose unknown destiny is eventually to destroy the secret cult of Akbaa, the god of devastation and chaos, and prevent his reign of terror upon the world of Arx. The game plays from the first person perspective, so you truly get to experience the world of Arx first hand. The world is a world where the sun has been extinguished, and so man and goblin and troll and other races have moved down into the earth itself, carving nations out of the bedrock of Arx. Only a few highly skilled and brave adventurers, collectively known as the Travelers Guild, are able to travel on the surface and go from underground city-state to city-state.
Arx Fatalis is played from the first person point of view. It does this to achieve a level of immersion almost unmatched among RPG games. The underground world of Arx truly sucks you in and makes you feel like you are the character in the game. The graphics are above average and so are the sound effects, and this helps to immerse the gamer in the fantasy world. You don't so much play Arx as much as experience it.
And not all of it is pretty. Remember, this game has a Mature ESRB rating, and for a good reason. There are depictions and scenes of horrible violence and bloody gore in this game. Don't play too soon after eating if you have a weak stomach. Parents should use discretion when deciding whether or not their young ones should get a game this intense. For those of us who can appreciate a good virtual beheading or ritual slaying, though, Arx Fatalis delivers nicely.
The interface for Arx is fairly intuitive. You can use the mouse in different modes. One is in mouse-look mode where it plays more or less like any other first person shooter style game, using a WASD keyboard setup for movement. Then there is the interactive mode, where moving the mouse controls an on screen cursor to manipulate items in your inventory and in the game world. You can drag and drop items from your inventory onto other objects or into the game world to attempt action with them. For example, drag a raw fish out of your inventory and lay it next to a burning camp fire. After a few seconds, your raw fish will cook and you now have a nice meal.
There are several hotkeys for speeding up commands. You double click your spell book to open it, or you can just press the F2 key. You can shift click on a potion to drink it, or you can just hit the 'H' key to drink a health potion automatically. These keys are customizable, so if you don't like the way they work, have it your way.
Casting spells works in two ways. One is casting on the fly. As you progress through the game, you will find runes. As you find some runes, your spellbook will have new spells added to it automatically and spells are a combination of runes to form a spell word. To cast the spell, go into spellcasting mode by holding down CTRL, then you trace the rune on the screen using the mouse as if you were moving your fingers to write the rune in the air. This looks pretty neat and is great the first few times you do it. Later on, this can get to be somewhat of a chore but it is a nice touch. If you did the rune word correctly your spell is cast.
If you hold down the SHIFT key while casting (as well as CTRL) then you will "memorize" the spell into one of your three instant spell slots. To cast an instant spell, just press the number key corresponding to the spell slot 1, 2, or 3 and it will cast immediately without having to redraw any runes. This 3 spell limit can be somewhat of a problem when encountering really tough fights because you can quickly run out of spell "ammo" and then be stuck trying to cast on the fly which is extremely hard during combat.
Combat works pretty much like you'd expect, draw your weapon with the TAB key, and then press the mouse button to swing it. If you hold down the mouse button you'll swing harder when you release it, doing more damage. Combat is fast and deadly. If you do not have the skill or the weapons to handle a fight, you will quickly die. It is best to try a different approach if you keep dying at a certain point. Try not to let enemies run away to bring reinforcements. Try to sneak up and hit enemies from behind, you will do more damage.
As you perform quests in the game your character will go up in level and you will be able to assign skill points to different skills. Some skills seemed more important than others. For example, the object knowledge skill influences the ability to brew potions, identify objects, and poison weapons, so it's very handy to have. Most of the skills seem to go up in capability only at the 10% increments, so having a 25% in something is the same as a 20%, at least, for certain aspects of the skill. So instead of bumping up every skill by a few points, you will get more benefit from bumping up a few skills by 10% or so.
Of course, you can increase you characters potency by finding new items or buying them. Runes are especially valuable since they determine what new spells you can cast. There are also magical items that you can find. The items in the game are fixed, meaning there is no randomization such as a game like Diablo where you get random "drops" from monsters. Everything is hand crafted in Arx. This gives Arx less of a "this doesn't belong here" kind of feel, but limits the replayability of the game somewhat. The good news is you can replay it taking a different approach, such as going as a fighter-type once, then going as a mage or a thief the next time, etc.
The only flaws to the gameplay seem to be that the game is somewhat unforgiving and depending on how you start off your character you may make a character that is too weak to really get started in the game. Also if you make unwise skill choices it can greatly affect the difficulty of the game. Arx seems to favor magic using characters the most, and makes life hardest on characters that are concentrating on the lower skills of rogues and thieves.
The NPC's in Arx are well done and have competent voice acting for the most part. You will talk to goblins and trolls and oh yes, maybe a human or two. The plot of Arx is a political one, especially at first, and it will involve you going to the different "camps" in the Arx world and delivering messages and otherwise being more or less diplomatic. Of course, how you play is somewhat up to you, you can try to talk your way through everything or you can go in sword waving. Don't be too surprised if one way ends up being a lot easier, though.
You can keep track of your quests using the nice quest journal that automatically tells you what you need to do or lets you review your tasks. The game for the most part is pretty linear, though, so if you're playing it through in one weekend you won't need to make much use of the journal. There is an automap function also that is handy and it will let you pull down a map to watch while you walk around.
The story is very well done and draws you into the mystery of who your character is and what his connection is to the mysterious god Akbaa. The ending may not be very surprising to most people, but at least the journey of getting there is somewhat refreshing and entertaining. The humor is subtle in the game but pretty good when it is there. Most of the story is told from speaking to the many NPC characters.
Overall the graphics in Arx are very well done. They aren't the greatest graphics ever seen in a PC game but they are quite above average, especially for the RPG genre. The best part is that you get to experience it all in glorious 3D in the first person point of view. The artwork is dark and foreboding most of the time, you really do feel like you're in an underground world. The flickers of the torchlight are realistic as well. Creature models aren't quite as good as some games, but they are competent and sometimes downright scary. The motion of the humanoid characters seems to be well done and realistic. The animation is fluid and smooth and doesn't get out of sync with the action going on.
Arx Fatalis allows you to choose resolutions from 640x480 up to 1600x1200. The game supports many options for color depth, texture quality, draw distance, and etc. The game supports bump mapping and other little nice features to improve the graphics quality. The game has a lot of flexibility to let you customize the game's looks versus the performance. It ran acceptably on my Athlon 850 Mhz, 512 mb RAM, and GeForce 2 MX (64mb) using 1024x768x32 and all the graphics options on high.
While some of the cutscenes seemed a bit simplistic, they did evoke a dark mood and were useful for moving the plot along. The artistic style of the game is very medieval...very gothic. It all seemed quite grim and realistic; torture devices with tortured remains, gory battlefields with the wounded still lying all about. The game didn't flinch when it came to showing you the brutality of the world of Arx, as it were. This is no happy fairy tale.
Then there are the sound effects, all well done, such as the little crackles and pops that the fire makes when you're cooking a fish, or the strange knocking noises or rumbles of earth movements while you're walking through the underground corridors. The voice acting was well done for the most part; nothing gratingly irritating, but nothing that made you sit up and say "wow" either. Overall, they did a competent job on the voices, and in general the sound effects were very well done.
The game supports EAX and this is great for first person games like Arx. You can hear sounds echoing around you like it is supposed to be, and this adds greatly to the experience. You can specify the volume and the level of quality you want for performance adjustments. This worked well with my SoundBlaster Live 5.1. The sound effects were a highlight of the game, and added greatly to the immersion.
The music is a creepy alien world theme, and overall while it did evoke a mood, it wasn't something I'd want to listen to outside of the game. I think it worked well for the purpose of setting the atmosphere of the game. It is not your typical fantasy theme music with loud horns and orchestral themes, but more of a strange, otherworldly feel to it. You get the feeling they tried to make it sound like strange echoes coming from the underground passages.
Arx should take you around 30 hours to complete, possibly more depending on how fast you are at figuring out a few of the puzzles or how often you have to reload some of the more difficult combats. You could spend longer if you had to see every little nook and cranny of the game world, maybe as much as 50. You would be better off, though, saving that for a replay using a different concentration of skills for your character. Replay value is low, though, because you will play the same story each time you play through it, with little variation. There are no multiplayer options to extend longevity. Arx is a unique experience, but you're not likely to keep it around for years unless you are the kind of gamer who likes to replay a good story.
Arx Fatalis is a somewhat unique experience in a game. This isn't a first person shooter where you run around and kill things with glee. It's not really a tactical RPG game where you build up characters and fight hoards of monsters. It's more of a fantasy world simulation of sorts. You are thrown into a completely immersive fantasy world and must figure out how to get by in it and hopefully save it from a terrible fate. There are similar games, but most of them are from an age long past, such as the Ultima Underworld series. Perhaps a game like Morrowind would be similar to Arx, but Arx is more focused and tells a more involving story, while Morrowind concentrates on its grandness of scale and doing a little bit of everything.
If you're the kind of gamer that appreciates immersion into a game world over all other aspects, you should definitely look at Arx. RPG fans who concentrate on stats or hate real-time aspects will not appreciate it. Fans of the old Ultima Underworld series should definitely pick this title up and cherish it. Also fans of Morrowind may enjoy it once they get used to its lack of freedom compared to Morrowind's completely open-ended gameplay structure. Fans of 3D first person type games that have much more depth than a shooter are the primary audience here.