Reviewed: March 5, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
DreamCatcher Interactive
Developer
Arkane Studios
Released: December 22, 2003
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature
9
7
9
7
8.4
Supported Features:
DreamCatcher is quickly becoming famous for finding obscure titles from overseas and brining them to the states with surprising success. Just more proof on my theory that creative game design is dead, or at least stagnent in the U.S. Arx Fatalis was originally released on the PC back in 2002 and after over a year of retooling this RPG is ready for its Xbox debut. While the game was moderately impressive on the PC there was just too much competition in the PC/RPG genre to make it a formidlbe contender. The Xbox is still in dire need of more quality RPG games so Arx Fatalis, while no different than its PC cousin, might just have a fighting chance.
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. This helps to immerse the gamer in the fantasy world allowing you to experience the adventure rather than playing it.
The first step with any RPG game is to create your character. You get to pick from a few faces then you assign several points to your basic attributes and skills. Picking the right skills will determine how the game unfolds, or more precisely, how you will approach the puzzles and combat situations that are headed your way. While this seems promising for replayability, the narrow focus of the story and tight scripting of the adventure makes this game much more linear than other RPG titles. As it is, the game favors magic but requires combat in the early levels so you have to balance those points carefully.
The interface for Arx is fairly intuitive. The left stick moves you and the right stick changes your view, much like any FPS game. The center of your view has a crosshair that will light up when you can interact with items or pieces of the environment. You can use the D-pad to access your inventory of items then use them with other items or things in the game world. For example, you can drag a raw fish out of your inventory (that you may have caught with a rod that you built) and cook it over a burning camp fire that you lit with your Ignite spell. After a few seconds, your raw fish will cook and you now have a nice meal.
When you aren't exploring you will likely be fighting off all sorts of enemies. The B button puts you in combat mode and you can then pull back the right trigger to draw back your selected weapon or fist if you are unarmed. The longer you hold the trigger the harder the hit when you finally release it doing more damage. It's a pretty cool concept and works quite well. With a little planning you can get in a good initial strike then follow up with faster but less damaging hits. There is also a great stealth element and you can try to sneak up and hit enemies from behind doing more damage.
When weapons fail you there is a unique magic system in Arx Fatalis. Casting spells works in two ways, arcade magic and simulated magic. Arcade magic is the easier of the two and you simply pick a spell and either cast it or precast it so it is ready for instant use when needed. You can disable arcade magic in the options and increase the realism of the spellcasting greatly. Now when you wish to cast a spell the rune will be displayed on the screen and you must perform a sequence of moves with the D-Pad to invoke the magic of the rune. This takes a bit of practice and timing, so you will rely more on precasting and caching up to five spells if you choose this mode.
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. Tweaking your skills will certainly dictate how you approach the game. If you are a master of stealth and ranged weapons you won't likely be getting into too many sword fights, and if you build up your magic skills you will certainly favor magical attacks over normal combat.
There are tons of objects to find and even purchase in Arx. Runes are especially valuable since they determine what new spells you can cast., and there are also magical items that you can find. The item placement in the game is fixed, so you will find the exact same items in the exact same place every time you play. While this takes away from the randomness you might expect on future adventures 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.
The graphics and sound are above average, but not nearly as impressive as recent Xbox RPG titles like KOTOR and Morrowind. 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. Character and creature models aren't quite as good as some other games, but they do offer some original flair and are 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.
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.
There is a nice vareity of textures so things don't get too repetitive and there are plenty of special effects like fog and lighting and destructible environments. I must admit that the overall look of the game is very much like a PC to Xbox port, which it is, but with more than a year to port the game I was hoping for some more Xbox enhancements. As it is, you get the same game running at half the potential resolution of the PC. There are other oddities like staring down at the spindly legs of your hero that seem to float above the floor.
The sound effects are all well done, such as the little crackles and pops that the fire makes when you're cooking a fish, the trickling of water, or the strange knocking noises or rumbles of earth movements while you're walking through the underground corridors. The creature noises and grisly sounds of combat stood out above the rest. The game supports Dolby Digital 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. The sound effects were a highlight of the game, and added greatly to the immersion.
The voice acting was well done for the most part; refreshing and surprising considering the amount of speech in this title. Overall, they did a competent job on the voices, and there was even some subtle humor stuck in, some so subtle you might not even pick up on it.
The music is standard medieval RPG flavor and works well within the scope of the game. The music ranges from epic quality during the movies then subdues down to almost pure environmental music to evoke a certain mood or emotion. Arx definitely favors sound effects over music for this adventure.
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. For those of you obsessive with thoroughly exploration, you might want to add 20 more hours to that estimate. You would be better off, though, saving that for a second replay using a different configuration of skills for your character.
The overall replay value is low since you will experience the same story each time you play through it, with little variation and the item placement is totally scripted and predictable. There are no multiplayer options, although there seldom are in RPG adventures. Arx is a unique experience, but you're not likely to place it more than once or twice unless you are the kind of gamer who likes to replay a good story.
Arx Fatalis is a somewhat unique experience in a game, mainly due to the lack of RPG games currently available for the Xbox. This isn't a first person shooter where you frantically run around and kill things, and ot'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. Arx throws you into a completely immersive fantasy world and you must figure out how to get by in it and hopefully save it from a terrible fate.
It's very easy to lose yourself in this game and a total adventure finding your way out. If you enjoy adventure games, RPG games, or FPS games that make you think then Arx Fatalis deserves a spot in your Xbox library. Unfortunately, I've yet to see a copy of this game in any store since it released, so actually finding a copy may be your biggest adventure yet.