Backlog Beatdown: Being Arcane with Arcania

First, let me say that these notes refer to the PlayStation 4 version of Arcania. If you’re considering playing this game on a different platform, you may have a different experience to me, which is just as well really, because my experience of this game wasn’t great.

This is quite early on in the game when you're fighting
your enemies off with a... what is that? A stick?

Arcania is part of a series of games called Gothic, a collection of fantasy-themed Roleplaying games with perhaps a darker tone in terms of its design than the usual affair. You play as a nameless hero, who after having his village destroyed by a horde of enemies, vows to take revenge. This takes him on a quest across the lands to find the truth behind the attack, and the malevolent forces controlling it all. Nothing, of course, that we haven’t seen before.

One thing unique to this version of Arcania I certainly haven’t seen in any RPG since the 5^th generation of consoles is a game with no cutscenes. I thought this was deliberate at first, and quite liked it – a game that drops you straight into the action without faffing about with exposition, in medias res, and what appeared to be a nightmare sequence, no less? That was a great way to get into the game, and I was looking forward to seeing where it was going. Alarm bells started to ring, however, when I’d got past the first area of the game (basically a 1-2 hour tutorial,) to find the hero in a different area entirely with some hints that his home had been destroyed with nothing in between. I finished the set of caves that formed the dungeon and found the hero on a different island altogether. Nothing set this up; nothing explained what exactly happened and why. I surmised that there probably were cutscenes in the game at some point but for some reason hadn’t got as far as the PS4 port. A quick glance on Youtube confirmed my theory – I have an incomplete game here.

These wasp-like creatures are a
pain in the bum...

Nonetheless, I kept going, wanting to at least get to the end of the game and finish what I started. The game is… OK. It’s a pretty standard role-playing game that reminded me of a grim-dark version of Fable more than anything else. You can develop your character in fighting, ranged combat and magic, and while there is some overlap in how your invested skill points develop your character’s attributes, you’ll have to stick to one build or another if you want to maximise your stats; spreading them out across the board makes for a balanced but less-than-spectacular character! The quests are one fetch quest after another, or kill a certain monster, or number of monsters. The combat is functional at best but not at the standard you might expect for a 7^th generation game; there’s very little feedback so you don’t always know you’ve been hit until your health bar is ticking down, the enemies barely react to being hit either, and the game has an odd habit of glitching enemies behind you – presumably as an error macro to being caught in the scenery. It’s the jankiest game I think I’ve ever played.

The set-up to this quest is absolutely ridiculous,
but the beast provides an interesting challenge.

I did enjoy some of what Arcania had to offer – the game is quite linear, so there was no wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused, and while the combat was a bit wonky in places, at least the challenge of the game was at the right level. The graphics are OK, if a little, er, “Bioware” in terms of the faces, and some of the monsters were fresh designs on a western RPG setting that can get quite stale. The sound was alright, even if the nameless hero sounded like an absolute wazzock and the voice acting for the rest of the cast is only marginally better than PS1-era games. The music score was suitably epic, and one of the better parts of the game’s presentation.

Ultimately though, I played Arcania to its story conclusion and found very little to recommend. If you like RPGs there are far better ones than this, and if you don’t, then this certainly won’t change your mind – even overlooking all the faff that comes with the PS4 version. A very poor game.

Final Score: 1/5. Nah.

Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2

I’ve slowed down on the painting since last week. I made a start on six of the Terminators from the Space Hulk set, but after the third rather thin layer of red paint I put on, I didn’t take that any further. I probably will this week – but I struggled to find the inclination last week. There were a few different reasons for that, including the fact that I was enjoying playing some other games in the evenings!

Not looking good for Europe...

At one point me and Kirsty had another go at Pandemic so that we could try to beat it again with proper regard to the rules this time. Some of you may remember we tried the game a few weeks ago but got two rather important points wrong: you’re supposed to draw two infection cards after an Epidemic, and for that reason, we didn’t get a single Outbreak; and you’re only allowed to give or take a card if you’re in the city of the card you’re trading, unless you’re the researcher which neither of us were. So, we tried again with those rules in place and the game beat us this time; we arrived at the end of the Outbreak track but there were only two cards left in the draw deck so we would have lost the following turn anyway. It didn’t help that we’d got a particularly harsh draw at the start of the game and an early Epidemic; both New York and London had three infection cubes on them and as they’re next to each other, when those cards came up again they were a part of a triple outbreak across Europe and North America, and the blue cubes even found their way to South America.

The Shadow Beast.,,

I spent a couple of evenings playing Arcania on the PS4. One of the problems I run in to when I’m blogging long-form RPGs is finding things to say about it without repeating myself; if you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that by the standards of most of what you can buy for the PS4, Arcania is pretty poor. And yet this is the game I’m sticking with! I’m not far away from the end of the game now (the target level for the end of the game is 30 and I’m at 25,) and I think that, for all its faults, Arcania does have some positive qualities. I’ve never particularly liked Crafting systems, for example, so it’s nice to play a game where I don’t necessarily feel obliged to use it. But I think the main benefit for me is the linearity. This is no open world game where you can wander around the map becoming hopelessly lost and confused; it’s always obvious where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. The dungeons are challenging in their own way, and often quite fun. And while there are side quests, there are not too many of them – they don’t necessarily distract from the main storyline. Sadly, the main storyline is also marred by the cutscenes not working properly, and I missed some crucial pieces of information – thankfully you can read the finer points of these in your quest log – but there are some redeeming qualities. The voice acting, for example, while far from great, somehow manages to convey the urgency of your mission. And the unnamed lead character, while a complete doofus in many situations, has a B-movie-like self-awareness – almost as though he knows he’s in a video game. I might even get to the end of this one!

Just done the bit with the Golden Mask...

Contrast that with the other long-form game I’ve been playing a lot of lately: Assassin’s Creed 2. While this game is far more competently put together, Ubisoft were finding their stride in creating huge open-world sandbox games, with plenty to do in them, yes, but a lot of it feels like it’s padding out the game. I guess it represents good value for people who bought this game new and that might be the only one they buy for three months, but for me there’s quite a lot of unnecessary faffing about in Assassin’s Creed games. Still, I’m close to the end of it now!

Last Week's Games: Aracania, Doom, Legions and Misty

Most of my gaming time last week was spent on Arcania; the not-very-good RPG I’ve been playing on the PS4. I’m not sure where I am in relation to my progress through the game but I’m in the area of the game that features a lot of swamplands, which has been curiously named Tooshoo. It’s not so much an open world RPG as several open questing areas chained together in a sequence, which is fine by me; I don’t necessarily like the whole world hitting me in the face at once! And I’m enjoying the game at least enough to overlook a couple of its major flaws:

That Stamina bar is a bit redundant...

First, the stamina bar. You have three bars on the bottom of the HUD, (Heads Up Display, if you don’t know!) one for health, one for mana, and one for stamina. You can increase these attributes as you level up. The problem I’ve run in to is that I’ve not been able to do anything that decreases the stamina bar. Nothing you do in open play seems to affect it, and even the moves that should affect it either doesn’t, or the move doesn’t work at all. I’d have thought dodge-rolling, at the very least, would be a way to exhaust it, but I’d be wrong apparently. Now, you’d think that this was a positive thing rather than negative, since what essentially amounts to unlimited stamina would make the game easier to play. And it does… but it also removes a lot of the challenge and makes some of the skill upgrades redundant.

The other glaring issue is feedback. Apart from your health dropping – and you’re not always looking at the HUD – the player character doesn’t react at all to being hit. There’s no hit animation, no cry of pain, nothing. Hit detection is a little off from the enemies as well, so there’s no telling whether the moves they have done have hit or missed. Often, you don’t know you’ve been hit at all until you’ve looked at your health bar or died. Again, it’s not impeding my progress in any major way, but it could have been handled a lot better than this. A shame, really, as there’s about 60% of a good game in there somewhere, but I’m finding it hard to recommend a game as mired in flaws as this.

He's invisible at the moment...

I’ve tried to play Doom as well, but I’ve found myself stuck on Deimos Lab. I’m having to be careful with my ammo as there are a lot of enemies in this section of the game and I am woefully unequipped to deal with the huge rush of them at the end of the level. I find myself running out of ammo before I can hit the relevant switches to open the end of the level, and even if I manage it, I won’t necessarily be in a good place to tackle the next one! I find myself wondering if I should be more careful in looking for the game’s secrets, as the increased difficulty setting that I’m playing on may require some extra work!

I also went back to the Horus Heresy: Legions. I have been booted from my lodge, because there was a gap of a couple of months where I wasn’t playing at all, but I’ve joined another one mainly for the card rewards. They won’t be as good – there aren’t as many members, and the ones that are there aren’t as busy – but I’ll keep playing with them until I get a 12-win run. I keep playing single matches with my Space Wolves as well; they’re always fun!

I tried to find a different picture,
but all that comes up on Google
Image Search is the character
from Pokémon.

Finally, I played Misty again with Kirsty. She had a better handle of the game this time and put up much more of a fight as we tried to arrange our window drawings strategically. I won again, but not before we’d forced a fourth round out of a draw! The main benefit of this game, we discussed afterwards, is its simplicity. If you’ve never played a card drafting game before, this one is pretty easy as the cards only do a limited number of things; we’d be happy to play this with younger or older family members!

 

Last Week's Games: Age of Empires, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2, SSX World Tour and Painting Chaos Raptors

I’ve had all sorts on this week…

Powerful, yes, but vulnerable in... wait,
what? What's happening in this picture?

I had another go with Age of Empires, playing the mission where you attack Troy with Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus and whatever army you can muster. I gave up in the end since all the heroes had died, and I couldn’t crack the enemy’s impenetrable wall of Hoplites and Cavalry. They had destroyed all my catapults, and I was getting to the point in the game where all the resources are starting to dry up so I wouldn’t have been able to mount an effective counterattack. I’ll probably come back to it at some point but those missions take anything up to a couple of hours to reach their conclusion, and I’m not keen on having another go just yet.

Funnily enough I'm several hours into the game and
I've only just started fighting goblins...

I carried on playing Arcania on the PS4. I stopped playing it for a while; not for any particular reason, I just don’t play the PS4 much these days for TV-related reasons. I remembered, whilst dealing with the clunky controls and the not-brilliantly-voice-acted dialogue, that it’s not a very good game. But I found it engaging enough to keep going, at least for a while. It got me thinking about the way I do review scores. Those of you who have been keeping up with this will know that I review games out of five, but as I only review games once I’ve beaten them, and that I will at least have had to have been engaged enough by the game to see it through to the end means that the chances that I will ever give a game the lowest score of 1/5 is quite low. The one game that I would have given that score to was Sweet Fantasy, a visual novel that took me less than 45 minutes to see in its entirety – a feat I accomplished before I started scoring my reviews. If I get to the end of Arcania that’s probably the score I will give it, but as it’s quite rare for me to do this with a long-form RPG, we will have to see…

I also continued my campaign on Assassin’s Creed 2, which I’m enjoying on the basis that I dip into it every now and then and not worry too much about the plot, or what in the world is supposed to be happening. In fact, I’ve bypassed all the plot missions and am in the process of doing all the side quests in the town I’m in now (I can’t remember what it’s called. The one with the port.) Coming into the game every now and again, rather than trying to defeat the entire game in one go, is proving a much more enjoyable experience.

At one point, my three-year-old daughter had a go with SSX World Tour, a game I’d downloaded years ago and hadn’t played for a while. It was amusing to watch her trying to control the snowboard (with a little help from me and my partner,) and I’m not convinced she knows she’s racing, but you know what, she’s having a nice time and that’s what counts.

Note the Blood Angel that this Raptor has killed...

Finally, I completed some Games Workshop models for the first time in a while, in this case some Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I was inspired to paint these by playing the Horus Heresy: Legions game and wanting to build a Chaos Space Marine army based around the Sons of Horus. Their thing in Legions is that they like to attack the Warlord, or whatever the enemy is counting on in order to win, and I’ve always liked that idea, so I decided to paint some Raptors. I was quite pleased with how it worked out in the end. There may have been a top layer of gold I forgot to put on but other than that I’m enjoying how they look. The Champion’s power sword is the second time I’ve used this technique, and while it definitely went better than the first time, it’s still going to need some practice. But that’s what I like about my collection of models; they showcase what I could do at the time and tell the story of how my painting progresses as I’m going along.

Last Week's Games: Aracania, 8-Bit Armies, Assassin's Creed 2, Trivial Pursuit, Codenames, Labyrinth, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Hey! That's My Fish

As I’ve been off on Christmas Holidays for the last couple of weeks, I’ve had more than the usual amount of time to play games! There’s been quite a few of them so I’ll be brief:

At least the guy begins the game equipped for his
supposed profession - shepherd.

On the PS4, I’ve been playing Arcania. This is a grim dark western Role-Playing Game, of little surprise to anybody familiar with The Witcher or the Elder Scrolls. This has been a mixed bag for me so far. There are some major flaws in the game, not the least of them that the cut scenes don’t work. I thought this was deliberate when I first booted the game and started playing as a King in the middle of a nightmare, then woke up a few minutes later as some rustic pretty boy whose name I don’t know and had no greater aspirations than to perform a few fetch quests and marry his sweetie-pie. But then, after going through what I presume was the magic tutorial in which I defeated a giant beetle-like monster, the game jumped straight to the adventure being on a different island altogether, a malevolent force (of Paladins?) having apparently invaded your home and killed everybody there. I didn’t see any of this. Also, by the standards of what I expect from roleplaying games, Arcania is very basic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it sustains under its own weight, but people who play these types of games may be expecting a little more. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I may see it through to the end!

On my laptop I’ve been mainly playing 8-Bit Armies. I beat another couple of missions on the Renegade faction. I like that the game is structured in this way, because it gives me a definite start-stop mentality; I can play it for a bit and then stop without necessarily having to carry on for ages. With a sometimes very busy schedule, this can be a blessing indeed!

The Ultimate Faffing About Franchise!

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2. I started this a couple of years ago and didn’t get very far. This was during the time where I was trying to play one new game every week; AC2 was my new game for that week but I don’t seem to have played it much beyond the first couple of hours. I wasn’t far off beating the first Assassin’s Creed game at that point and perhaps I was a little “Assassin’s Creed”ed out to put much time in to it’s sequel, but I’m enjoying it now. It’s a good game, hopefully I’ll see it through to the end as well!

Finally, we had a few Board Games! At Fran’s birthday party, we played a mixture of Harry Potter and Friends Trivial Pursuit. We didn’t have a board; we just asked each other the questions and I surprised a few people with my knowledge of Harry Potter! I didn’t even touch the Friends cards; I’m not saying I’ve never watched it, but I don’t know enough about it to be good at trivia questions. We also had a go at Codenames, which everybody likes; it’s a very simple concept – Word Association meets Spy Networks – and you can have a lot of people playing so everybody’s enjoying themselves!

I was so close! (Blue.)
But Kirsty (Red) was closer...

Later in the week we had our own games night around our flat with Fran and Phil, where we played a few games. Labyrinth is an interesting game where you must search for six treasures in a constantly shifting maze, then return to your starting block. It was a surprisingly competitive game, which Kirsty eventually won, but not before I’d embarrassed myself by playing the choral introduction to Inside by Stiltskin prior to making what I thought was the winning move – only to find out it wasn’t. We also played One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which was ok and put Fran in mind of a game she runs with her Youth Theatre group called Mafia. We rounded it off with Hey! That’s My Fish, which is an old favourite, if surprisingly competitive and is always a nice one to come back to.

I’m back at work next week, let’s see what I have time for!