Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GF Go 7800GTX Video
Minimum System:
More details here
I'm going to start this review off with kind of an odd statement: Gothic 3 is one of the best games that you shouldn't play.
Now that I've gotten that over with, let's discuss why. Gothic 3 is an RPG sequel by German developer Piranha Bytes and Austrian publisher JoWood, and it includes a huge, open world, plenty of items, skills, spells, and abilities, excellent graphics, and multiple paths through the game along with multiple endings. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it's also got a boatload of bugs and issues regarding combat, quests, NPC issues, frame rates, crashes, and AI that will make almost any gamer want to smash your keyboard in half at one point or another during this game's forty-plus-hour ride.
Gothic 3 starts out interesting enough: unlike many RPGs, there is no character creation here. You are the "Nameless Hero", some white dude with brown hair and literally no name who arrives in the land of Myrtana, and the first bit of gameplay you get is a pitched battle with a bunch of Orcs. You'll eventually be leveling up and choosing from a number of spells, skills, and stat bonuses to customize your character with, but at the start what you get is pure action. Yes, the lack of choice at the beginning goes against what most RPGs do and it may turn you off, but later you'll have the ability to customize a huge combination of stats, skills, and spells, and that winds up being much better than what we've seen in most RPGs.
Let's dive into the story a little bit. In the first two Gothic games, the Hero fought his way out of a prison and stopped evil from taking hold on the island of Khorinis. Now that he and his buddies have arrived on the mainland that Khorinis sits next to, he finds that he hasn't really improved his situation at all. It turns out that the Orcs, one of the favored people of the evil god Beliar, have almost won a war against the humans and have taken over almost every human city in Myrtana. The Orcs have struck a deal with the Hashishin people to the south and are searching for the ancient artifacts that would allow them to quell all human resistance once and for all, while the rebels themselves have been building secret outposts and planning their own counterattacks to bring their towns back under human control. And Xardas, your nemesis from the previous games, has struck a deal with the Orcs. You'll need to deal with him as well.
You, playing as the hero, are thrust into this world and while you have no choice but to liberate the town of Ardea at the beginning, after that you have a choice. Your first major choice should be whether to side with the humans and free Myrtana from the Orcs, or to crush the human resistance as you work for the Orcs themselves. You'll then have three choices for actually completing the game which I'll leave out here for the sake of keeping at least some of the story under wraps.
Gothic 3 plays somewhat similarly to how the recent Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind and Oblivion do. It's full-on action from a third-person perspective with a lot of RPG number crunching going on behind the scenes, but the important part here is that if you're terrible at action games, you are not going to enjoy Gothic 3 much. Even on the lowest of the three difficulty settings you'll find combat to be brutal and frustrating if you're on the losing end of the battle. Recent patches have eased up on this a bit by making sure you aren't getting "stun-locked" by monsters too badly, but it's still tough to deal with sometimes.
It's probably not a Gothic 3 review without a complaint about boars. Yes, these evil, destructive forces are actually the targets of one of the game's very first quests that actually send you to go kill something. And you'll find out quickly that even with the patches, these boars are no joke. Before your poor body is finished reeling back from your previous attack, the boar's already pushed his snout into your crotch again (at least, that's what the animation looks like), causing you to start reeling back again. This means that even taking one hit from a boar, or from one of many other types of wildlife, can set off a chain reaction where you wind up dead without having been able to do the slightest thing about it once it started. Sure, there is an easy method for taking out boars once you learn it (the idea is to tap your move backwards key, then let it go, then swing your weapon once, then tap backwards again, and repeat), but taking one hit can be catastrophic. And even then, other monsters in the game don't fall for this and will require lots of trial and error - in the form of loading quicksaves repeatedly - in order to come out victorious. Oddly, this problem isn't nearly as big when you're fighting humans or Orcs, and combat with them is usually actually pretty fun.
