Review: Arx Fatalis (PC/Steam)

In this review, we go underground in the PC/Steam game, Arx Fatalis. We find out how well this RPG game plays.

This game was released in 2002. It was initially intended to be the sequel to Ultima Underworld II – Labyrinth of Worlds, but due to licensing not being granted, wound up being this game instead. This game was also the subject of one of our first impression videos.

The story is that the sun on the planet you are on failed. As a result, the inhabitants of the world, including humans, trolls, goblins, and other races, were forced to burrow underground to survive. While the events did force all the races to work together, this alliance was not to last. Eventually, the races start going back to their usual warring ways underground. You were apparently attacked by rat men. When you awaken, you are in a goblin prison with no memory. The cell mate in the next cell says that there is nothing he can do on his end, so it is up to you to escape. After your successful escape from jail, you free the other prisoner who gives you the name Am Shaegar. You then venture forth to get your memory back and try to figure out why you are there.

When you originally build your character, the RPG elements really come in strong. You need to figure out your general look of your character. After that, you can start spending stat points on your general stats (including strength and knowledge). These general stats help boost your skill points as well. Skills are much more numerous. You have skills including close combat (skills with your sword), item knowledge (ability to identify and mix items), and spellcasting to name a few of them. What you choose to spend those points on depends on how you intend on building your character. Generally, there are two routs: a spellcaster and a fighter. Both generally work, but know that it’s difficult later on to build up the other side after.

When you are actually playing in the game, there are generally four modes: Stealth mode, combat mode, general movement, and spellcasting. Movement is what you have when you aren’t actively engaged in any other mode. You are able to use the mouse to look around and WASD keys for movement. It’s very likely the mode you’ll use the most. Fortunately, it is also the easiest to use. Space bar is the jump command.

Meanwhile, stealth mode allows access to your inventory. To get to this mode, you need to use right click. You lose mouse look, but gain the ability to pick up and move objects. This is critical for when items are involved. It can also be used to steal items from other NPCs should you want to develop skills as a thief. If you are in this mode and wish to pick up items quickly, you can hold down the shift key and click to add items into your inventory quickly. Just make sure you have either an empty slot or an item you can stack that item on to.

Item management is also pretty key. You do have the ability to store and sell items, but know that there are lots of items you can have as well. One great way to manage items is to stack them. For instance, if you have one mushroom in your inventory, you can stack another mushroom on that slot and a number will appear indicating how many of that kind of item you are carrying on that slot. How many you can carry varies from item to item.

Along the way, you may want to use items. One kind of item is food. This restores some health. The thing is, you can’t eat some food raw. You actually have to cook it. To cook food, either find a camp fire and light it or use an already lit camp fire. Place the item you want cooked near or on the fire. You should hear some crackling sound. The item will generally change colour once done. After that, you should be able to eat that item. Mouse over and use enter to eat said item (can be on the ground or in your inventory).

Mixing items is also something you can do in this game. What you can mix depends on what you have available in your surroundings. One example is to mix flour and fresh water. This creates dough and an empty potion bottle. From there, you can take that dough and cook it to make bread. Another capability you have in this game is general alchemy. Throughout the game, you might encounter various plants. If you have a mortar and pestle, you can grind up the plants into a powder. From there, that colour of powder can to combined with an empty potion bottle to create a bottle of that powder. Once done, use a still (one is located in the human castle) to create a potion. Your item knowledge will determine if you can make certain potions or not at that point.

One final note about items is the ability to give items to characters. To do so, you can double click on that item to give you that ring icon. After that, click on an NPC to give it to them. This is generally used to trigger sequences in quests.

Next up is combat mode. To ready a weapon, you just locate a weapon, use stealth mode to activate the items, mouse over the weapon and press enter. This should allow you to have a weapon equipped. From there, use tab to get into combat mode. You’ll have mouse look, but clicking is used to swing a weapon. You can click and hold the left mouse button to power up for a stronger swing. Generally, this causes greater damage. You can also just click for a quick swing as well. Just don’t expect that to deal as much damage.

Finally, there is magic mode. Throughout the game, there are runes you can pick up. If you find a rune, you can either add it to your inventory, or just straight up press “F” to transfer it over to your spellcasting menu. Runes are basically building blocks for spells. You generally need two or more runes to cast spells. Spells are available right away assuming you have the spellcasting skill high enough. After that, you can consult your book to find the spell recipes.

Then, to cast a spell, you need to hold down CTRL. This will activate a read icon. From there, you have to draw the runes by clicking and dragging. If you are successful, you’ll hear a voice confirmation that you drew the correct rune. Then, draw the next one and repeat the process until the spell is complete. This, in turn, casts the spell. Note that the drawing process can be quite finicky, so it may require multiple attempts to get the spell right.

While this is a very inefficient way of casting spells, there is the quick spellcasting system. You can “equip” up to three spells at once with this. To put something in your quick spellcast menu, you need to hold down both CTRL and shift. After that, draw your spells as per normal. Once complete, release both the CTRL and Shift and it will pop up in your quickcase menu on the lower left hand part of your screen. You can use the numbers 1, 2, and 3 to quickly cast that spell once you have it set. Be warned that you can only cast the spell once. After that, it will disappear from the quickcast menu, forcing you to re-draw the spell all over again.

So, with that ridiculously long description of the basics out of the way, you can practice and get used to these controls (good luck with that) and get moving on your quest.

While this game labels itself as an RPG game, after you built your character, the RPG elements generally fall away. The only question is if the skills you have will be sufficient for various tasks (like swinging a slightly more powerful weapon). While you can defeat enemies, pick locks, and cast spells, none of that actually contributes to the building of your character in the traditional levelling sense. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be an experience point system of any kind in this game. In order to level up, you need to complete a large quest in the game. Upon completion, you’ll automatically level up where you can spend the limited attribute points and the slightly more plentiful skill points. So, you well and truly are stuck with what you have for a while after the character creation.

Initially, you are meant to attack and defeat hostiles. However, as the game progresses, the game becomes more about solving problems, navigating to the correct locations, and interacting with various NPCs (Non-Playable Characters). So, this really becomes more like a puzzle game akin to Shadowgate 64 – Trial of the Four Towers. While the game does give you hints as to what to grab and what object o manipulate through the blue glow, after a bit, you are generally on your own.

You’ll have keys (with respective locks) items to fix (such as rope to fix an elevator) and people to talk to in order to gain access to new areas. The game does bill itself as an open-ended world where you are free to do what you want, judging by how far I got, this is generally to mean that there are a number of extra locations you may or may not find. These locations are generally optional for the most part. There are area’s that, once unlocked, will offer you faster access to key locations as well. Let’s just say that Super Mario 64 was far more exploration friendly than this game. Gameplay did end up being open-ended, but you’d have to use the term rather loosely here.

Aiding you in your quest are various menu’s. In all, there are four of these. Each one has its own F key that you can quickly access it. Otherwise, in stealth mode, you can access this via the little red book.

The first menu shows what your character looks like. This also showcases what you have equipped and all of your attribute and skills. Use this to spend points once you level up.

The second menu is your spellcasting menu. Every rune you have “remembered” will be located. It will also showcase what spells you know after. What spells you have access to can be activated. When you activate a spell, the rune recipe will briefly appear in the upper right hand corner. From there, that should make spellcasting somewhat easier.

The third menu is your maps. You have different tabs indicating the different levels you have accessed. Each level will showcase all the places you were able to explore. Anything unexplored is left in a sort of “fog of war” which causes that part of the map to remain undrawn. Generally speaking, despite the inability to make notes on this, it is still very useful. If you get stuck, it’s possible to look around and find locations that remain unexplored. This generally indicates either a location locked off or a location you have yet to explore. So, it is probably worth checking out if you don’t really know what to do next. Chances are, you’re going to get lost a lot in this game.

The fourth and final menu is your quest notes. Randomly, as you get to new locations, the game will add a note into this diary. Sometimes, these are game hints about controls. Other times, they note the events that are taking place. The helpfulness of this cane be quite touch and go, though.

In the environment itself, you can encounter a number of things. Over top of the aforementioned items are switches and general items you can’t keep. Switches are quite plentiful in this game. Just double click on them in stealth mode to activate. In addition to this are items you can’t keep. An example might be a pillow. While these items may just seem like scenery, they can also wind up being critical to gameplay. An example is a key needed to advance the plot found under a pillow (pillow needs to be moved to reveal it).

In addition to that, you’ll encounter stairs. Stairs allow you to travel between one level to another. When you reach a transition area, you’ll see a slashing stair icon on the top right hand corner of the screen. Go into stealth mode and click on the icon to take those stairs.

You might encounter some enemies that will just attack you on sight. An example are large spiders. Note that spiders can poison you. In order to cure the poison, you’ll need either time for it to wear off or a cure poison potion. Obviously, the latter is the better of the two.

When you defeat enemies, you can strip many of them of their belongings. Sometimes, it’s just a little bit of food that needs cooking. Other times, you can obtain items, equipment, gold, and even keys.

Gold is the in-game currency and you can buy thing if you find the correct locations. Shops operate like chests, only you have to spend gold to take those items. Intuition can help lower prices, so there is room for negotiation in this game.

For me, this game was a rather painful one to play. Right out of the gate, there is a huge learning curve. As you could tell from the first impression video, fumbling through four different modes made this game extremely clunky. When you are new, even once you figure out which mode does which, it is an absolute nightmare trying to switch between modes. This just to perform simple tasks. While you can get used to this after a while, it takes a lot of getting used to. I personally never fully got used to this.

The second big problem with this game is the stability issues. First of all, the Steam DRM did this game no favours on this front. In order to boot this game, I had to start it, then stop the game in the Steam window, then boot it again. For whatever reason, it hands on the initial first boot with an empty command prompt window. After that, it would sometimes crash so hard, it nearly completely locks up my computer. I can CTRL+ALT+DEL out of this to regain reasonable control of the cursor, but I have to basically restart the computer (or initiate a restart and cancel it immediately to fully close the game).

This started happening after I gained access to the human castle. Entering the kings room in Arx can cause the whole game to crash. After that, the game started regularly crashing on exit, causing system freezing in the process. It got pretty brutal after a while.

Another big problem is the fact that I constantly found myself getting lost. Even in the early stages of the game, I found myself regularly asking, “well, now what?” As you can tell by my extensive gameplaying, it’s not from a lack of gaming experience. This game was just plain bad for being confusing and difficult right out of the gate. If the initial twisting corridors don’t do it, the Goblin Fortress probably will do it. It was just plain frustrating after a while.

Then there’s the badly utilized physics. Objects regularly got stuck on walls or even in mid air. Sometimes, NPCs randomly completely block your path as well. What’s worse is that this game boasts a jumping system that may be one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s like a simple calculation is made, then you almost instantly go from one spot to another. You can actually see the anchor points you pass through along the way. Sometimes, jumping is randomly disabled as well if you happen to be on slopes as well. Hit boxes while picking up objects can also be touch and go as well.

Finally, the game sometimes randomly skips frames. Sometimes, it’s no big deal as cooked food can cause this. Other times, it can happen when you kill an enemy and you happen to be moving. One moment, you are swinging a sword while stepping backwards, the next, your all the way down a corridor with you back against a wall.

In addition to this, spellcasting in this game can be an absolute nightmare. You can generally get a sense of where the main box is to cast something, but beyond that, it’s frustration all the way. Even something as simple as drawing a straight line can be annoying. Sometimes, you can draw the line too long. Other times, your line isn’t quite straight enough. On paper, it’s a cool concept of drawing simple lines to cast spells. In practice, as far as this game is concerned, it was just badly implemented. Even some simple indicators while drawing would have been nice.

As for casting spells in the heat of the moment? Well, you can all but forget about it unless you master quickcasting. Even then, you have to plan all three spells ahead of time and hope you get lucky that what you select is what you needed. This makes physical combat a more reasonable choice because spellcasting is so clunky. Even then, physical combat is far from perfect as well.

For the most part, this game seems to be one of those games that have a lot of interesting ideas on paper, but implementation was just plain bad. Imagine a cool system of spellcasting where you draw your spells. The game doesn’t implement it well, but try to imagine it being well implemented. This game has cooking in it. Imagine it being a really cool concept that adds huge depth to the game. This game has RPG elements. Now imagine those RPG elements actually being well implemented in this game. The game has a number of interesting ideas on paper, but I struggle to think of any critical interesting idea being well implemented.

Some might use the excuse that this is an older game and, therefore, you can’t expect things to be amazing by any means. The problem is, that excuse might have flown in the 80’s because choice was extremely limited, but this is 2002 we’re talking about. By 2002, there is a whole host of brilliantly made and polished games including RPG games. Just look at SNES, N64, and even some DOS games. For me, this excuse simply doesn’t fly for having so many badly implemented concepts.

Generally speaking, it’s hard to come up with any positives in this game. Even when there are positives, those positives aren’t really enough to justify the pitfalls that later arise. This game winds up being a collection of interesting ideas, but it’s as if the developers had no real skill in implementing them seamlessly into the game. Instead, you get a collection of badly executed idea’s that makes this game a painful one to play.

The game has a very steep learning curve, a tough difficulty curve, and the whole game gradually becomes less and less stable as time goes on. the Steam DRM manages to make this even worse on top of it with requiring two attempts just to boot every single time. The four modes is downright clunky, the spellcasting is badly implemented, and there are limited features in the mapping to prevent you from getting lost. to make matters worse are the bad physics and glitching along the way. Break out a guide if you attempt to play this: you’re going to need it. Definitely not a game I would recommend.

Graphically speaking, this game is pretty hit and miss. While I can appreciate that being underground means you aren’t exactly in for a psychedelic experience, but the environments feel like a game generation too old. It’s close to being on level with Turok 3 – Shadow of Oblivion, but even that game had different distinctive environments worth noting. The objects in the game are rather plain. Probably the only thing even remotely saving this game is the animation sequences where the models actually move reasonably well for a game of its time. Barely passable if you ask me.

Audio is fairly bland in this game. The atmospheric effects throughout the game are rather interesting in giving the game some life. Beyond that, the music is hardly notable despite the good choice of sticking with the atmospheric genre. Voice acting is OK, but nothing huge. Other sounds are fairly simple. Also barely passable in my books.

Overall, this game is a great example of requiring players to give it as many excuses as possible to find greatness. It has some interesting ideas that sounds good on paper, but when it comes to actual implementation, almost nothing is well executed. The different modes makes even basic tasks confusing. The learning curve and difficulty curve are quite steep. The game is both glitchy and unstable after a while of playing. The Steam DRM requires two attempts to boot this one. Spellcasting is badly implemented. At the end of the day, this is just not a game I would recommend outside of players who are obsessed with the Ultima – Underworld series and haven’t heard of this one. Both graphics and audio are barely passable. So, a game to pass on for the most part.

Overall

Furthest point in game: Brought the idol back to the troll king. Game crashed again when I made it to the human king’s castle entrance and finally had enough.

General gameplay: 10/25
Replay value: 4/10
Graphics: 5/10
Audio: 3/5

Overall rating: 44%

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.