Arcania: Gothic 4 Review

Gothic 4 PC Review

A lot of these problems affect other hardcore RPGs. Indeed, fans of the Gothic series won't be shocked to hear of the atrocious voice acting or the relatively mindless fetch quests. They're staples for both the genre in general and this series specifically.

However, what Gothic fans will be aghast at is how dumbed down this fourth iteration feels in comparison to the last games. Forget any genuine crafting, herbalism or alchemy, mining and so on and so on. All of these things are still there, but in name only.

You can still mix potions using the herbs and plants you collect, but why bother? You'll be collecting potions everywhere anyway, so what's the point in wasting your time brewing them up yourself? Likewise item crafting. I can get a blueprint to make a cool sword, but again, there's no point if I can just find quality weapons in seemingly every single cave. After 10 hours of play, my character had accumulated upwards of 67 bandages, which provide 100 points of healing. Why would I need to brew up any healing remedies when I basically collect all the healing I need in and around the game world?

The same goes for stealthy, rogue characters too. You could creep in and quietly pilfer what you want, or you could just stroll into a shop and take it - because not one person in the whole world seems to mind you rifling through their personal belongings!


The easy retort to the bandages issue is that bandages can only be used out of combat. It’s a fair point, but defeated by the fact that you’re able to find or buy healing potions easily enough. And when the game is as easy as this, there's even less need to busy yourself preparing for epic combat, which can be won in 100 per cent of cases by simply spamming the attack button and occasionally dodging a heavy blow from an enemy. This works for every foe you'll ever encounter, bar none. Bigger mobs might require more spamming, but that's about as sophisticated as combat gets.

Combat and the lack of any traditional role-playing elements (in any meaningful form, anyway) just show how much this is essentially just a basic hack-and-slash game with the Gothic name slapped on. There's a poster on the official forums who claims to have got almost to the top level without once spending his skill points to increase his attributes. What serious role-playing game allows you to effectively complete the thing without once levelling up properly?

All of this isn't helped by the usual collection of bugs and glitches that routinely plague Gothic games. Usually, the depth is there to help you overlook problems, but when that's all been stripped out, all your left with is an unpolished, hollow turd that might not load if your sound quality is set too high in Windows.

Yet after all this, there's still something that makes you continue playing; a certain indefinable something that saves Gothic 4 from the knacker's yard, for a little while at least. It's as mentioned before, that curiosity that drives you on to see what's next, even when they know they're just going through the motions collecting berries. It’s like an MMO, except in Gothic 4 it's purely offline. And, eventually, curiosity gives way to boredom and you sack the whole thing off.


There's not much good to be said for Gothic 4 then, as you might have gathered. Visually lush, it's lost everything that made the Gothic series what it was. It's insultingly easy and is utterly linear and repetitive – the exact opposite of Gothic 3, where everyone was killed by the first enemy they saw.

There's a middle ground to be found between the insane difficulty of the third game and the cake walk that's this fourth one, but it isn’t found. Or maybe it has been, but in Risen, a far superior Gothic-style RPG (on the PC, anyway).

It's difficult to see just what JoWood were looking to achieve with Gothic 4 really. It's far, far too simplistic for series fans to enjoy, as all they'll be doing is lamenting what they used to be able to do the whole time. On the other hand, it's not got the right production values to attract the hack-and-slash crowd, so fans of that genre will retreat to the likes of Bayonetta.

A sad day for the Gothic series then. In attempting to appeal to the mass market, JoWood has alienated its core fan base while not doing anywhere near enough to get the casual crowd on board. It's difficult to see who'll end up playing this, other than the developers, JoWood executives and us poor games reviewers.

Score Guide