Gothic 3 [PC]

You're going to see an awful lot of Oblivion talk in this review, so let's get it out of the way up front: Gothic 3 bears a strong resemblance to Bethesda's smash hit first-person RPG, in content, presentation, combat, and overall style. It bears considerably less resemblance to it in the area of polish, but we'll get on to that in a few paragraphs.

Early in the game your nameless character has his personality stolen by a ..no, not really. But it might as well be the case, so bland is his dialogue. Thankfully the plot is anything but bland, picking up after Gothics 1 and 2 as our hero returns to the mainland and finds it under the control of an occupying Orc army. Many settlements are already cooperating openly with the invaders, and there's an ill-equipped band of rebels resisting them. Whether you side with the Orcs, the rebels, or a little of both is up to you.

This open-ended approach sounds neat, and so it turns out to be. Towns you liberate, quests you complete and sides you take shape Gothic's world as well as your character's development. It's certainly one of the best-implemented systems of this type we've seen, and if the game gets its teeth in you you'll probably want to play it through several times to see it all. Individually, the quests tend towards the generic, but they're put together with style.

Gothic's also a gorgeous game, bringing this living world to your monitor with real class. Much of the landscape is wilderness, sure, but for wilderness it's packed with involving details. Picking out specific high points isn't easy, as the quality of Gothic's models and textures is consistently strong, but the hulking Orc models and the dense, detailed trees stand out.

Sad, then, that it's hamstrung by its poor performance. Having a wide-open world with no loading screens doesn't exactly count for much when the game freezes for seconds at a time as it loads in whatever beastie you're about to encounter. It's not shy about doing this during combat either. The cheesy lens-flare is out of place and unnecessary, and rather spoils the appeal of the game's pretty dawn scenes.

Unlike Oblivion and most other RPGs, your character's development isn't constrained at all. You can mix and match skills to your hearts desire, and doing so doesn't gimp your character like it can in some lesser games. Even the alchemy and other trade skills come in for sensitive treatment, and are worth pursuing both for the fun of the development and the decent items and potions they can yield. Shame about the rest of the loot: there isn't much, and a good proportion of it is worthless.

So far, so good, right? Sadly, Gothic is one of those games that's a lot more fun to describe than it is to actually use. For a start, there's no autosave. If you're used to popular RPGs like Oblivion (or even MMOs like World of Warcraft, to which Gothic bears a superficial resemblance) that save your progress automatically whenever you achieve anything worthwhile, Gothic 3's outdated insistence on manual saves will bite you on the ass at some point, guaranteed.

Selling stuff ought to be a simple task, but Gothic's oppressive interface screws this up too. It's not enough to drag all your kit down to the trade window. No, you have to click the cryptically named "Gold Balance" button, otherwise you'll end up selling it for nothing. No confirmation, no "Are you sure you want to just give this greasy used-sword dealer all this stuff?" dialogue box. If Gothic 3 wasn't actually designed with genuine hostility towards its players, it sure feels like it, and we haven't even started on the woeful, worthless quest log yet.

And then there's the bugs. Plus there's the stuff that could be bugs but could just be crap design, because the game has been patched (and improved significantly) since its European debut in mid-October. The AI, both friendly and enemy, is riddled with issues. The fighting system rolls over and gives up once you figure out you can just mash the left mouse button through most fights. There's no crosshair or aiming marker on the screen, so picking up objects is a matter of sweeping the mouse vaguely around until you happen to hit the right spot. NPCs and monsters get stuck on scenery, making escort missions a babysitting chore.

A good game still lurks somewhere under all this garbage. Gothic's approach to the open-ended RPG is a good deal more compelling than Oblivion's, and it surpasses it in other areas too. But if there was ever a game in need of a few more months of development, Gothic 3 is it. Is it worth slogging past all its foibles to get to the good stuff? At the very least, we'd advise you to hold out for another patch, because if Piranha Byte can lick the game better shape it'll be one no RPG fan should miss. But it's been out in Europe for some weeks, and there's no sign of that yet.