An Adventure Title Featuring a Living World-Gothic3

Gothic 3 picks up where Gothic 2 left off, and continues the saga of the nameless hero who broke out of a magical prison and eventually slew an undead dragon. Fresh out of the frying pan (Khorinis, the island setting of the last two games), you disembark on the mainland in time to grapple with an inferno: Orcs have overrun the continent, enslaving most of the human population...and only the capital's holding out. As a free-roaming mercenary, you can join with the orcs, side with the humans, or pass the buck entirely to follow a mysterious third path.

Most of the questing betweentimes boils down to the usual RPG chores. Kill some stuff to help a village; collect a bunch of stuff for a mage; defeat something to get five animal hides for a guy who tells you how to enter a building where another guy asks you to do more or less the same thing. Still, you have to admire the fidelity here. Gothic 3 wears "old school" like a Boy Scout badge, and that's terrific news if you're into this sort of thing.

Other kinds of fidelity are less admirable, and Gothic fans who put up with the last two games' foibles probably won't be shocked to hear that Gothic 3's troubles come in two familiar flavors: loopy design choices and out-and-out bugs. The European version's been available for months, but even the patched U.S. version (up to v1.09 already -- yikes) still has the creepy-crawlies. Loading or saving games sometimes elicits "out of memory" crashes. A few quests can't be finished because the game won't acknowledge that you completed them. Overlong quest descriptions in your journal get truncated and -- this isn't so much a bug as a missing feature -- NPCs no longer come a-running when you bust into their homes. Sleep in their beds, pilfer their goods...it's like paradise for newbie thieves or something.

More weirdness: Some NPCs get stuck against crates and jitter in place or fall through objects, and the text names over their heads are some kind of fugly font that looks glued in. You're also denied a crosshair reticule, which means constantly stumbling over items or bodies you're trying to target. Visual effects like lens flare (cameras in medieval times, guys?) render everywhere, including straight through mountains and inside caves. And on high-end systems, the game pitches and heaves for several seconds as on-the-fly scenery loads, like film hitching in a crappy projector. None of these by themselves are showstoppers, but taken together they certainly scuff up the chrome.

It's the goofy combat, though, that's most off-putting. By holding different buttons on the keyboard in conjunction with variably timed mouse clicks, you can punch, jump-attack, parry, cast spells, loose arcing quarrels and arrows, and pull off killing blows. It all sounds wonderful in theory; in practice, the game's creatures and human enemies only seem to know two moves: "lunge" or "back-up-really-really-fast." Which means you're either clicking like mad to keep your backpedaling opponents at bay, or falling over (much too frequently) when they score a hit. It's tough to actually lose a battle if you click fast enough, because you're constantly stunning your opponents. In short, a combat system meant to be tactically plush comes off instead as shallow and monotonous.