Arcania: The Complete Tale (PS4) - Reviews

(3.4)

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15.5.2015

I had Arcania 4 for the Xbox360 some time ago but didn’t get the chance to spend a lot of time on it before I upgraded to the PS4. I was waiting for more user-reviews to see how good the PS4 version was but it seemed to take ages for any useful reviews to appear so I decided to buy it anyway as I hadn’t completed the game on the 360. I had just finished Bloodbourne on PS4 and needed another adventure to keep me busy.Arcania is a semi-open world adventure where you can explore various environments until your heart is content or you can simply take the shortest route from quest to quest if you prefer. In keeping with most RPG’s there are main quests that are essential for the progression of the story and many side quests which help you to boost stats and gather new items.Most of the quests follow the ‘fetch an item for me and I’ll give you something in return’ model which can get a little dull but once you gloss over that and see the quests as simply a reason for exploring, the process becomes less troublesome. I’ve played some AAA games recently (Dying Light being just one example) which also suffered from the ‘fetch this and fetch that’ model so I can’t criticise Arcania for that since its game design is a few years old now.You can choose from a few different types of character which are all standard affair for RPG’s (warrior, mage etc). Each has there own strengths and weaknesses. Each can be levelled up with armour, weapons and magic. The environments you travel through are varied and well thought out. Castles, massive underground caves, forests, swamps and mountainous regions all take there place in the line-up. I found the environments to be detailed and worthy of exploration as you will often find crates full of kit hiding off the beaten path. You’ll also find a greater number of enemies wandering about off the trodden paths which provides more opportunities for those all important experience points for levelling up.Having just played Bloodbourne, I found this game to be easy. I ramped the difficulty up a bit to make it more of a challenge and you can adjust the difficulty at any stage during the game without restarting which is a nice feature when you want to get the degree of challenge just right for your own preferences.Combat is fairly simple with just two buttons controlling melee and ranged combat. A third button allows you to roll/evade whilst a fourth allows you, thankfully, to jump properly (not like in Dark Souls). You can hold down the melee button to power up an attack and you can block with your shield or choose two handed weapons if you prefer.Graphically, this game is a mixed bag. Some of the environments are stunning, some are rendered no better than the Xbox360 version. Water for example looks very realistic in some in-land lakes but the sea rolling in at the many coastal areas looks very last-gen. Overall the graphics are probably on a par with Dark Souls 2. The frame rate on Arcania goes from very good to decidedly average and occasionally the graphics can judder which is disappointing but not to a game breaking extent. The developer’s claims of 60fps seem to me a bit ambitious.There are a good variety of enemies including skeletons, goblins, orcs, killer dragon flies, lizards, dinosaur type creatures, stone gollums and some unfriendly locals to name but a few. I did find that I was about 10 hours into the game before the enemies started to prove challenging even on Hard however things began to heat up after that with bigger and often multiple enemies attacking you at once.Compared to bigger budget games such as Bloodbourne and Dragon Age, Arcania does struggle to compete in terms of overall polish and finish, but that doesn’t make it a bad game. This is a low budget game and I often take a liking for lower budget games for what they offer. They don’t pretend to be AAA productions and sometimes they are quite refreshing for it. Hey, Minecraft and many other popular digital games on PS+ prove that cutting-edge graphics are not required for a game to be enjoyable and successful.In summary, I enjoyed this game more than I though I would. It’s a port from the PC version of a last gen game which makes it an improvement over the Xbox360 version but in truth it feels it’s age. That said, the asking price is low and the game provides RPG fans with a more light-hearted, relaxed and stress-free adventure for those times when your nerves are shot from playing Dark Souls 2 and Bloodbourne. It won’t compete with the Witcher 3, but it is honest and fun and I enjoyed playing it in spite of its shortcomings. I’m about 25 hours into the game now and I’m glad I bought it. It gets 4 stars from me when balancing cost, style and enjoyment.