Arcania: Fall of Setarrif Review

The most interesting part of this expansion to Arcania: Gothic 4 is the total removal of the Gothic name. We regularly get press releases telling us things we might like about games, but the one accompanying Arcania: Fall of Setarrif concentrated entirely on this fact and forgot to mention anything good about it. Seems Spellbound were rather upset with the fan reaction to Arcania so want to distance themselves from the brand with the expansion. Without the Gothic name there’s nothing to complain about, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

There’s a brief recap of the main game at the start of Fall of Setarrif (I’m going to spell it wrong eventually, I know it), and I hope you know what’s going on because I certainly didn’t. To be fair, I actually didn’t care. The writing and acting are so utterly awful I couldn’t concentrate on anything that was said. Even in the game’s native German I can’t imagine the storytelling to be any better, as the game doesn’t really give time for any growth, twists, or anything of interest to happen on screen.

Skeletons! With swords! WHAT CRAZINESS WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT?!

No matter where you look in Fall of Setarrif you find something designed as if by someone who’s only heard about RPGs through a friend of a friend describing them. It really takes a complete amount of unfamiliarity with the genre to make an RPG this out of touch. Every single thing about it is wrong or just plain badly thought-out. Specifics? Fine.



Let’s start with the combat. At first glance it seems similar to The Witcher 2, which was itself inspired by Batman: Arkham Asylum, two very fine combat systems. You attack with the left mouse button, block and roll with the right, and change weapons and spells using the number keys. It’s dynamic and would work quite well if someone with actual competence had programmed it. Instead, combat in Arcania consists of left-clicking an enemy as quickly as you can until they’re dead, with maybe a lightning bolt to stun them or a roll now and again. Every enemy you face apart from the final Archdemon can be beaten in this way, easily, boringly, and they probably never even had a chance to fight back.

It’s embarrassing just how easy Arcania: Fall of Setarrif is. People didn’t need to even upgrade their character in the main game to beat it, and things haven’t improved in this expansion. I didn’t change my weapons once for example, despite picking up and selling loads. The whole prospect of looting, getting cash to buy bigger and better weapons, is as totally broken as the rest of the game. Every enemy in the game carries gold (even the dead ones), it’s in chests, vases, and given for accomplishing quests. And what did I spend it on? Healing potions. That’s it. None of the traders I met in the game (all helpfully named “Trader”, making it easy to remember them at parties) had anything better than what I started the game with. And of course that small mountain of potions I was carrying made the game even easier.

I mentioned the writing being awful, but it begs re-iterating. Do you play RPGs for story, dialogue, characters? You don’t want to play this. The dialogue’s atrocious at the best of times, but it goes full-out toe-curling once it tries to be funny. Which it does far too often. Then you’ve got characters saying things like “that is good” and “we have to ban the demon” (don’t you mean “banish”?) in hideously annoying voices and it really feels like the developers shouldn’t have agreed to let their younger cousins write and star in it.

These girls yell “loot” when they see you. Typical women, am I right fellas?

Quests aren’t much better, revolving as they do around getting to the end as soon as possible. One major quest involved collecting special weapons to slay the Archdemon, which turned out to be less effective than my standard flaming sword. Also, the Ancient Crossbow was made useless by the fact that there’s no crossbow ammo in the entire game! There’s also only really one side-mission in the whole thing too, and that’s right at the start back when the game appeared slightly open (it gets swiftly linear). It involved killing some demon wolves, and is only really notable for my favourite moment in the game – where a sheep I saved followed me about for ages.

One of the few good things about Arcania was the slightly impressive environments and the generally pleasing graphical effects. Somehow Spellbound have managed to even cock this bit up too. Yes, the rain-falling-down-a-stone-path effect is nice and the shadows are rather pretty when they’re not “ticking” around the landscape, but that’s just the first hour. Soon the expansion makes way to dark caves, a boringly ruined city (seriously, I’ve never seen wanton destruction of property and lives so dull), and copy-paste tombs. Stick the engine in green fields and you have a reason to nod happily, but put it near any sort of rock (like 80% of Fall of Setarrif) and it looks 10 years old. Seriously, I’m looking at Gothic 2 and it’s not far off.

So what else could possibly be wrong? How about bugs? Didn’t encounter that many game-breaking ones, but subtitles frequently didn’t match the words being said and on my third level-up I was granted 43 skill points (you usually only get three). Not that I needed them. The real final kicker though is that my entire play-time was only three hours long. I explored what I could (which isn’t much), but Fall of Setarrif is so damn linear and easy I can’t imagine squeezing any more time out of it. Oh, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. It’s terrible.

Behold, the best part of the game

So, don’t buy Arcania: Fall of Setarrif. It’s short, it’s easy, it’s ugly, it’s badly written, it’s hard to spell, it’s not worth your time or money. Even if you did like Arcania I advise you to stay away from Setarrif at all costs. It takes the few remaining good things about Arcania: Gothic 4 and dumps them down the toilet, plus has the cheek to dress itself up as a Standalone Expansion Pack rather than a cheap bit of DLC.

One final thought for you: despite all the many, many problems the game has, Spellbound still programmed in the ability to stir soup. Soup your character can’t actually use. They actually took development time out from dialogue, story, characters, quests, content, graphics, combat, and all the other essential RPG elements they screwed up to give your annoying shepherd an utterly pointless animation. That just blows my mind.