August 2000

Westka Entertainment
Ubi Soft

Polish Title: Arcatera: Mroczne Bractwo
German Title: Arcatera: Die Dunkle Bruderschaft

Third Person

"There is so much about Arcatera to admire. First of all, it looks great! It takes place in a faux medieval world with convincing buildings, paths, even mud. The perpetual sunset sky is gorgeous indeed...The story is also intriguing. In the fair capital city of Senora, a black conspiracy is underfoot, and it's undermining the very fabric of society.

"You can choose as your primary character to be an Adventurer, a Thief, a Monk, or a Magician...The game has an unusual structure, as well. Billed as an 'adventure/RPG,' it really comes off as sort of a story-driven RPG mystery.

"Unfortunately, none of this translates into effective gameplay...The third-person perspective and capricious camera angles make navigation quite confusing. Add to this a nearly useless 'map' feature, and Lost becomes your default mode in Arcatera.

"The music is lovely...unfortunately there's only about sixteen bars of it, and it quickly becomes extremely monotonous. Worse, the combat system in the game is virtually useless. It's confusing and difficult to control in any aspect, from your character's position to spell casting to weapon attacks...The interface is clunky in the extreme. The amount of work required to simply move an object from one place to another is just ridiculous.

"After a few hours of gameplay, I realized I'd rather be vacuuming my balcony than playing the game. What Ubi Soft has is an intriguing, ambitious game that's virtually unplayable. It's that rare game that I couldn't complete before writing a review.

"Few times have I begun a game with more goodwill. Few times have I been this disappointed."

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D

• Patches (English, French, German, Italian & Spanish versions)
• Desktop Wallpaper
• Movies
• Cheats

PC REQUIREMENTS:

• Windows® 95/98
• Pentium® II 233 MHz (350 MHz recommended)
• 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended)
• 8x CD-ROM drive (12x recommended)
• DirectX® 7.0
• Sound card
• 600 MB hard-disk space