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Gothica 2
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Game Name:
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Gothica 2 |
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Console:
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Nintendo 64 |
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Reviewed:
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Unknown |
I can’t say I ever played the original Gothic, but I’d heard good things about the sequel so I decided to give it a shot. Gothic 2 is an action-RPG hybrid played from a third person viewpoint. You can switch to first person view to look around but the game will switch back if you get into a fight. The game environment is reminiscent of Morrowind where you can run around the landscape as you wish. The terrain is more constricted than Morrowind though, there are some off the track parts you can follow but most of the time you can’t get from A to B by following a straight line.
Being a third person action-RPG you might expect this to play a bit like Diablo. Quite the opposite, if anything, Diablo was more true to the classic RPG format than Gothic 2. That’s because the melee combat in Gothic 2 is fairly arcade like requiring reflexes and timing. Assuming you don’t have the game set to use the original Gothic controls, you have two buttons – attack and block. Block is only useful when fighting a humanoid enemy with a weapon. You can’t block the attacks of a wolf for example. Attack is used to slash at your opponent. But, depending on your weapon skill, you can string together attacks into a combo by clicking the attack button again at the right time. This isn’t a Street Fighter type combo; it’s more in the way of a number of fast slashes or a slash followed by a thrust. With the right timing you can keep some enemies from ever hurting you just by timing your hits to keep them from getting an attack in. The problem is, most single enemies aren’t too hard to beat provided your timing is good. But many enemies are found in groups and will attack in groups unless you approach carefully so as to attract only one of them. I often found myself killed by two enemies when a single enemy of the same sort would be trivial to fight. Another problem is that some enemies decide to duck back and forth as well as running circles around you before attacking. When there’s only one it’s not too hard but when there are two or more you are stuck trying to target any of them. There’s also the matter of damage dealt. As far as I can see, there are two stats that affect damage – strength and weapon skill. I think strength affects base damage while weapon skill affects the chance to get a critical hit which does a lot of damage. As a result, the damage each hit does may vary wildly. I’ve had some enemies take a dozen hits to go down, only to have the next one of the same type go down with a single hit. Fighting other humanoids can be really tough. Generally you want to wait for them to attack, block and then counterattack. The enemies can use combo hits as well though. They also can hit you even when you are hitting them which can make you take damage despite your best efforts. You only get experience for a kill if you struck the fatal blow. As such, you need to think twice before leading an enemy towards other people since they might kill it before you can. Other humans tend to dodge and weave around during a fight so you need to be careful if attacking an enemy they are also fighting since you might hit them. There is a fairly nasty learning curve when fighting monsters – you need to work out which ones you can kill easily and which ones will wipe the floor with you at low levels. The first time I encountered a skeleton I figured it would go down easy as skeletons are typically very weak undead in most RPGs. Instead it killed me with just two hits. Most enemies will warn you before attacking, many of the beasts will growl at you to warn you off and only attack if you get close enough. Others will just come straight at you.
The game itself follows a fairly traditional plot. An army of monsters are threatening the area and you have to alert the people in charge as well as help fight them off. At the end of the original Gothic your character was quite powerful; however you’ve spent the last few days buried under rubble so all of your equipment, skills and strength have been lost. On top of that, you are a former convict, however only some other convicts who have escaped from the penal colony (where the first game took place) will recognise you.
To regain your lost powers you need to do some old fashioned levelling up. This is done using the traditional method of gaining experience points. You can get these from killing monsters and completing quests. The experience points are kind of odd though - in most RPGs the weaker enemies are worth practically nothing while the really strong enemies offer lots of experience. You progress through the game by picking on the weak ones and moving onto the strong ones when you are ready. Usually you will only encounter weak ones at the start of the game. In Gothic 2, the numbers aren’t quite that skewed. A really weak enemy might offer 60 experience points while a fairly strong one might offer 200 experience points. Since the really strong enemies are much harder to kill it makes you want to clear out all the weaker enemies before tackling them. Even when you get up in levels though, the weaker enemies offer enough experience for them to be worth their while.
For each level you gain, your maximum hit points increase and you get 10 learning points. These can only be spent by finding a trainer for a particular skill. Some skills can be improved by a certain amount while others are a one off affair. For example, you can spend points to improve your strength by a certain amount or you can spend points learning how to skin animals or pick locks. The latter two are a one off affair; once you’ve spent them there is no further improvement to be had. Some of the things you can learn though seem a bit off in terms of cost. It takes 5 learning points to learn any kind of “animal salvage” skills; this includes things like skinning, removing claws, horns etc. It seems odd to spend these points only to have the trainer give you a one sentence explanation of how to go about it. Likewise you can learn alchemy in the game for the purpose of brewing potions. When you learn a formula, your instructor just rattles off the ingredients and might give you a tip on how to brew the potion. Once you know the formula though, you just need to find an alchemist’s workbench (usually found right need to the alchemist trainer) and you can brew the potion if you have the ingredients. Again, this costs 5 LP and while the skills are useful, it seems to me a more involved teaching session would be appropriate. It seems balanced in terms of gameplay but I’d prefer something more than my trainer telling me to remove wings from dead animals by just pulling them off.
The weapon skills are very strange as well for learning. You have four skills – single handed weapons, two handed weapons, bows and crossbows. The first two and last two are kind of bound together. One handed weapons are fast while two handed weapons have more range and damage. But when learning these skills from a trainer, you can’t let them get too far apart. The weapons have four levels of proficiency which is determined by your weapon skill level. You start at 10% skill in each weapon type. Once you hit 30% in a skill, you’ve improved a rank. However, if your one handed skill is rated above your two handed skill for example, the next time you try to train your single handed skill it will cost twice as much – when you train you will be training both single handed and two handed at the same time for the same amount. The same applies to bows and crossbows. I’m guessing this is a way of slowing advancement but it seems kind of annoying to me as you are spending points on things you don’t plan to use.
Weapons have either requirement in either dexterity or strength to use. Generally the melee weapons have a strength requirement while the ranged weapons have a dexterity requirement.
Lockpicking is an odd skill to use. Basically each locked chest you find has a certain “combination” needed to crack it. The combination is a series of left/right directions. If you choose the wrong direction you have to start again and there is a chance (based on your dexterity) that your lockpick will break. However, since the combination is a constant for the entire game, you can just save beforehand, work out the combination then reload and do it without losing a lockpick.
You can choose a number of different paths in the game depending on your play style. The righteous might sign up with the city militia and then become a paladin. Or you can become a mercenary then a dragon hunter. Alternately you could become a magic user instead. Certain quests are only available for members of certain factions.
Despite a few annoyances and oddities, Gothic 2 is a pretty interesting game to play. The combat might not be as hard for people with better reflexes than me. The graphics are fairly good and the sound is pretty decent as well.
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