While sick as a dog and home from work a couple weeks back I was asked if I wanted to review a copy of Gothic 3. Sure, why not, I'm available to help out. I figured the game was probably some Resident Evil rip-off-survival-horror bunk. After accepting this plum assignment, I actually researched the game to find out it was, gasp, an action/role-player in the vein of Oblivion. I would later learn that my newly-gleaned enthusiasm would be unfounded as Gothic 3 went on to give me one of the most unrewarding and frustrating experiences in my erratic gaming career.

Hey This Looks Pretty Cool…
Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I need to state that I really wanted to play Gothic 3. Graphically, it looks great; textures are very detailed, the environments are expansive, albeit the colors are not as varied a palette as Oblivion, mostly encompassing greens and browns, but they don't look muddy, just very natural and realistic. A lot of the promised features looked promising as well: I did research on game specs, what the developers promised at launch, stuff like that. It seemed like Gothic 3 was touted as Oblivion with more interactivity: freeing towns from the clutches of orc invaders meant humans would repopulate the town and recognize you as their savior. Conversely, helping the orc enslavers would make humans everywhere wary of you and the human faction less likely to accept your help; killing would also lead to consequence as friends of your murder victim would later seek you out. This, my friends, is what Oblivion was lacking, and this was a game I sorely wanted to play.

What the F--?!?
So I load this sucker up, and a portent of things to come was the fact that the game takes roughly (I timed it one of my many subsequent boot-ups) 8 minutes to load from the time I double-clicked the icon to the moment I could move my character. I check the graphics settings: the game read my specs and set everything to medium. I have 2/3 of the recommended specs (memory and processor) and a more-than-minimum-but-less-than-recommended video card, so I figure I should be good to go. The game drops a new character right into the middle of a fight. Orcs are swarming everywhere, kicking the crap out of humans I am supposed to save, but I'm stuck in the seconds-long period espoused in the title to this section trying to grasp my surroundings when an orc, expertly camouflaged by massive frame-rate glitching proceeds to mop the floor with me. I recover long enough to make the orc regret his birth but realize I cannot play this game. It's too jerky by far. Alright, time to hit the video options and restart. This occurs numerous times over the next few nights to the point that all of my graphics settings are set to low. The game looks horrible at this point, but I'm finally able to play, slightly.

The box declares that I'd be able to explore a huge world with no loading times. I assumed maybe this is why I have an 8-minute boot-up, right? Wrong. There are no loading times per se, just inexplicable moments (often, actually) where the screen just freezes and my character kind of epileptically break dances himself through the couple of movements it takes to reach the next area. And when I'm backing up during combat, trying to avoid deadly strikes and my character suddenly feels the need to break dance because he's reached the next loading area? Well, it makes for an AWESOME gaming experience.

@#*%$ @#(*%^&%
Eventually I try my hand at altering the .ini file, which controls the games resources and whatnot. I go online and find some troubleshooting hints and they help for a while, but the next night I'm still unable to play the game, with it stuttering itself to non existence at the low graphical settings. If my computer can't run a game, it can't run a game, this is the curse of PC gaming, but my computer should have been able to run this game! Memory leaks causing too many instances of desktop crashing is not a feature listed on the back of the box, but it should have been.

I apologize for this not being a review in the tradition of Gamehelper, but this sums up my playing experience of Gothic 3, 10 hours of total time, three nights wasted, all for about an hour and a half of game time. The rest was spent tweaking the files the game runs from. I'm not a programmer; I don't know why I spent so much time reprogramming this game. Gothic 3 does not work right out of the box, it takes far too much tweaking, and there are too many other games for consumers to put up with this crap.

According the producer, Aspyr, the North American version of Gothic 3 is 1.09, not that I could tell since the game did not display a version reading. I also had trouble finding a reputable site regarding any information on 1.10. The developer's site had no mention of a new patch. A patch should make a working game better, tweaking balance issues and maybe adding little graphical touches or content, not be used to fix major performance issues that render the game unplayable. There are many other horrible aspects I can mention, such as ambient sound or sound effects randomly disappearing from the game, a clunky interface, lack of a cursor or targeting icon, poor collision detection; but there are also good aspects I didn't mention, like a unique leveling system, an engrossing story, and the high levels of interactivity. It's all moot though; performance issues with the game are rampant and prevent long-term fun. I wanted to play this game so badly, but cannot recommend it to anyone.

-doctordoom99