Additionally, you can use your skills such as sneaking any time you want - for instance, there's a certain bridge you have to cross, but a huge troll will refuse to let you pass. To cross it you won't have to kill him, you can just shimmy across the wall behind him. So, as you may have gathered, Arx Fatalis doesn't have any restrictions whatsoever. You can cook, eat, sneak, cast-spells, create your own weapon, etc. However, when it comes to "weapon creation," there's a certain number of flaws that could've easily been avoided if the developers just made things simpler. For starters, stuff like armor and powerful melee weapons are in short supply throughout most of the game. But, when you finally find all the necessary ingredients for weapon-making, you're gonna have to learn how to use the appropriate forge facilities to mold a desirable object. The instructions for that are pretty vague. What's more, there are only a couple of spots in the entire game, where you are allowed to trade items. And, that's a major bummer since most of your weapons tend to deteriorate rather quickly and you'll often need ones. Such inconvenient moments make the game dreary. At first, you get to have fun slicing and dicing opponents with diverse weapons and spells, but after a while it just becomes a senseless search for weapons, mushrooms, and garlic. This doesn't sound very interesting now does it? The thing is that a good number of players is likely to be drawn into the story. Plus, there's a variety of items you can tangle with, so that can kinda keeps you busy for a certain period of time. Even though the game tends to look promising at the beginning, after a while you'll realize that it just cycles you through confined cave-like environments without any challenges or motivating quests that might reduce the monotony. This aspect has seriously downgraded the game's overall score. So, no matter how deep you may have involved yourself in the story, it still cannot compensate the game's general lack of gameplay depth.​