Allow me to copy-paste a review I wrote for another site.
"Any RPG fan worth his salt will remember Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 from the early nineties.
The UU games were essentially first-person dungeon crawlers with a uniquely interactive and living gameworld -
Everything could be picked up, turned around and moved, you'd come across many different factions in the dungeon depths to befriend or massacre, the gameworld was expansive with tons of nooks and crannies to explore and the classless game system and large number of skills made it possible to diversify into many different kinds of character.
Sadly, Looking Glass Studios went belly-up sometime in the late nineties, effectively killing the franchise.
Then, 8 years after UU2 was released, Arkane Studios released Arx Fatalis, the spiritual successor to the Underworld series and I must say they managed to capture both the atmosphere and gameplay of the originals wonderfully.
While UU 1 and 2 were set in a standard fantasy world where the storyline just happened to make all the action take place in enclosed spaces, the world of Arx Fatalis is a frozen wasteland with an extinguished sun, forcing the humans, dwarves, trolls, goblins and rat-people to take refuge in huge many-leveled underground fortresses. This sets the stage for the linear but highly sophisticated dungeon crawling storyine. The game begins with you customising your main character, choosing a face, starting stats and skills, using an effective classless character development system.
You then materialise, mysteriously, in a blue magical flash in the goblin controlled part of the city of Arx. You are, of course, amnesiac, as it's against the laws of RPG gaming to have a non-amnesiac main character. Your task is to find a way out of Goblinland and then discover your true identity and purpose for being in Arx.
The story is nothing special and full of cliches, apart from a bit of interesting mid-game intrigue, but the goals are clearly defined and the story keeps the game moving smoothly - And the gameworld is very interesting, interactive and full of homages to the Ultima Underworld series. Many inventory items can be combined to form new ones, use a knife on a stick to form stakes to stick into vampires, use rope on a stick to make a fishing rod, use water on flour to make yeast to bake into bread over fires. The immersion into the game world is excllent.
Like in UU1, each level of Arx has a specific theme, lvl 1 belonging to goblins, lvl 2 being home to the human settlement, lvl 3 being the troll mines and so on and exploring it is really, really fun. The gameworld is very interactive, most things you find can be picked up and moved around, there are lots of little nooks and crannies to explore, a couple of well-written quests and several different ways of solving them, usually by stealth, diplomacy or violence.
Veterans of Ultima Underworld will feel right at home here as there are a few puzzles that are strongly inspired by UU puzzles - I found myself instantly realising the solution to one lever-based puzzle because the exact same puzzle was used in UU2. Great nostalgia.
Graphics are good and character design is excellent. Goblins look dimwitted and devious, trolls rugged and tough and zombies sufficiently smelly. The ambient sounds of running water and faraway echoes add to the feeling of exploring a vast complex of caves and catacombs and is very well done in general.
The combat is OK - You draw your weapon, a coloured gem at the bottom of the screen depicts the power of your attacks, another homage to UU, you attack with the left mouse button and...that's pretty much it. Hit enemy, try not to get hit through sidestrafing and backpedaling. Pretty much like Oblivion, not too much to say here.
There is much to be said about the magic system of Arx Fatalis, however, simply because it's the best magic system ever seen in a CPRG. Like in Ultima Underworld, magical spells consist of 2-5 magic words or "runes" strung together to form a sentence. Stringing together the runes for "create" and "fire" will ignite torches and campfires, "negate fire" extinguishes them, "create fire projectile" creates a fireball, "improve vision" grants night vision and so on. You string the runes together by holding ctrl and then drawing the magical symbols with your mouse, tracing magic sparks with your finger. You can experiment with drawing runes as well, as there are a few hidden spells not listed in the game manual which can be figured out by guessing the right sequence of runes.
An few examples of offensive spells can be seen here:
Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LueGiUasvFk
Magic is very powerful and is what makes Arx Fatalis a truly great game. Walking down a corridor when a charging monster suddenly appears, you frantically try to remember the rune combination for fireball and struggle to draw the runes correctly. This leads to very exciting and involved gameplay. One of the best boss fights I've seen in a video game is when you're locked in a small room with a demon capable of killing you in one hit. Sidestrafing, ducking and jumping over obstacles to avoid getting killed while trying to keep focused on drawing magic runes is awesome and challenging.
The awesomeity of the magic system does expose one of the two big flaws of Arx Fatalis: The unbalanced character development. It's a hallmark of a truly good RPG that it should be possible to complete it as a diplomat, magician, thief or straight out fighter. In Arx, playing as a magician is by far the easiest, playing a fighter is hard as hell and playing as a thief is unplayable - Investing too many skillpoints in thieving related skills like stealth and lockpicking may land you in a situation where you simply don't pack enough punch to kill the stronger monsters and backstabbing is underpowered, considering how many skillpoints you need to dump in stealth to make it worthwhile and completely worthless in boss fights.
Being a straight fighter only using magic for healing and powering up is hard too, as the game takes a steep jump in difficulty around mid-game once heavily armoured devil worshippers begin appearing who can take 3000+ hits and can kill you in two. It's simply easier to just blow them the fuck away with lightning bolts than letting them get close enough to hit.
Arx Fatalis is therefore not that well balanced and lacks replayability for that reason. But hey, when magic is so much fun, why would you want to play anything but a mage?
The other big problem with Arx is that it's fairly short. Maybe 15 hours or so of total gameplay, less on your second run. The gameworld, while very atmospheric and well designed, simply isn't that big. For a game built on as solid basics as Arx, it would be nice to have a longer game to experience them in.
A third minor irritation is that the voice acting sucks dick, but as it's a French game later translated, that's excusable.
Arx Fatalis is a fantastic update of the Ultima Underworld games and is criminally underrated by RPG lovers - Provided you play as a magic user. If you opt out of using magic, what you have is a pretty average dungeon crawler with shitty voice acting, great looking environments and a linear storyline.
Final score: 8.5/10 if playing a sorcerer, 6/10 if trying to tough it out as a warrior.
Get it from here for a paltry six dollars:
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/arx_fatalis
With that price tag, you simply can't pass it up."
To summarise, it is fucking badass. Get it.
What was wrong with UU, anyway? I beat the first one when I was like 12, and that was in the days before convenient walkthroughs weren't as easy to find as now. I love UU.
[/list]
