Imagine a place of wonder, where magic and technology hold equal sway, and an adventurer might just as easily wield a flintlock pistol as a flaming sword. A place where great industrial cities house castle keeps and factories, home to Dwarves, Humans, Orcs and Elves alike. A place of ancient runes and steamworks, of magic and machines, of sorcery and science. Arcanum is the first game to come from the development house Troika Games, LLC, started by former Fallout team members Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson. This team takes the depth of gameplay and world-building in role-playing games to entirely new levels of realism and excitement. Arcanum creates a compelling new world where magic and technology coexist in an uneasy balance. As Arcanum opens, the mechanical age has only recently arrived in this ancient land where Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and other races have learned to survive in the new sprawling industrialized cities.
This game has some flaws which shows clearly why it never sold too well in the first place, but overall it's a very good RPG game. The story is very good and gets you to different ways each time you play because there are so many different options for your character. You have many different skills and actions to learn and improve, also you can't be good at both magic (or "magick", as it is called in-game) because the developers made a good story about them. You can interact with many different NPC's who are reacting in different ways depending on your behaviour, for example a technichian would not be as nice to a magician as they would be towards another technichian. You will never play the game the same way twice because there is so much to try, it's going to take some serious amount of time to experience all what the game has to offer. The musical scores are really good, I like how they used mainly string instruments but they should have made more music or at least varied it because it gets too repetive in the game after some time. The combat system has recieved some serious critism and lowered the score in many reviews, that's easy to understand because it really is true, of course. Turn-based mode makes you have to sit and wait for the enemy to hit you and then you are just willing to hit them back but you take lots of damage, there is also real-time combat. I know many people uses turn-based combat because they say that real-time is a clusterf*ck due to its high speed, I can agree to it but it is good for the click-and-pray player who just rapidly taps the attack button to hit something. Sometimes the game is unbalanced with people's tech/magick aptitude; The magicians can just use their flaming swords and walk-on-water spells to defeat technicians who must pick up junk to create cheap flintlock pistols with expensive ammo. This game is great if you like RPG's and only care about gameplay but otherwise you may not like it. Personally I love this game.
Masterpiece of an RPG and definitely one of the top five RPGs ever made for me (and I have played most ever released). Awesome take on a Steampunk and Fantasy amalgamation along with a brilliant story and twists as well as deep RPG, combat, progression, world-building and exploration mechanics. This was the natural progression for Tim, Jason and Leonard moving on from Fallout and it shows. Simply a masterpiece, even with the bugs (that have mostly been ironed out over the years).