Recent reviews by Dingasm

This game is barely, tenuously about machine learning. The first few puzzles are solved with if/else or if/elseif statements that this game grandly calls Expert Systems and Decision Trees. The puzzles at least early on are mostly figuring out how to route red/green/blue circle/square/triangle to the correct output, on a time limit for a gold/silver/bronze medal.

Unfortunately even in some early puzzles the gold medal result can only be achieved by RNG. The items to be routed appear to come out in a fixed, mixed order. When routing an item that matches neither case of an if/elseif block it will 'randomly' go to either of the outputs of the block, except that the randomness is decided when you edit your layout, and rerunning the scenario won't change the result.

I could not get a gold time on one puzzle with the obvious solution after several reruns and realised that the items were being routed exactly the same every run despite the tutorial claiming randomness. Messed around with different layouts still not getting the gold time, then reverted back to the original solution and suddenly met the time just because the random routing resolved differently after a rebuild.

This is just poor design that is only exacerbated when the game introduces 'perceptrons' that have a fail-rate for their routing. You can, at best, implement the solution 'most likely' to succeed and close, reopen, and rerun the puzzle to force the randomness to be decided again until you meet the requirements.

Having to coincidentally succeed at a puzzle game is just bad.

Arx Fatalis is a good solid RPG. If you dont mind the slightly dated graphics I highly recommend you try it out.

If you go find Arx Libertatis, its a 'mod' for the game, it'll use the game files that you download through Steam, but optimize the game for use on newer machines. Unfortunately it didnt count me as playing on Steam so my game time counter didnt go up.

Initally I was a lil skeptical of the onscreen gestural magic stuff, I've never been good at drawing symbols with a mouse but the game lets you precast three spells to hotkeys so you can instant cast later which is awesome. Melee is basic but effective: hold mouse button, gem glows, more it glows the more damage you do, release mouse to strike.

Anyways sound is decent, graphics are dated but not ugly, theres a combine/crafting system so you can make things like a fishing pole from a piece of wood and rope, and theres potion brewing. You might need a paper and pen to keep track of everything, the journal isn't very helpful.

In closing definitely worth getting, especially at $5.