DreamCatcher had a very early build of Arx Fatalis for the Xbox at its booth at E3. The game is a port of the PC version, which was released in 2002. The development team has been working on the game for about a month, and the build on the floor was around 30% complete. Keeping this in mind, it was still possible to have a brief look at what might be in store for us later this year.

Arx Fatalis is a first person RPG, which is something that I had never played before. The controls handle okay, but I found accessing menus to be rather laborious. Items are picked up by targeting them with the reticle, but, especially when the items are small, it's a bit of a pain to target them. Combat is a rather slow process, but from the limited access I've had of games of this sort, that seems to be the norm.

The demo starts off with the main character, who awakes to find himself in a dungeon. By bending his cell bars, he escapes to face the guards. Weapons in the portion of the game that I played are rather uninteresting, but they do maintain consistency with the game world. There are bones that can be picked up initially, and once the guards are taken care of, you can use their clubs. Combat is a one-button affair: Weapons are equipped, then used by pulling the right trigger.

Since the demo was an early build, the major flaws can be overlooked. There were some serious problems with animation, and the font used for in-game text was hard to read.

One facet of the game that I thought was original was the magic system. Spells are cast using combinations of spell radicals. Basically, there are a set amount of different spell components (a spell language, if you will) that are combined in various forms to perform a range of magic spells. The spell components are performed using the d-pad. From speaking with some of our staff members, the actual mechanics of spell production are similar between Xbox and PC, though the patterns are more angular in the Xbox iteration, no doubt due to the lack of mouse support.

Arx Fatalis looks to be a game that will interest gamers that are not averse to PC RPGs. There appears to be a lot to do, and the spell system is rather intersting. The game is set for release in November.