The story starts when the main character returns to his homeland Myrtana, after his adventures in Gothic 2. Not only has the journey weakened him (all stats have been reset to zero), the Orcs seem to rule the land nowadays and humans only serve as their slaves. As it goes, there’s of course a group of brave rebels.

In the beginning you indeed mostly have to fight Orcs, but further on in the game you can choose for yourself wether you continue to help the rebels or rather want to work together with the Orcs to gain some of their power. Your choices eventually lead to different endings. As it should be, you’ll have fun with this game for quite some time.

The main character is nameless and that can’t be changed, in fact no part of him can really be changed, so creating you own character isn’t possible. The Orcs seem to have exterminated women too, because not much females are visible in the villages. The other villagers act like zombies. The biggest problem lies with what should have been improved: the fighting system. Usually the quicker one wins, regardless of power. Orcs are quite easy to beat, but ordinary animals like wolves and boars, that’s something else.

Those beasts are the real danger in Gothic 3. Boars for example quickly throw you on the ground and so eliminate you in the wink of an eye, while they can take a lot themselves. Shielding, increasing power or other methods don’t help much. So only using a trick remains, but that creates some strange situations.

Somewhere at the start of the game I had to kill some boars in the neighbourhood of a rebels’ camp, so I lured one of the animals that way, convinced that those rebels would help me finish off that beast. Unfortunately the rebels showed to be not that though and eventually that one boar was able to murder out that camp of some twenty rebels.

As usual with Jowood’s games, there are some hidden bugs, which could have been removed if the game would have been finished properly. Luckily nothing is really annoying or disturbing the gameplay. Graphically Gothic 3 creates a beautiful, vast environments on your screen.

This splendour of course demands a lot of your system. As for the sound especially the music is very strong, while the voice acting sucks. Maybe they switched the sound band for this game with that of a porn movie. Not only do the voices sound incredibly uninspired, every time a character goes down (particulary the main character) it was apparently necessary to make it sound like an orgy (or maybe they aren’t even faking).