Look at Authur at the picture above, he looks depressed, so would you.
First up, the story that's in the game is apparently missing. Apparently, the creators believed that player will already know all about the story of King Arthur and how he had managed to become king. That's a bad thing to do, as a developed story that is well integrated into the game would have made the experience much better. Leaving everything unexplained means that the creators/developers couldn't care less about the game.
Right at the start of the game, you'll be suddenly instanced into a town which is under siege by dark dwarves. There's no explanation why the enemies are attacking the town or how is it that you are there when that happened. You are simply thrown into series of bland and confusing maps.
As the games goes on, you'll meet more characters, like Merlin. The back of the box reads. "With a powerful wizard by your side, you must defeat the legendary evil…" With that, you might think that you would have Merlin to accompany you on your journey and provide some real-time assistance. Let me ascertain that this is a horrible lie, as Merlin only shows up once in the course of the game during a particular cut-scene. That's right, you don't even get to see Merlin do anything besides standing still. Worse still, the voices for the cut-scenes in the game do not work as well, and you will be looking at a ugly-looking character model move their mouths slightly during each brief and very rare cut-scenes in the game. Adding insult to injury, the subtitles for the dialogues are very small and almost indecipherable.
Suffice it to say, playing Arthur's Quest will make you go "Why am I going around killing all these things?" every now and then.
Despite its utter failure to deliver even a simple story, Arthur's Quest might yet redeem itself by providing the player with a decent gameplay experience. Unfortunately, that fails miserably as well.
As previously mentioned, you will start the game in a town under attack by dark dwarves. A woman then runs up with you and hands you a sword, even though you don't really see her giving it to you.
One of the main things that will get players going with the game are objectives. This game either does have any, or puts them in a way too subtle for players to notice. You will know that you have to kill the dwarven invaders in town, but there really isn't anything else besides that.
In actuality, the objective of the game is just to reach the exit of the level so that you can reach the next level. With the exception of the first and the fourth level, you do not actually need to kill any enemy at all. Killing enemies are also rather unproductive, as you will get nothing at all – no money, no experience, no weapons and not even the satisfaction of slaying them. This pretty much kills the game.
It doesn't take long for you to realize that the artificial intelligence in this game is as simple as it gets. The dark dwarves will charge at you aimlessly like zombies, attempting to kill you. They do not really exhibit any intelligent behaviour besides that fact that to do try to not clip into each other when trying to chase you down.
The AI is so atrocious that you can make them kill each other by jumping over a large group of dwarves. They will try to strike at you while you jump over their ranks but unfortunately, more often then not, they will hit their comrades by mistake.
They can be taken down in the same way as you would with a crowbar with Half-Life zombies - just run forward, hit and run back. This wouldn't be that much of a pain if your sword was good – it takes a good 3-4 slashes to kill a single dark dwarf, and more than ten of them will appear in the first level of the game. Later on in the game, the enemies will be so tough and so numerous that this "combat" becomes a slow and grinding affair. Faeries can be found sprinkled in the levels to boost your combat abilities, but you will still feel as though the enemies have way too much health.
Apparently, there isn't any AI made for the various clones of the exact same man and the exact same woman who populate that town. A woman runs right up to you at the start of the game to hand you a sword, but everybody stands motionless when the dark dwarf do appear. They do not move, show facial expressions or even make sounds. All they do is stand around and turn to face you when you get near them.
A bow will be given to you for the later levels, but it is even less useful than your sword. You might feel like being a wily archer, sneaking around and taking enemies down silently with your bow, or climb up a tree and take potshots at unsuspecting enemies. Unfortunately, the game doesn't let you do any of those.
First, the mechanics of the bow are broken. Picture this scenario – you have a dark dwarf running straight at you at about half a feet away, you pull out your bow and take an almost point-blank shot at its stomach. Magically, the arrow has a chance of missing the dwarf. Apparently they have tried to implement Diablo II style of a chance to hit. But for a first-person action game, it is just ridiculous. The ammunition of the bow is astoundingly rare for the ridiculous amount of shots you need to take down even the simplest of enemies. Magic arrows, which are more powerful version of arrows, are also plagued by the same hit-detection problem that normal arrows have. Your best bet invariably lies in hand-to-hand weapons.
Second, despite the fact that you could press a button to toggle between walking and running, there is pretty much no point to be walking. You could also press a button to crouch, but there's no point in that either as there is no stealth element in the game at all. You could try moving slowly while crouched and enemies will spot you instantly when they appear in your viewing distance. There's also no low areas or caves in which you have to crouch to proceed through, defeating the purpose of walking or crouching altogether.
The level design of the game is also pretty bad in general. There are no maps provided in the area in which you are going through, so you will get lost rather frequently. The maps are filled with many dead ends, especially in the forest levels, and you will often find yourself going in circles, adding much frustration. There aren't many landmarks in the game to help you keep track of your location as well.
Water is a pretty nice addition to any FPS in general, as it could unlock various gameplay options. Unfortunately, Arthur has severe aquaphobia. A cut-scene will explain about a bridge that's destroyed so that you have to take a detour. The funny thing is that the small gap in the bridge looks so small that you can easily jump over it, but the game places an invisible wall and prevents that from happening. You could, however, jump into the narrow stream that the bridge stretches across. Upon crouching, with your head clearly above the water level, Arthur will magically lose health at an alarming rate.
Perhaps the only redeeming factor of this mess of a game would be that most of the basic clipping and fighting mechanics work when they should. You don't go through walls, enemies or the various in-game scenery. Your melee weapons also strike the enemies when they should. The game is also surprisingly stable and I only crashed the game once during the final battle.
It doesn't help that the game looks pretty bad for something released in 2002. I mean, look at No One Lives Forever 2 or Serious Sam: The Second Encounter and you'll know what I mean. The trees in the forest level are flat and ugly walls of pixels, even on the highest quality settings. The first few levels are filled with the annoying dark dwarves and the stronger dwarves look exactly the same, albeit larger. They didn't even bother to do a palette swap. The variety of enemies in the game can be counted with one hand, and that's not good.
The sounds for the game are also bad, and that's being generous. Most cut-scene dialogues are devoid of sounds. Enemies generally only make three sounds, one when hurt, one while attacking and one when dead. Weapon sounds are also bland and fairly generic and slashing on stones sounds like hitting a cardboard box with a rattan stick. The three tracks for the game are also nothing really special, featuring peaceful melodies to overly dramatic operatic odes that seem to go "ha-ha-ha-ha" – possibly hinting a subconscious attempt at mocking the player for playing such a boring game. They loop frequently and when moving to new areas, come to an awkward silence before starting the track all over again.
Some games have some kind of special magic in them that makes players want to come back and play all over again, Arthur's Quest isn't such a game. The difficulty levels do nothing but make enemies tougher and do more damage. There's no highscore chart, no end-of-round statistics and basically nothing at all. There's really no point in playing the game again when you've beaten it and beating it even once is a very frustrating experience.
All in all, Arthur's quest is a very shallow game with bland graphics and constantly dysfunctional sounds. Do not play this game unless someone pays you to do it. But even if someone actually does, you are putting your sanity at risk.