Considering the style of game that New Arc Line was shaping up to be, it had some pretty big boots to fill. I wasn’t sure what to expect with my time with New Arc Line, but I found that for the vast majority of my playthrough of the cRPG that is now available in early access, I was pleasantly surprised. The game has a lot of potential but still needs just a little bit more fine-tuning to really make it shine.
Diving into the game, you are greeted with character creation, as with any proper roleplaying game. While it doesn’t quite live up to the extensive customization options featured in Baldur’s Gate 3, there is enough variety to still make your character yours. What I found disappointing was the chance to choose between only two classes. Whether this was just for this early access or a permanent feature, I’m unsure at the moment. Regardless, instead of choosing the tech themed class, I went for the Voodoo class. Anything with magic or necromancy is always up my alley, and I won’t pass up an opportunity to play it. The other main gripe I had with character creation was the inability to zoom in on your character’s face, meaning you can’t tweak the fine details exactly how you’d like.
Getting into the prologue of the game, I was stunned by how beautiful the game was. It felt like a mix between BioShock Infinite and Disco Elysium, and I was all here for it. It reproduced the entirely underrated Steampunk fantasy setting through a highly immersive dystopia. However, while I did enjoy the world-building throughout my time with New Arc Line, I would understand if people stopped playing during the prologue. It’s a bit of a grind to get through, as your character shuffles about at a snail’s pace, and there is a rather wide region to explore, especially if you like getting all the knickknacks as I do.
I was continuously impressed by the finer graphical details. The water was so beautifully animated and had sparkles in all the right places, which helped add to that utopia versus dystopia vibe, especially when you’re first entering the New World. I liked that, to find out which of the nearby items was interactable, I could just hold down Alt, and it would highlight them, similar to the system in Baldur’s Gate 3. On the flip side, the hitboxes were a little bit off. You had to have your mouse a fair amount of space away from the marker to be able to collect anything or speak with someone. During battles, this made it far too difficult, and this is where I started to lose interest.
The voice-acting felt fitting to New Arc Line, but it was also a tad confusing trying to guess which messages would be voice-acted. Sometimes, I was expecting the paragraph to be narrated, and it simply wasn’t, with other insignificant paragraphs being narrated instead. The narration and voice-acting felt very inconsistent, as if they couldn’t decide which parts should be narrated and which should be left for the player to read themselves.
When it came to battling for the first time, I didn’t really enjoy the UI layout. It felt very small and cramped, and it was easy to miss details beneficial to the fight. Additionally, the hitbox issue proved to cause a lot of problems during the battle and led to my companion dying on the docks because of this. I would try to target one of the enemies, and it would very clearly hover over that specific enemy, only for my character to attack the other enemy. This happened multiple times throughout, which is what led to my companion dying, as he was taking unnecessary hits from an enemy that should have already died.
Overall, New Arc Line has a ton of potential, and I’m excited to see the game develop over time. If the hitboxes were fixed, and some of the rougher edges were smoothed over, I would most likely sink more time into it. Additionally, the combat could do with a little fine-tuning to make the UI a bit more readable. This game has a lot of potential, and you can see the amount of love and effort that has gone into the game’s worldbuilding to provide the balance between dystopia and utopia. I’m excited to see how New Arc Line develops throughout its early access journey, which the studio expects will last until late 2025.
By the way, if you’re interested in the game, there’s currently a 15% launch discount offer in place.
