Have you ever imagined a cross between Quake and Pokémon? I bet not. And you probably also never heard of ZanZarah, an obscure German game about a teenage girl visiting a land of fairies. What these things have in common? Well, everything.

In ZanZarah you play as Amy, who goes from London to a magical land of fairies, elves and wonder. This enchanted world is threatened by an ancient evil, your arrival was foretold by a prophecy and all that. Your quest here is to explore the land, help the locals and raise a strong party of fairies to save the world. To recruit new magical creatures, you must first weaken one in combat and then capture it with a special ball. Sounds very familiar, no?

And it doesn’t stop there. ZanZarah offers over 70 magical creatures – including animals, dragons and demons – spread into 12 types: Fire, Water, Nature, Air, Stone, Ice, Chaos, Energy, Psi, Metal, Dark and Light.

Their attacks have the classic effective/noneffective relationships, and in true Pokémon fashion you also get to choose your initial fairy between three types. They even evolve after reaching a certain level.

But here’s the big twist: unlike Pokémon, you won’t battle in turn-based combat, but rather in FPS arenas with elaborate layouts, firing magic blasts at enemies while strafing, dodging and flying!

There are no guns, but each fairy can equip up to four different spells – two offensive and two passive. The game features 120 spells with a wide range of effects, damage, fire rate and mana pool. Spells must be charged before firing – some allow for quick bursts, others are very slow – but charge too much and it will backfire. All of this keeps battles interesting, as you’ll have to figure out the best loadout to use depending on the arena layout or the enemy type you face.

To crown everything, the soundtrack is excellent. Composed by King Einstein, the battle music is exciting, the exploration music is charming and the main theme is a beautiful melody sang by Karina Gretere.

The only real downside - and this will be a deal breaker for some - is that even this new 2015 Steam re-release doesn't run well on modern computers. You'll occasionally get some visual glithces and graphic artifacts, but the worst part is that the game drops to like 5fps when you open a menu, no matter how powerful your PC is.

If you can deal with this, give ZanZarah a try. If not, don't even bother.

Zanzarah is a great game. I mean it! It's basically one of the only creature-raising games on PC, and even if it's quite old, it's still worth playing for that function alone.

So then, why don't I recommend this game?

Because for some people, this game runs flawlessly out of the box, and for others you're going to have to fight to get it running -- and unfortunately, you won't know where you stand until you already have the game. Depending on the luck of the draw, the hoops you have to jump through to get Zanzarah in a playable state aren't worth it for most players -- this game is a mess.

Pick up Borderless Gaming, folks... you're gonna need it, because if you get the screen flickering issue, the only way to fix it is windowing the game (alt+enter won't work, append -windowed to the .BAT in the game folder.) But take heed -- if your cursor leaves the game window, the game will restart. It's not even a crash -- it seems to be some sort of intentional function (which is horrifying.) If this happens in the middle of something important it means backtracking and rebattles. Not fun. Plus, those with a nvidia card better grab the legacy PhysX drivers, or get used to excessive mouse lag in menus -- in addition to the worst screen flicker I've seen since Circus Tycoon.

Thus, BG comes into play -- you can pseudo-constrain the mouse to the window this way. It's not a perfect fix, but it's better than setting your system resolution to the game's native res.

Of course, this is just my own personal experience of trying to get the steam version to work -- the disc version was unplayable for me on a modern OS, with abstract broken polygons stretching in all directions... from what I understand, this is also a problem people may face with this release as well. I'm not sure if compatability mode will help, as when I've tried launching it with that setup, it just endlessly loops the loading screen... getting this game running was not an insignificant amount of effort, I can say that much.

And on the matter of screens -- constrain the maximum prerendered frames to one and get used to black borders, because this game's maximum resolution is 1024x768x32 -- oh yes, there are 16-bit color options. Just in case you want them! Folks with 4k monitors -- my sympathy for your plight. It's not going to look that great in any setup, but for it's age, I can forgive that... now that I've solved the fact that I couldn't see much at all due to the graphical errors.

Zanzarah really is a good game. It's fun, it scratches that creature-raising itch while you wait for certain other titles to release, and if you've nostalgia for it, it's still as lovely as it always was. But it's a flawed game, and it has aged wretchedly as far as compatability stands. I can't recommend it be bought in this state, not when it's significantly likely to be unplayable without a lot of fiddling -- not when much of it requires more work than the average computer novice could put into it. I got it working without too much trouble, but I know friends of mine would be utterly lost -- and for that, I cannot recommend this game without saying "caveat emptor."

If you still want to play it, by all means. It's not a bad game! It's just so risky to spend money on something that might not work -- so if I do have one suggestion to impart, it's this:

If you want to take a shot in the dark about whether Zanzarah will run on your system or not, get this game on sale. Heavily on sale. I'd pay the asking price for it if it was at least moderately updated to be stable, because I hold that the game offers that much enjoyment for me. But like this, don't waste your money. Don't pay more than a few dollars for this game unless it gets some serious updates to fix the compatability, because it's likely you'll spend more than two hours troubleshooting it -- and then you're stuck with a game you might not be able to play at all.

TL;DR: Zanzarah is a good game marred by significant instability and graphical errors that render it nigh-unplayable for many (especially those with nvidia cards,) and therefore despite it's good points, I cannot recommend it to the average player -- and caution anyone interested to pick it up on sale at the least.

I wish I could give this a positive review, for what it's worth.

I got this on sale for 0.78, and it's awesome. The bulk of the negative reviews are due to this being an old game (2002) and simply not running on newer systems. The only issue I had was cursor lag, and that was fixed by switching the game's resolution from 16 to 32 bit. The rest of this review will assume you too can run the game:

Graphics
This game is pure ps2 era glory and the graphics are true to form. Just look at some screenshots to see if the graphics are something you're ok with.

Gameplay
The premise is basically pokemon with fairies. You capture fairies of different elements with different skills and pit them against each other. When you're not fighting wild fairies or other "Fairy Masters" you're exploring each area for items and directions to your next destination.

Combat
Small arena fps with fairies. Seriously. You take control of a fairy in first person and lob magic missiles at the opposing fairy. It's bizarre but it works so well.

Story
Pretty basic fare of "defeat the evil and save the world" with the added allure of the "gotta catch them all" fairy collecting.

Overall I find it to be simple but satisfying, a fun romp through a game that sucessfully mixes familiar systems into something unique.

One of the best game ever made

Ask yourself these questions: Do you like fantasy lore, RPG's, FPS, catch-them-all, beautiful visuals, great soundtrack, a captivating story and more all that in a beautiful, large and very diverse semi-open world? If any of these are a YES, then go and buy Zanzarah. You will not regret it.

You play as Amy, a eighteen year old girl from London, UK. At the start of the game your house is visited by a swamp goblin Rafi, and he places a magical rune in your attic. Investigating the rune you are transported to the world of Zanzarah — a realm of magic and faeries, strange creatures and odd landscapes. But you are transported there for a reason — you are the Chosen One, from the old legends which speak of a human girl to save the world of Zanzarah from an threat and unite Zanzarah with the human world. The story later further reveals that Zanzarah, Earth and the realm of Faeries were the same world and humans, faeries, dwarves, elves, goblins lived in peace. But humans became corrupted and the human world had to be cut off from the magical realms.

The gameplay consists of two main areas, the first is the RPG in which you play as Amy and navigate through the world talking to NPC's and solving platform elements. The second is the FPS part where you take part in faerie battles.
Playing as Amy you can talk to NPC's, collect items, pixies, and most importantly explore the world and capture faeries. Amy can also partake in a few mini games and puzzles hidden throughout the world. Capturing faeries is the most important aspect. There are 77 different faeries, divided into twelve elements, each having advantages and weaknesses against each other. You can only have five faeries in your deck, however you can go back to your house in London anytime in order to change them. Faeries are usually caught at a low level, and then you have to train them against faeries in the wilderness (the world is divided into element and level areas) or at several trainers which costs money. Most faeries can evolve upon reaching a certain level into their other, which means they get new stats, look and spell possibilities. The maximum level for faeries is 60, and leveling and catching all faeries will take time and effort. Each faery can have four spells, two offensive and two defensive. Your faery can also gain a joker spell slot which means you can put a spell of a different or any element for it to use. I shall be making a Guide covering most of the game mechanics and good builds and decks.

The combat only exists inside the faery battles, and takes form of a FPS in a arena where you can move, fly around and hide. You have two sets of spells, and each has one offensive and one defensive. You can swap these around when not in a battle, and there's a bunch of different spells each changing the way you battle. Mana is limited, and spells can be charged for more damage (which should be done almost always). You can also swap between the five faeries in your deck at anytime, because some faery types do more damage against others. There is a certain tactical feel to it if you look at it at a certain angle, especially for some very difficult battles. The combat is very fun!

The graphics are outdated, but still beautiful. There are no natively supported HD resolutions, and it would be nice from Daedalic to update the DirectX and add more resolution options, as well as a windowed option. Apart from the technical stuff, the game still looks very pretty, the world is diverse, and tastefully made. The menus work and look very good.
You can modernize the game to run windowed and in other resolutions. See my guide.

The music and the audio is overall fantastic, especially the main theme sung by Kariina Gretere, who is similar to Enya.

The game has some form of TCP/IP LAN multiplayer where you can use your gamesave deck and fight with your friends.

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal is a fantastic game that you are sure to love and play for a long time. It might be hard at start to get used to all the faery stuff, but the learning curve isn't very steep. The game has some very difficult sections, which require careful deck planning and leveling of faeries. The story can be speed-run in some fifteenish hours, mostly because you need to level up faeries in order to defeat certain enemies blocking passage or to progress the story. However it will surely take you double that much hours to finish the game with a normal tempo, and this just means finishing the main storyline without getting all the faeries or leveling them up, or even trying to collect everything. To do that it will take at least 100 hours of gameplay if you are fast.
The only real negative side of the game is that after you finish the game, there is no save just a cutscene and then the game reloads to the last checkpoint. You can still go back and do whatever you want, just there isn't anything after the "ending".

But even with that taken in consideration, this is a gem not to be missed, and is worth more then its price, even when it's not on sale.

Don't get me wrong, great game. I have fond memories of playing this back when it originally came out, and as you can see from the other reviews, its basically fairy themed third person pokemon with first person 'creature' fights.

I played this out back in the day, and would love to play it out again.

I cannot, however, recommend this game.

Why you ask? Because it ran better on my 1998 Compaq Presario, than my current 8 grand worth of hardware. And I doubt it will ever be fixed, owing to the company that made it going out of business in the mid 2000's, and recently being bought out (in name only) by Nordic Games.

What does this mean for us gamers? Simply that they can release old content (and earn a bit of dough off us sappy sentimental folks) without ever having to commit to fixing the obvious flaws that causes the game to slow to painfully slow fps any time any box of dialog or menu opens over the main screen.

I'm sure a small investment would fix this, and I eagerly await it happening, however I must also resign myself to the fact that it probably won't.

If you want to purchase this out of sentimentality, go right ahead. Otherwise, leave it alone until it's fixed, and don't tarnish your opinion of what is actually quite a great game.

People that have mouse lag issues when text is on screen (everyone), check out dgVoodoo 2.

UPDATE: Use the dgVoodoo v2.54 version! Latest one does not work with Zanrazah :/

Put the executable and the contents of the "MS" folder in the game's "system" folder and run it once to set up the correct path (the ".\" button), that should fix the mouse bug. Run the x32 color depth resolution too instead of the default x16.
Disclamer though: the program seems to upset a lot of antiviruses... from what I could dig up it's a false positive but use it at your own risk?

Otherwise it's awesome to get to play this gem again, a shame it'll probably never get a remaster.

A classic 10/10 game, but unplayable on modern hardware. Daedalic released an untouched 13 yo binary hoping it'd work. It does not. Avoid this release until modders sort out the problems, because frankly Daedalic has absolutely no clue how to fix the game. And I'm pretty sure we can forget about a proper Steam integration.

**Warning: Some people have experienced severe performance issues with the game if they are running Windows 10 or have an Nvidia video card. There are likely ways to make it work, but expecting this old game to be playable right out of the box if you have either of those would be a mistake.

I played this game years ago, not long after it first came out, and it's easily one of the best sleepers out there. For those curious, it's basically like Pokemon, but instead of going into a turn-based battle when you fight, you go into a first-person, Quake Battle Arena-style deathmatch where you control your creature. It really is an amazing game, and easily one of my all-time favorites.

Pros:
Surprisingly-evoking thematics.
Next-level Pokemon-style game.
Plenty of creatures to choose from.
Complex elemental matchups.
Cool creature evolutions.
The type of game we've wanted since the 90s.
Skill-reliant gameplay.

Cons:
A lack of diverse attack dynamics—no arcing shots, mines, scattershots, etc. Could be easily fixed by a good modding community.
Game IS from 2002, so the graphics are somewhat dated.
Some of the translations for certain attacks are inaccurate/confusing.
Many of the creatures are fairies, which might be challenging to some people's masculinity.
Game is amazing, but a Zanzarah 2 is unlikely due to the length of time that's passed since the games release.

Overall:
BUY THIS GAME. SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS. IT'S AMAZING.

As I loved playing the game in my youth I was looking forward to it and quite disappointed that it didn't work.

After a few initial tries I have finally found the solution of running it properly in windows 10. And given the amount of negative reviews I'm gonna mention it here.

The fix has already been mentioned in the steamcommunity but was for some reason not the first entry I found when searching for the solution.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/384570/discussions/0/152390648088618058/

My main problem with this fix initially was that chrome considers the tool very much unsafe. This has been addressed here as it is a false positive.
https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/183073-dgvoodoo-2-false-positive/

In my case I even had to download the zip file through edge as chrome entirely blocked it. Don't do this in general. But if you're upset about not being able to play the game as I was here would be the exception.

To summarize the steps are:
1. Download the software mentioned here (get the latest stable version) https://steamcommunity.com/app/384570/discussions/0/152390648088618058/
2. Copy the contents of MS/x86 and 3Dfx/x86 into your Steam/steamapps/common/ZanZarah/System folder
3. Launch the zanthp.1920x1080.exe inside the System folder
(Edit: I had already done steps for this months ago. They can be found here https://steamcommunity.com/app/384570/discussions/0/485623339233589075/?ctp=4 )
4. Enjoy your childhood nostalgia. The game still feels great :)

if you can get it to load and get the glitches out of it you will find it is a great game. the controls are simple and you capture and collect faries will performing quests. your fairies level up and you earn game gold which you use to buy spells for your fairies. there are many different kinds of faires each class with different strengths and weaknesses. you battle your way through the game learning each fairy's skills and become better at the game.
you can carry 5 fairies at a time and have to go home, to london to change the ones you are carrying. it was originally a multiplayer game. after you battled your way through the game you could log into a server and battle other players and thier fairy collection.
because it is an older game 2000 there are not servers so it is solo play only. it would be great if the game got mod for new computers and players could link on servers for pvp.
i got it to work pretty good on my nvidia graphics card following the instructions in game but had to remove it because ssd was getting full. tried it again on my computer with asus amd rx480x8 and just get the zanzarah screen. game does not launch.
its not a large investment if you want to try it you could have some fun with it.