Post by N3B on Dec 6, 2009 22:10:05 GMT -5
(A Detailed Analysis) -- “Solid, but falls short of Classic.”
Risen is the latest game from Piranha Bytes, a small German developer known for their previous games in the Gothic series, which made its debut in 2001 and has since received two sequels and an expansion. The first two Gothics were highly praised for their gameplay and atmospheres, although neither was without bugs, technical problems, and interface issues which made both games receive mixed reviews praising the core but criticizing the implementation. Gothic 3 took a new approach to the formula and expanded the game world into a truly non-linear experience of epic proportions. However, it suffered even more performance issues and incorporated a particularly weak combat system.
Risen was quite obviously inspired by the Gothic games and is very similar in style; it could easily be called the fourth Gothic, if the Nameless Hero were to wind up shipwrecked on a new island. All of what made each of the three Gothics great can be found within Risen, however, none of this is done as well as in its predecessors. Still, Risen is a fun and satisfying continuation of PB's efforts, and is definitely a pleasant sight after the catastrophic response to G3. Although Risen doesn't do anything that's truly new or revolutionary, if you have a taste for old-school computer RPGs, you'll probably find enough of it here. Despite its strengths, there are a few problems that pull the game's overall quality from what could have been sheer excellence down to mere adequacy.
[The Premise]
Risen is what would best be called an adventure role-playing game with action. You play a nameless castaway who has just been washed up on the beach of a Mediterranean island. Immediately following the introduction cinematic, you begin your new life on the island of Faranga. Initially, this means finding a shelter from the storm, defending yourself from the wild beasties, and figuring out what civilization on the island is like through four chapters of gameplay.
Gameplay is like typical “old-school” computer RPGs. You explore, talk to people, pick up quests, kill monsters, find loot, level-up, and eventually do battle with epic foes. All of this is done with a third-person behind-the-back camera system. Although it can be classified as “open world” it's not entirely non-linear – after the introductory chapter the plot and quests converge into a semi-linear deal, but you are free to explore the island at your own pace. Very few areas are off limits, which means you have access to the entire island right at the start; the only obstacle will be enemies which you may have to avoid or come back to.
There is no character creation; everyone plays the nameless castaway and you don't get to pick his starting stats. Every playthrough will begin with a “blank slate” of minimum stats. As you kill monsters, complete quests, and gain experience, you level up and earn “Learning Points” which you can use to increase your stats, skills, and talents. This is done by finding a trainer within the world and having him (or her) teach you. Aside from basic close-combat melee skills (swords, axes, staves), you can also level up ranged weapons (bows and crossbows), deal in magic (with rune and crystal varieties, though different factions can only use certain types), as well as learn various other talents (animal skinning, sneaking, acrobatics, lock-picking, pick-pocketing, smithing, alchemy, etc).
In the first chapter you'll be tasked with joining one of three Factions – Don Esteban, the Mages of the Holy Flame, or the Warriors of the Order. The faction system provides different perspectives on the story and gameplay, and you'll have a chance to explore and learn about them before having to make a choice (the exception being that you can be forced to join the Order if they catch you in criminal acts, which in this case, is being outside of town). There is no right or wrong, good or bad choice to be made in the factions, it's purely a matter of taste and opinion.
You'll continue to explore the island, do quests, and upgrade yourself in the process. From there, you go on to learn about the mysterious nature of Faranga, what terrible things are happening on the mainland, why the ruins are rising up from the ground, and what lies in the Volcano at the heart of the island.
[The Narrative]
There is no backstory to the main character, other than what is seen in the opening cinematic: that he is a stow-away on an official ship bound for the island Faranga. A later scene embellishes his ambiguous background when a character asks what he was doing stowing away on the ship, to which he merely responds (paraphrased): “I don't know exactly what I was hoping to find, but I wasn't running away from anything.” My guess is that he was looking for a purpose in life and was hoping to find it elsewhere, but I'm looking further than the game expects me to.
Our nameless hero's lack of a real background, generic facial appearance, blank expression, and monotonous voice acting certainly make him seem like a boring and generic character within the first few minutes of gameplay. This is essentially true, because he really isn't that deep. It's supposed to make him a more accessible character, to make it easier for the player to assume his role. It works in an aesthetic sort of way, but there's little role-playing to truly develop him into a reflection of yourself (or what you want to be). He occasionally makes sarcastic or witty comments in response to some of the characters' snide or elusive attitudes, but it seems less of a personality trait, and more like the writers making a very subtle penetration of the fourth wall.
I often found myself laughing at and agreeing with his cynical (and sometimes Captain Obvious) interpretation of the world. It's almost reminiscent of 2004's The Bard's Tale, in which the Bard makes satirical mockery of fantasy-RPG cliches and axioms. Risen, of course, never goes to the extremes like The Bard's Tale, and it's clear that the intention for the game was not to make fun of itself (and indeed this is not the effect); it is simply to make the nameless hero a bit of a wise-ass for the sake of humor.
As the “Introduction” on page 1 of the manual tells us, a “Dark Wave” has befallen humanity, causing ancient ruins older than humanity to rise up from the ground, unleashing hordes of monsters to plunder and destroy the continent. Violent storms terrorize the waters at sea while tornadoes and lava eruptions ravage the land. One island seems to be unaffected by the storms, and it will be up to you to decide what becomes of it.
You ultimately have no choice in the matter: the island must be saved. You can make superficial choices in a few key places which alter the appearance of things on the island, but for all practical purposes the story is linear and you are the vessel which gets it from beginning to end.
The backstory to this fictional world is that “the Gods” created the planet and ruled over its people. At some point, power was bestowed to humanity and in their arrogance, they banished the Gods from the planet. This is evidently what brought about the “Dark Wave” and what has caused all of the mayhem and destruction, though it's never made explicitly clear if this is the Gods punishing humanity, a natural occurrence with the imbalance of Nature versus Order, or just some cosmic coincidence. The monsters are there, and you have to deal with them, end of story.
Although that's really just the beginning. Faranga was originally controlled by Don Esteban, who can basically be described as a bandit. By the start of the game, the Don and his men have been exiled from town by the Inquisition – the Warriors of the Order. The Inquisition has come to the island to investigate the ruins rising out of the ground, and to discover the mystery surrounding the island's apparent safety from the storms. Martial law has been applied to the island while they go about their business.
This sets up the two opposing sides of the three-faction system which you must choose between, one of which you will eventually align with – Don Esteban or the Inquisition. No matter where you go you'll find people bad-mouthing both sides. The first NPC you meet, Jan, is a member of the Don's troop, who will make a rather convincing argument for you to join the Don – radical freedom and that whole romantic defiance of authority. The next NPCs are novices of the Holy Flame, the magicians, who will tell you that the Don's men are cutthroats, a bunch of murderous thieves and bandits. Likewise, they tell you that the Order is fair and are just looking out for the well-being of the citizenry, and if you talk to any of the Don's men they'll tell you that the Order is a bunch of power-hungry tyrants looking for gold. Even the town's citizens have mixed opinions of both factions and will give you varying accounts of what makes them good or bad.
This all aims to paint the factions with a mix of gray – there's no morally right or wrong choice to make, no good or evil, just two different flavors of gray. It's kind of a nice feature, because you can play either side and not feel obligated to behave or role-play a certain way (consider most RPGs which include an alignment system; they tend to force to you pick all good or all evil, and make you miss out on rewards for being neutral or penalize you for acting out of character once you've established an alignment).
The actual story is, frankly, bland and uninspired. It boils down to the typical tune of “unsung hero collects magical artifacts in order to save the world from total destruction.” Without revealing any spoilers, this is the plot progression of Risen: Land on the island, join a faction, collect 5 items, enter the main dungeon, collect 5 more items, fight the final boss. The justification for the item collection is arbitrary and doesn't contribute to the “epic scale” of the story in any way, which means that there really isn't any meat to this narrative.
This doesn't necessarily detract from the experience, though, because the bulk of the enjoyment comes from the freedom of exploring the island and doing quests. A backseat story is almost essential for this type of game, which emphasizes gameplay over anything else. You'll easily become so enamored with the core of the gameplay that you'll forget about the story anyway.
Epic storylines in non-linear, free-roam, open-world games are usually immersion breakers to me. The premise is always that the world is going to end unless you do something to stop it. But the forces of evil always seem to wait patiently until you've wasted 60 hours picking your nose and arranging silverware before they begin the invasion. They make it seem like a big deal when really there's no weight to it at all. Risen, at least, doesn't try to force the imperative on you to save the world, because ultimately the story is happening elsewhere.
The ending (and thus the whole experience) makes it seem like the story is just one big prologue for something much greater. We know that there's some crazy stuff happening “on the mainland” but we never get glimpses of it, and until we choose to act our own little island will remain safe from the chaos (due a plot element which won't be spoiled) so there's no big hurry to get to work. No strong or conclusive resolution is given to what becomes of you or the island and its inhabitants, which is just begging for a sequel. Hopefully a sequel will validate everything that happens in Risen, but until then it makes the game's after taste kind of bland and un-fulfilling.
[The Atmosphere]
The atmosphere is largely what makes this game drip with flavor. If the story is not compelling enough to hook your interests, the game world is convincing enough on its own to make you feel motivation to do things. This is something that Piranha Bytes has always excelled at – creating believable, immersing game worlds.
The island itself is entirely hand-crafted – absolutely no terrain is randomly generated, which means that every square meter is unique in some way. Relatively little of the environment feels repetitive; the parts that do get to feel this way are usually the ruins from which you have to collect magical artifacts in order to progress in the story line. These all feel like variations of the same idea. Although you'll notice superficial differences in the layout, structure, and contents of the ruins, once you've thoroughly explored one, you'll feel like you've explored them all. This is largely because they all use similar textures, similar enemies, similar traps, puzzles, and obstacles, as well as similar structures. Fortunately there are only five that are mandatory or particularly demanding, so once they begin to feel stale you can at least be content that they're almost over.
The exterior of the island, however, is vibrant. The Mediterranean environment means that there is dense vegetation, so everywhere you look the screen will be filled with luscious shades of green that just scream “photosynthesis” at you (a little botanical joke about how “alive” it looks). Amidst the vegetation you can almost always see pollen and spores floating around. There aren't a whole lot of trees everywhere – there are forests, swamps, and other areas that are so thick with trees that you can't see much more than a few meters ahead of you – but most of the open areas rely on underfoot vegetation such as shrubs, plants, and grass. When it waves in the wind you really get the feeling of wilderness. Lakes and rivers also show up all across the island. You'll even venture underground in the ruins, and into the heart of the magma volcano.
Aside from the Ancient Central American-inspired ruins, you'll also come across dilapidated tower forts and catacombs. Each one of these areas looks very well worn and will convince you that they're centuries old and haven't been used in a long time (a sign of humanity's Fallen state, perhaps? (that was an intentional juxtaposition of the symbolic title Risen)). There are also mines, caverns, and cave systems which you can explore. Despite being underground or in the side of a mountain, away from the light of day, the caves are surprisingly well-lit and colorful, largely due to crystals and ore veins which jut out from the walls and illuminate your paths in various shades of green, blue, and purple.
Because Faranga is a volcanic island, there's a lot of mountainous terrain – hills, cliffs, plateaus, and waterfalls. Everything slopes upward towards the volcano and levels out near the ocean, so the closer you get to the “heart” of the island, the higher up you have to climb. This creates a lot of different vertical levels to have to explore, which makes the terrain incredibly complex because you can't always see everywhere or go everywhere through direct or conventional means. Even though the island is relatively small (compared to Gothic 3 and other non-linear WRPGs), it looks and feels deceptively bigger than it actually is. You can look on the map and see that you need to move about an inch to the east, but you might then have to take a major detour to get down the face of a cliff or around a canyon. This creates all sorts of little nooks for you to explore and in which to find treasure.
There is no randomly generated loot, which also adds to the atmosphere. Games with random loot generation tend to make me feel like I'm playing the lottery, and that my success is based more on luck than on actual skill, so it's nice that Risen features particular loot in particular places. Such a system means that you come across all sorts of challenges across the map, and you can either save it for later when you're stronger, or find some clever way to beat it, and feel the satisfaction of collecting your just rewards. If you explore enough and are skilled enough you can find hordes of loot and treasure much sooner than you ordinarily would come by them just by doing the main quests, which definitely makes you feel accomplished.
Most of these challenges are blocked off by strong enemies, and in fact, most all enemies in Risen are dangerous. Enemies don't scale to your level, and the island is not organized by level (aside from the general rule that stronger enemies inhabit the regions directly in and around the volcano), so you're very likely to encounter groups of enemies that are much too strong for you. This will often require you to avoid them, train up, and come back later. At the start of gameplay, you're pretty much limited to fighting spikey over-sized rats, sea vultures, and young wolves. Quite literally, anything else will be far too difficult for you.
But even these initial monsters will destroy you when you first start out. It basically means that you'll constantly be challenged up until the final stretch of the game because there's always something stronger than you. Death is very easy to come by because most enemies will, at various times, kill you in just a few hits, so you will die a lot. This makes quick-save an essential tool to getting around the game and makes it so that you have to be careful of what you're doing at any time. The world feels very dangerous and makes you cautious, which is something that few other games accomplish.
Human NPCs are, for the most part, exceptionally well-voiced. There are some characters that are naturally more generic and bland than others, but this is fitting of their character – a downtrodden farmer isn't going to have a lively, energetic voice or use a bunch of complex language. Others are right around the adequate mark, the point where the execution is so good because it's subtle. If you have the opportunity to sit back and think “Wow, this is some great voice acting!” then you've already lost the immersion because you've remembered that you're playing a game. Most characters won't impress you with their voice acting, but that's part of the unsung brilliance of it because it feels so natural and convincing.
Most characters have their own daily schedules – they work in the mornings, they go to the taverns in the evening, and they sleep at night. “Work” sometimes means standing in front of their stalls if they're merchants, but there are a lot of people who spend time cooking on fires, sweeping the floor, sawing logs, tilling land and picking crops, and so forth. Sometimes you'll catch them have a swig of beer or take a puff on a cigarette, while others might be found playing a lute or chatting with each other. There are a couple of characters who seems to stand around 24/7 doing absolutely nothing, which can be an immersion breaker if you think about it, but these characters are relatively few and it's easy to disregard.
The soundtrack is subdued for the most part. There aren't any catchy jingles or easily recognizable melodies which you'll hear, and you certainly won't find yourself humming any of the tunes. The music plays the role that it's supposed to: ambiance. Most of the time you won't even notice it because it's just very simple and subtle chords with musical sound effects. Every so often an acoustic guitar will come in and play a harmonious theme, and this is about the closest to conventional “music” that you'll hear. All-the-while you can hear other ambient sound effects – vegetation rustling in the wind, birds chirping, rocks sliding down a cliff, sometimes the roar of the volcano, the waves on the beach, people talking in town, etc. These are all very easy to overlook, again, because they feel so natural and convincing, but they add so many layers to the immersion that it's simply indescribable.
[The Gameplay]
A majority of your interest and enjoyment in Risen will come from the simple minute-by-minute gameplay. In terms of adventure style gameplay, you spend a lot of time talking to people, fulfilling quests, and exploring the island. The quests are pretty well-implemented, and very few involve simple item fetching or monster slaying (excluding the glaring main questline which is nothing but fetching and slaying).
Side-quests, however, usually have some flavor of detective work and problem solving typical of an adventure game. They usually begin with a simple prompt which only gives you a vague notion of what must eventually be accomplished. For example, you might get a quest to find someone to buy a fish stall, or to figure out who's behind the local robberies, or to break a treasure seeker out of jail, or to find a pirate's treasure. To solve these quests, you almost always have to go around and talk to people to gather information and find evidence. In most cases, you'll have to snoop around and find the evidence yourself because the game won't explicitly tell you where to get it.
There's relatively little hand-holding in Risen. The quests require you to figure things out for yourself through exploration, and sometimes even trial and error. Even the start of the game doesn't give you a whole lot of guidance on what you should be doing, you're merely let loose and it's up to you to get things done. This is incredibly satisfying because it (generally) makes it feel like you have actual, substantial input on the game. Even if what you do is scripted to happen that way, it feels creative and rewarding because you got from point A to point B on your own.
For those who might be less patient, there's a quest map which will indicate a basic location or character on the quest map. This sometimes feels like cheating to me, because you can come to a solution without really accomplishing it, but it will be necessary at times (notably, when you get a quest to find a series of unmarked graves, which are marked on your map. Even then, the actual graves will be difficult to find because the map isn't as detailed as the actual environment is).
Although most quests tend to have only one outcome, various faction quests (which you have to do in the first chapter, in order to join the faction) have various outcomes and consequences depending on which side you want to support. Most of the quests in Harbor Town will require you to make permanent changes to the composition of the town based on what you do. The faction quests within town almost always overlap – both the Don's men and the Order might want the same item, and you have to decide whom to give to, or whether you should root out one of the Don's moles to the Inquisition or pull one over their eyes. It's often the case that quests become intertwined, where you have to complete some quests alongside one another in order to make progress in either one. Think of it like side-quests of side-quests of side-quests that create a web of chain reactions.
Exploration of the island is also done on a free leash. You have access to virtually everywhere at the start of the game, and aside from plot-centric ruins, you can choose to go wherever you want, whenever you want. The manner and pace in which you level up and explore is entirely up to you. It usually requires trial and error to figure out what enemies you're capable of handling throughout the game. The great thing is that you're usually rewarded for taking the effort to kill enemies before you chronologically (or statistically) *should* be fighting them.
Every time you level up you gain 10 Learning Points, which you can use with a human NPC known as a “trainer” who will instruct you in whatever task it is you seek. Most combat skills require a full 10 LP to “level up” (each can go up to level 10), while most of the non-combat related skills and talents (such as sneaking, pick-pocketing, alchemy, smithing, etc) cost only 5. Aside from these areas, you can also improve your strength, dexterity, and mana at a one-to-one ratio for LP. Strength and dexterity add damage values to melee weapons and bows, respectively, but are also the threshold requirements in order to equip the various weaponry.
On average, you should reach level 27-30 in one playthrough, which equals 270-300 LP to spend. As a general rule you can specialize in one combat area, gain proficiency is a second field, and still have enough LP to raise your stats and learn some of the peripheral talents and skills, but it won't be possible to master all builds unless you're extremely diligent about what you invest in. However, any more than two combat skills will probably be a moot accomplishment because you can only effectively use one at a time, and in all likelihood you'll prefer one over the other anyway.
Alchemy allows you brew potions, which at lower levels limits you to simple HP/MP recovery by gathering herbs and other ingredients. At level 3 you can make permanent stat-boosting potions using limited, rare ingredients, but this can save you a lot of LP if you can find the valuable Hero's Crown necessary for the permanent potions. Smithing allows you to create swords, though the selection is pretty limited. You can find better swords for free, but it might allow you to get stronger weapons sooner. The actual smithing process is more complex than just one button click, however – it involves the full process of heating a steel blank in a forge, hammering it into shape on an anvil, cooling it in a water trough, and then sharpening it on a circular whetstone. With the smithing talent, you can also forge magical rings and amulets which give you stat bonuses and defensive attributes.
Lock-picking will allow you to pick locks of various difficulties with lock-picks, while pick-pocketing will allow you to take items directly out of a character's inventory (though again, the selection isn't always great). With animal gutting, you can take trophies like claws, wings, teeth, horns, and skins from animals, which you can sell for profit or use as ingredients in scroll-making, another talent which allows you to make your own spell scrolls from raw materials. Sneaking is self-explanatory. Prospecting is only essential if you intend to smith, because that's essentially the only way to get valuable iron, gold, and obsidian ore. Acrobatics halves the damage when you fall from distances.
Ultimately, some of the skills are more useful than others – alchemy and lock-picking are perhaps the only strongly recommended skills, because the others are useless to certain builds, can be learned with a magic ring, or can be circumvented entirely. Still, it's nice that the options exist. You can also interact with many pieces of the environment like fires, stoves, and cauldrons to cook food if you have the recipe and ingredients. Many other things in the environment can be interacted with, though they have less practical use, such as chairs, beds, hookahs, benches, table saws, etc.
Armor is a rare item in Piranha Bytes' games, because these are tied to your faction. Your armor represents who you are, so you only get armor in complete sets (as opposed to individual items) as you move through the ranks of your faction. You'll start the game with absolutely nothing, but you can get some basic clothes from merchants (or through dexterous theft), and you can get an upgrade usually at the start of new chapters in the story. Weapons, on the other hand, are far easier to come by.
Each faction has its own basic specializations. Don Esteban's crew and the Mages of the Holy Flame are the two opposite ends of the spectrum – the mages can use all forms of magic, while the Don's men are limited to scroll magic, which anyone can use. Thus, aligning with the Don will mean being a dexterous hunter or a burly warrior, while aligning with the Mages in the monastery will mean casting fireballs, magic bullets, and casting various other buffs and support spells. They get melee combat proficiency in the form of staves, but can't effectively use swords or axes (you technically can if you train these areas before joining). The Warriors of the Order are a balance between the two extremes because they can learn all melee combat and even use Crystal magic, basic offensive damage-dealing spells.
Combat is arguably one of Risen's greatest strengths, despite some hiccups in the system. (I never used magic in my first playthrough, since I aligned with the Don – I'll update this review when I get around to a Mage replay.) Combat is done in real-time, which means that you control each movement and each sword stroke you make. At the start you have no training in combat fields, so the number of attacks and combos you have is limited, but you can unlock more diverse attacks as you level up your skill with the weapon. Aside from forward combos, you can also make lateral swings which will attack a wide area, and at later levels you can charge your attacks to do increased damage and recoil. You can combine the attacks in virtually any way possible, with the limitation being either 3 or 4 at a time before you have to start the combo again.
You can use your melee weapons to defend attacks from some enemies, but only a shield will block all enemies' attacks. If you intend to use axes or two-handed swords, you'll need to rely on the game's dodging mechanics to avoid damage, since you won't have a free hand to equip a shield (though at higher levels you can equip two-handed weapons in one-hand, sacrificing a little bit of power and reach for extra defense). By double-tapping a direction key (or the jump key as you move a certain direction) you perform something equivalent to a jedi-ninja slide, which quickly moves you out of the way. You can do this to circle around an enemy's flank as it attacks or to simply back out of the way. You can still perform these maneuvers with a shield, but you have to drop your defensive state to do so.
As you engage enemies, the game will auto-lock on the target, which will allow you to strafe circles around and it and (generally) keep your eyes on it. It's possible for the opponent to break your target lock, though, if it jumps to the side, which will require you to manually turn and face it again. It works well against single opponents, but can be problematic against groups because it might not target the one you wanted, and in order to break the target you have to drop your offensive or defensive stance (which leaves you vulnerable to attack).
The system is well-balanced between the skill of the player and the statistics of the combatants. Most stronger enemies can be defeated at level 1 if you're patient and skilled enough, but it will only take them one or two hits to kill you. In realistic terms, it means that you have to be at a certain level to face certain enemies, but if you're determined enough you can get by most obstacles on pure skill.
Each enemy has a different set of attacks and movement patterns which you have to learn to interpret and react to. It incorporates both the twitch-based reaction speed of, for example, a first person shooter, yet attacks and sequences are methodical enough that if you keep a mindful eye on what's happening, you can still approach it in a strategic manner. You'll have to time counter-parries in order to deflect attacks with a sword and dodge at the critical moments. The timing of your sword clicks also determines how fast you do your combos; if you get it right, your attacks are fast, but if you click too fast or too slow, or click irregularly out of rhythm, your attacks go much slower.
Ranged combat seems to function on a more consistent basis than melee combat. Bows and Crossbows, aside from having different dexterity and strength requirements, work differently from one another. With bows, you remain in a third-person perspective (though the camera tilts down and back a little to match your aiming axis) and a vertical cross hair appears. Arrows will arc with gravity, so you have to aim higher up if the targets are further away, and the longer you pull back on the bowstring the further the arrow flies. With practice you can easily get used to the limits of the arrows and can use them accordingly. Crossbows are similar, except you can right-click to zoom the camera to an extreme over-the-shoulder angle. Bolts fly straight, they don't arc, and you can't determine the amount of pressure behind it, which means reloading takes longer. However, crossbows tends to do more damage, at the expense of their slower firing rate.
In all fairness, ranged combat works. It gets the job done on a minimal, required level, but it lacks a certain amount of input that the melee combat requires. To me, it just wasn't satisfying to use ranged combat on a regular basis, because all it amounts to is “point and click” and a bunch of backwards running. It doesn't require as much skill as melee, since enemies will charge pretty much straight at you, making it easy to line shots up, and doesn't have any sort of dynamic qualities to it; if you can outrun your enemies, every fight will be the same, excepting how many bolts or arrows you use.
Of course, by late game you'll have explored enough and leveled up enough that combat really won't be a challenge. But, I suppose at that point you sort of deserve it given how challenging the beginning is.
[The Issues]
That said, every fight seems to also add an extra computation to the balance of skill and stats, something that I will officially refer to as the Bull$#!%-Factor. This BS-Factor has perhaps a 60% chance of throwing itself into the middle of your fights and can make the combat imbalanced, flawed, and maddeningly frustrating if it strikes.
The most notable example of the BS-Factor is that, when you're fighting groups of enemies (which is pretty frequent) the auto lock will sometimes switch targets in the middle of the fight and in-between sword swings. It's unpredictable and often causes you to swing at an enemy that's out of reach (while closer enemies rip your ribs out from your flanks) or to turn and expose yourself to enemies that you had wanted to keep in front of you. Most of the problems could have been avoided had there been no locking feature at all (which just feels restrictive if you can't control it), or if you could have manually selected and toggled your locks like in the original Gothics.
The auto lock will sometimes wind up on one enemy which is relatively close to you, with another enemy or two immediately behind them. Logically, you'd think the enemy behind the one you have targeted would not be able to hit you, but it seems that the target on lock will defend your attacks while the one behind it will clip its attack through its comrade and blast you.
Other than that, it seems like all of the enemies have quicker animations for their attacks than you do. If every attack takes 1 second to perform, perhaps the first 0.5 seconds of that swing will involve you pulling the sword back. This is reasonable considering that's how a sword actually works (unless you're holding it in a stance that can just go right into a swing, but that's neither here nor there), however, the enemies' damage and animation can happen *after* you begin your swing but *before* you actually land your attack.
It also makes it impossible to counter-parry some enemies because you can't realistically react to a 0.25 second attack animation, because there's simply nothing to react to. It means that you have to sometimes blindly guess at when they're going to be attacking you. This sort of means that it takes skill to *anticipate* what's going to happen, rather than react to, but some enemies are inconsistent in their attack patterns and are just unpredictable and frustrating to try to anticipate. Not to mention it seemed like half of the time, my counter-parries didn't register, and instead of doing the parry, the character raised his shield for a second, or worse, did nothing at all (note that a parry is a single click of the right mouse button, whereas a full block is a full hold of the RMB). Maybe my mouse is just faulty, I don't know.
It's equally annoying when these same enemies are the ones who seem to block 90% of the time, which means you just pound on them for zero damage. When you go to charge your attack to send their shield into recoil, thus exposing them, they interrupt your attack. And if you sit and wait for them to attack, hoping to counter-parry, you're back to the impossible anticipation problem.
Sometimes, enemies will do forward attacks, and you can still get hit as you're sliding around to their flank, despite the fact that it was not a lateral attack that they were doing. Boars are infamous for this.
Furthermore, whenever you're hit, you recoil. It's normally not that big of a deal, but it seems excessive in this case. Aside from flailing your arms wildly and grunting like a seal each time you get hit (an animation that seems to be the game laughing at you for being such an idiot), taking damage cancels and interrupts any action that you were already in the process of making – most crucially, that means that your attacks get interrupted and never get to land.
It might have been nice if at least when you were already doing something, the recoil effect was negated. If you're standing there and an opponent hits your flank or your backside or genuinely breaks through your defenses, that would be acceptable for the recoil, but it drives me crazy when I try to string a combo forward and an enemy gets three or four hits on me while I'm trying to make my clicks because I've gotten “chain stunned.”
With all of these potential BS-Factors, it's easily possible to do the same fight twice and have the outcomes be polar opposites, purely based on the random factor of whether the game decides to screw you over or not. Generally, however, it rewards the patient player who takes their time with each fight.
The problem with this is that, by mid to late game, you've probably already explored a majority of the island, you've already reached maximum proficiency in your weapons, you've already fought most varieties of enemies, and you're ready to just get on with the story. It's easy to become impatient, especially when the plot sends you on endless fetch quests and dungeon crawls.
There also comes a time in the game where, statistically, you're strong enough that enemies just shouldn't be much of a threat because you can kill them in two or three hits, a point where it shouldn't have to take a bunch delicate mind games to win. I normally would praise this, but Chapters 3 and 4 notoriously paste Lizardmen all over the map with no other variety of enemy to fight (alright, sometimes you get an Ashbeast or a Ghoul, or perhaps even a Brontok or a Scorpion, but there are about 20 Lizardmen for every one of these). I think I had literally killed over 200 Lizardmen by the end of the game, which, simply to say, gets incredibly repetitive and I lose patience for it.
The amount of game content is disproportionately balanced; you'll probably spend 15-20 hours in the first chapter alone, and then no more than 5 hours in each of the remaining three. It kind of gives you a false impression of what you can expect, because after the incredibly atmospheric non-linear first chapter, the rest of the content just feels stale and tasteless.
After all of the complex questing, character development, and exploration, you're tasked with two chapters worth of item collecting. This isn't even the item collecting typical of JRPGs or Fantasy-RPGs in general, where you have to travel across continents, go on epic journeys, conquer diverse dungeons and bosses, or even go on massive side-quests for the items. Each item in the final chapter is hidden in one of the risen ruins, which should take no more than 30 minutes worth of Lizard-slaying, Switch-flipping, Puzzle-solving, and Trap-avoiding to walk in, get the item, and walk out like nothing happened. And each dungeon uses the exact same puzzles so there's really not a lot of diversity.
Although you can do a lot of exploring on your own pace, it's sometimes not advisable to do so because you can complete quests without ever actually picking them up. This may sound like a benefit (and indeed it is, because you don't want to break the game or quests by inadvertently doing things out of order), but it's an immersion breaker when you're off doing your own thing and see a floating message pop up that says “Quest Completed!” Not to mention, whenever this happens I feel like I've just missed out on game content and other opportunities for experience points, because I'd effectively skipped all of the in-between stages. Each time it happens it makes me regret going off on my own so much and so early, like it discourages free roaming gameplay.
There's a really limited number of weapons and magic spells available compared to the other Gothics (especially in terms of bows and crossbows), which is definitely a disappointment. There just aren't enough weapons for you to make small progressions as you go through the chapters. I practically went from the starting 15-damage Sword straight to an 80-damage Berserker Sword within the first chapter, and only got two swords (which are only obtainable through the main quest) which were better. In this regard, there's really not much for you to save up for because you can easily get 6 or 7 levels and have enough strength to use some of the strongest weapons in the game within only a few hours (if you know where to get them). Or, you accumulate a mass of LP with nothing to spend them on, because there aren't any weapons with higher thresholds readily available – you often don't have goals to be striving for, in this regard.
Compared to the environment and architecture (and even to wild animals and monsters), human NPCs look kind of pathetic in quality. Generic NPCs (nameless people dropped in to populate the town, who have no purpose for any quests or services) look the same, or at least you'll see different combinations of the same clothes and faces with a few color changes, and even a few important characters' faces show up in other places. Even though you probably wouldn't want to, you can't actually talk to the generic filler characters; they just make snide or impatient comments at you. Even unique, named NPCs won't talk to you if you've exhausted your dialogue trees with them, which is simply an immersion breaker when an NPC whom you're supposed to be good buddies with tells you “stop bothering me” and shrugs you off. There are perhaps only three faces and character models for females, which you'll notice very quickly, and some of them just have odd proportions in their chests.
In conversation, characters blink, move their mouths, and make very basic upper body gestures, but there's no other facial expression or good lip syncing. This doesn't bother me too much since I prefer to read the subtitles and let their voice “fill in the gaps in my head,” but if you like cinematic quality “cut scenes” then it's definitely sub-par. If you pay attention to their gestures, you begin to notice that there are maybe only five things that they can do, and they're obligated to make some kind of motion at the start of each line of dialogue. It just makes it seem formulaic and not very sincere, because the motions may as well be randomly pasted into it.
The story doesn't really go anywhere at the end. After your mindless item collecting you're sent to face the final boss (which is itself kind of a childish platforming boss, and the immersion is broken when floating tutorial messages tell you exactly what to do to beat it (but still, it's an improvement on Gothic and Gothic 2's bosses)) and then it cuts to an abrupt end. The feeling upon completing this 30-40 hour game is “so what was the point of all of that” because there's simply no explanation of what becomes of your efforts at the end. Even though the first chapter is great, and bits and pieces in the later chapters are good, the ending can almost invalidate all the fun you had at the start.
One of the more noticeable flaws of Risen is that there's really only one town (it's not truly a *flaw* but this decision caused a lot of missed potential). There are two other outposts, Don Esteban's bandit camp in the swamp and the Mages' Monastery, but both of these are pretty much central to their respective faction. If you decide to join the Don, you won't spend much time at all in the Monastery and will miss a lot of quests there until it's time to get on with the main story. Had there been one or two other major outposts with human NPCs and quests which would become central in a later chapter, a lot of the shallow feeling could have been alleviated.
The action leading up to the final boss fight also lacks a certain amount of polish to make it memorable or even that exciting. Essentially, all that happens is a bunch of Lizardmen get spread across the island and the volcano starts to spew a massive column of black smoke in the air. Now this is just me, but armor-clad, bipedal lizards wielding swords running around on the island (and seemingly standing around doing nothing at all) just isn't End-Of-The-World quality chaos. Had the armies of evil been something more alien/foreign (in the sense that it is something unfamiliar and truly mysterious) it could have been convincing, but the lizards are just kind of cheesy when you think about it.
Furthermore, I wish the game world were more dynamic at this critical point in the story when the forces of evil are actually unleashed on the island. The Monastery has a brief moment of excitement when you walk in and find Lizardmen literally killing everyone depending on how quickly you move to fight them, but nowhere else really shows a dramatic change. If some of the terrain could have been converted to burning wastelands, segments of the island could have been completely sliced through and cut off from the rest of the island, then I might have been feeling a stronger sense of dread and impending doom.
It might have been nice if the titular ruins hadn't risen before the player even starts the game. There's much less of a “holy crap” feeling to them (which I would think is the intention) when they're just sort of there and some random guy tells you about them. It would have been much more dramatic, for example, to play the first chapter and *then* have the ruins rise up and unleash the various beasts (there could still be wild animals in the environment, but not the monsters), especially since you don't gain access to most of them until later anyway.
[The Run-Down]
Graphics: 8/10
The graphics processing “only” uses DirectX 9, so it's not pushing any technological boundaries or reaching into new territories. It makes up for this with the level of detail and artistic direction, however. Everything looks not only believably realistic, but it even goes one step further to the realm of fantastic. I may never have seen such a beautiful sunset in a game before. There's a lot of variety to the scenery, from swamps, meadows, lakes, forests, cliffs, mountains, volcanoes, crypts, ruins, beaches, and volcanoes, each scene having a distinct and memorable look and feel. Some of the character models don't look quite right – faces in particular look rigid and “plastic-y” and many are re-used for multiple characters. The gestures and animations that people make in conversation can seem really contrived and repetitive if you look at them too closely, and there's next to no actual facial expressions and weak lip syncing during dialogue, but these are minor issues. The look and feel of jumping is definitely weird.
Sound: 9/10
The level of auditory ambiance is phenomenal; crickets and birds chirping, bullfrogs croaking, the rustling of leaves and branches in the wind, the dull roar of the wind itself, the sound of the volcano whenever it quakes, the echoes of the waves against the beach. Every sound effect seems to have been deliberately recorded for that specific purpose; none are noticeably recycled or sound out of place. Because of how dense the vegetation is you often hear wild beasts rustling around or snorting before you can actually see them, which is simply delightful. Although no melodies stand out as truly distinct or memorable, the music does a superb job of setting the mood as you roam around and never becomes intrusive enough to distract you from the immersion. I was absolutely elated to hear a Gothic riff in the end credits.
Gameplay: 7/10
Aside from a few glaring problems, this would have scored at least a 9. It's got a lot of great “old school RPG” aspects to it, reminiscent of RPGs from the mid 80s to mid 90s and is definitely in the vein of Piranha Bytes' Gothic series, which is a blessing and a curse; it's refreshing to play a game like this in today's market, and to see some nostalgia to the original Gothics, but at the same time Risen hasn't moved forward substantially from them, so it does feel like an old experience at times. Regardless, the first chapter is brilliant with lots to explore, complex quests with different outcomes, and sincere input from the player. After that it begins to go from excellence to mere adequacy, and the latter half simply doesn't stack up to the first. Combat is surprisingly deep but has a lot of surface-level problems that become frustrating. Overall, it means that the sum is less than its parts; while it provides a lot of great moments at the start, and a few as you go along, the rest begins to feel shallow and not worth its weight in gold.
Story: 6/10
There's really nothing here that's all that unique or interesting. In fact, what little plot there actually is feel more like a general premise than an actual plot. A plot is supposed to be a series of linear events that lead from a beginning to a conclusion, usually with forms of rising action and conflict. Once Risen's story gets going (I don't fault the game for not having any plot in the first chapter) it really doesn't go anywhere. Instead you're given distractions which seem like arbitrary gameplay-lengthening gimmicks, rather than sincere attempts at a plot. As I said earlier, this really wouldn't be an issue in this kind of an RPG, but the shallow feeling of the whole second half could easily have been spared had there been some substantial plot and questing involved. Despite this, the actual premise is quite good, and the amount of detail in which the exposition is set up is pretty engaging. This makes the island (and notably, the atmosphere) compelling right from the start of the game, even if the plot doesn't contribute in later chapters.
Replayability: 7/10
There's definitely good possibility for replay here, because you can try a different faction (which should have you doing different quests at the start of the game, as well as give you a different perspective on the story), and you can also take a different approach to combat. However, these differences may only have a strong effect on the first chapter and the rest of the game may become even more tedious a second time around since you've already done the shallow fetch quests. It's possible to become burned out after 15-20 hours and not feel a strong urge to finish a second playthrough, especially since ultimately, the final boss fight has you in the same situation regardless of class or faction. Since there's no random loot, terrain, or monster generation it's possible to plan ahead a second time around and do things that you missed, and get things done sooner and more efficiently, which might prove satisfying.
[The Conclusion]
Risen does a lot of things well, but unfortunately there have been games in the past which have done these same things even better, so there's really nothing new to see here. It can be a treat if you're looking for more of the old-school RPG-style gameplay, but that's about all it truly amounts to, “more of the same.”
Many of the complaints that I mentioned in the [Issues] section can be written off as nitpicking, but the biggest flaws remain: the tendency for the combat system to hiccup and cause a lot of unnecessary deaths and reloading, a *whole* lot of missed potential (which is just disappointing because you know it was possible at one point), and imbalanced game content making the last half feel rushed and shallow.
As a long time fan of the Gothic games, Risen is a fun game for a while but doesn't have the same overall quality as the originals. It's definitely worth playing if you have a taste and appreciation for WRPGs, but I suspect that gamers who have grown up on Oblivion and Fable may find it a difficult game to get into. If 30-40 hours of play time is worth $50 to you, then by all means get Risen; if you're looking for a truly great game with lasting impressions and a sweet aftertaste, then $50 may be steep.
Ultimately, Risen is a solid game, but lacks a certain amount of content, quality, and sheer “oomph” to warrant the label of a classic. Worth the time and money to play, but don't expect too much from it.
Risen is the latest game from Piranha Bytes, a small German developer known for their previous games in the Gothic series, which made its debut in 2001 and has since received two sequels and an expansion. The first two Gothics were highly praised for their gameplay and atmospheres, although neither was without bugs, technical problems, and interface issues which made both games receive mixed reviews praising the core but criticizing the implementation. Gothic 3 took a new approach to the formula and expanded the game world into a truly non-linear experience of epic proportions. However, it suffered even more performance issues and incorporated a particularly weak combat system.
Risen was quite obviously inspired by the Gothic games and is very similar in style; it could easily be called the fourth Gothic, if the Nameless Hero were to wind up shipwrecked on a new island. All of what made each of the three Gothics great can be found within Risen, however, none of this is done as well as in its predecessors. Still, Risen is a fun and satisfying continuation of PB's efforts, and is definitely a pleasant sight after the catastrophic response to G3. Although Risen doesn't do anything that's truly new or revolutionary, if you have a taste for old-school computer RPGs, you'll probably find enough of it here. Despite its strengths, there are a few problems that pull the game's overall quality from what could have been sheer excellence down to mere adequacy.
[The Premise]
Risen is what would best be called an adventure role-playing game with action. You play a nameless castaway who has just been washed up on the beach of a Mediterranean island. Immediately following the introduction cinematic, you begin your new life on the island of Faranga. Initially, this means finding a shelter from the storm, defending yourself from the wild beasties, and figuring out what civilization on the island is like through four chapters of gameplay.
Gameplay is like typical “old-school” computer RPGs. You explore, talk to people, pick up quests, kill monsters, find loot, level-up, and eventually do battle with epic foes. All of this is done with a third-person behind-the-back camera system. Although it can be classified as “open world” it's not entirely non-linear – after the introductory chapter the plot and quests converge into a semi-linear deal, but you are free to explore the island at your own pace. Very few areas are off limits, which means you have access to the entire island right at the start; the only obstacle will be enemies which you may have to avoid or come back to.
There is no character creation; everyone plays the nameless castaway and you don't get to pick his starting stats. Every playthrough will begin with a “blank slate” of minimum stats. As you kill monsters, complete quests, and gain experience, you level up and earn “Learning Points” which you can use to increase your stats, skills, and talents. This is done by finding a trainer within the world and having him (or her) teach you. Aside from basic close-combat melee skills (swords, axes, staves), you can also level up ranged weapons (bows and crossbows), deal in magic (with rune and crystal varieties, though different factions can only use certain types), as well as learn various other talents (animal skinning, sneaking, acrobatics, lock-picking, pick-pocketing, smithing, alchemy, etc).
In the first chapter you'll be tasked with joining one of three Factions – Don Esteban, the Mages of the Holy Flame, or the Warriors of the Order. The faction system provides different perspectives on the story and gameplay, and you'll have a chance to explore and learn about them before having to make a choice (the exception being that you can be forced to join the Order if they catch you in criminal acts, which in this case, is being outside of town). There is no right or wrong, good or bad choice to be made in the factions, it's purely a matter of taste and opinion.
You'll continue to explore the island, do quests, and upgrade yourself in the process. From there, you go on to learn about the mysterious nature of Faranga, what terrible things are happening on the mainland, why the ruins are rising up from the ground, and what lies in the Volcano at the heart of the island.
[The Narrative]
There is no backstory to the main character, other than what is seen in the opening cinematic: that he is a stow-away on an official ship bound for the island Faranga. A later scene embellishes his ambiguous background when a character asks what he was doing stowing away on the ship, to which he merely responds (paraphrased): “I don't know exactly what I was hoping to find, but I wasn't running away from anything.” My guess is that he was looking for a purpose in life and was hoping to find it elsewhere, but I'm looking further than the game expects me to.
Our nameless hero's lack of a real background, generic facial appearance, blank expression, and monotonous voice acting certainly make him seem like a boring and generic character within the first few minutes of gameplay. This is essentially true, because he really isn't that deep. It's supposed to make him a more accessible character, to make it easier for the player to assume his role. It works in an aesthetic sort of way, but there's little role-playing to truly develop him into a reflection of yourself (or what you want to be). He occasionally makes sarcastic or witty comments in response to some of the characters' snide or elusive attitudes, but it seems less of a personality trait, and more like the writers making a very subtle penetration of the fourth wall.
I often found myself laughing at and agreeing with his cynical (and sometimes Captain Obvious) interpretation of the world. It's almost reminiscent of 2004's The Bard's Tale, in which the Bard makes satirical mockery of fantasy-RPG cliches and axioms. Risen, of course, never goes to the extremes like The Bard's Tale, and it's clear that the intention for the game was not to make fun of itself (and indeed this is not the effect); it is simply to make the nameless hero a bit of a wise-ass for the sake of humor.
As the “Introduction” on page 1 of the manual tells us, a “Dark Wave” has befallen humanity, causing ancient ruins older than humanity to rise up from the ground, unleashing hordes of monsters to plunder and destroy the continent. Violent storms terrorize the waters at sea while tornadoes and lava eruptions ravage the land. One island seems to be unaffected by the storms, and it will be up to you to decide what becomes of it.
You ultimately have no choice in the matter: the island must be saved. You can make superficial choices in a few key places which alter the appearance of things on the island, but for all practical purposes the story is linear and you are the vessel which gets it from beginning to end.
The backstory to this fictional world is that “the Gods” created the planet and ruled over its people. At some point, power was bestowed to humanity and in their arrogance, they banished the Gods from the planet. This is evidently what brought about the “Dark Wave” and what has caused all of the mayhem and destruction, though it's never made explicitly clear if this is the Gods punishing humanity, a natural occurrence with the imbalance of Nature versus Order, or just some cosmic coincidence. The monsters are there, and you have to deal with them, end of story.
Although that's really just the beginning. Faranga was originally controlled by Don Esteban, who can basically be described as a bandit. By the start of the game, the Don and his men have been exiled from town by the Inquisition – the Warriors of the Order. The Inquisition has come to the island to investigate the ruins rising out of the ground, and to discover the mystery surrounding the island's apparent safety from the storms. Martial law has been applied to the island while they go about their business.
This sets up the two opposing sides of the three-faction system which you must choose between, one of which you will eventually align with – Don Esteban or the Inquisition. No matter where you go you'll find people bad-mouthing both sides. The first NPC you meet, Jan, is a member of the Don's troop, who will make a rather convincing argument for you to join the Don – radical freedom and that whole romantic defiance of authority. The next NPCs are novices of the Holy Flame, the magicians, who will tell you that the Don's men are cutthroats, a bunch of murderous thieves and bandits. Likewise, they tell you that the Order is fair and are just looking out for the well-being of the citizenry, and if you talk to any of the Don's men they'll tell you that the Order is a bunch of power-hungry tyrants looking for gold. Even the town's citizens have mixed opinions of both factions and will give you varying accounts of what makes them good or bad.
This all aims to paint the factions with a mix of gray – there's no morally right or wrong choice to make, no good or evil, just two different flavors of gray. It's kind of a nice feature, because you can play either side and not feel obligated to behave or role-play a certain way (consider most RPGs which include an alignment system; they tend to force to you pick all good or all evil, and make you miss out on rewards for being neutral or penalize you for acting out of character once you've established an alignment).
The actual story is, frankly, bland and uninspired. It boils down to the typical tune of “unsung hero collects magical artifacts in order to save the world from total destruction.” Without revealing any spoilers, this is the plot progression of Risen: Land on the island, join a faction, collect 5 items, enter the main dungeon, collect 5 more items, fight the final boss. The justification for the item collection is arbitrary and doesn't contribute to the “epic scale” of the story in any way, which means that there really isn't any meat to this narrative.
This doesn't necessarily detract from the experience, though, because the bulk of the enjoyment comes from the freedom of exploring the island and doing quests. A backseat story is almost essential for this type of game, which emphasizes gameplay over anything else. You'll easily become so enamored with the core of the gameplay that you'll forget about the story anyway.
Epic storylines in non-linear, free-roam, open-world games are usually immersion breakers to me. The premise is always that the world is going to end unless you do something to stop it. But the forces of evil always seem to wait patiently until you've wasted 60 hours picking your nose and arranging silverware before they begin the invasion. They make it seem like a big deal when really there's no weight to it at all. Risen, at least, doesn't try to force the imperative on you to save the world, because ultimately the story is happening elsewhere.
The ending (and thus the whole experience) makes it seem like the story is just one big prologue for something much greater. We know that there's some crazy stuff happening “on the mainland” but we never get glimpses of it, and until we choose to act our own little island will remain safe from the chaos (due a plot element which won't be spoiled) so there's no big hurry to get to work. No strong or conclusive resolution is given to what becomes of you or the island and its inhabitants, which is just begging for a sequel. Hopefully a sequel will validate everything that happens in Risen, but until then it makes the game's after taste kind of bland and un-fulfilling.
[The Atmosphere]
The atmosphere is largely what makes this game drip with flavor. If the story is not compelling enough to hook your interests, the game world is convincing enough on its own to make you feel motivation to do things. This is something that Piranha Bytes has always excelled at – creating believable, immersing game worlds.
The island itself is entirely hand-crafted – absolutely no terrain is randomly generated, which means that every square meter is unique in some way. Relatively little of the environment feels repetitive; the parts that do get to feel this way are usually the ruins from which you have to collect magical artifacts in order to progress in the story line. These all feel like variations of the same idea. Although you'll notice superficial differences in the layout, structure, and contents of the ruins, once you've thoroughly explored one, you'll feel like you've explored them all. This is largely because they all use similar textures, similar enemies, similar traps, puzzles, and obstacles, as well as similar structures. Fortunately there are only five that are mandatory or particularly demanding, so once they begin to feel stale you can at least be content that they're almost over.
The exterior of the island, however, is vibrant. The Mediterranean environment means that there is dense vegetation, so everywhere you look the screen will be filled with luscious shades of green that just scream “photosynthesis” at you (a little botanical joke about how “alive” it looks). Amidst the vegetation you can almost always see pollen and spores floating around. There aren't a whole lot of trees everywhere – there are forests, swamps, and other areas that are so thick with trees that you can't see much more than a few meters ahead of you – but most of the open areas rely on underfoot vegetation such as shrubs, plants, and grass. When it waves in the wind you really get the feeling of wilderness. Lakes and rivers also show up all across the island. You'll even venture underground in the ruins, and into the heart of the magma volcano.
Aside from the Ancient Central American-inspired ruins, you'll also come across dilapidated tower forts and catacombs. Each one of these areas looks very well worn and will convince you that they're centuries old and haven't been used in a long time (a sign of humanity's Fallen state, perhaps? (that was an intentional juxtaposition of the symbolic title Risen)). There are also mines, caverns, and cave systems which you can explore. Despite being underground or in the side of a mountain, away from the light of day, the caves are surprisingly well-lit and colorful, largely due to crystals and ore veins which jut out from the walls and illuminate your paths in various shades of green, blue, and purple.
Because Faranga is a volcanic island, there's a lot of mountainous terrain – hills, cliffs, plateaus, and waterfalls. Everything slopes upward towards the volcano and levels out near the ocean, so the closer you get to the “heart” of the island, the higher up you have to climb. This creates a lot of different vertical levels to have to explore, which makes the terrain incredibly complex because you can't always see everywhere or go everywhere through direct or conventional means. Even though the island is relatively small (compared to Gothic 3 and other non-linear WRPGs), it looks and feels deceptively bigger than it actually is. You can look on the map and see that you need to move about an inch to the east, but you might then have to take a major detour to get down the face of a cliff or around a canyon. This creates all sorts of little nooks for you to explore and in which to find treasure.
There is no randomly generated loot, which also adds to the atmosphere. Games with random loot generation tend to make me feel like I'm playing the lottery, and that my success is based more on luck than on actual skill, so it's nice that Risen features particular loot in particular places. Such a system means that you come across all sorts of challenges across the map, and you can either save it for later when you're stronger, or find some clever way to beat it, and feel the satisfaction of collecting your just rewards. If you explore enough and are skilled enough you can find hordes of loot and treasure much sooner than you ordinarily would come by them just by doing the main quests, which definitely makes you feel accomplished.
Most of these challenges are blocked off by strong enemies, and in fact, most all enemies in Risen are dangerous. Enemies don't scale to your level, and the island is not organized by level (aside from the general rule that stronger enemies inhabit the regions directly in and around the volcano), so you're very likely to encounter groups of enemies that are much too strong for you. This will often require you to avoid them, train up, and come back later. At the start of gameplay, you're pretty much limited to fighting spikey over-sized rats, sea vultures, and young wolves. Quite literally, anything else will be far too difficult for you.
But even these initial monsters will destroy you when you first start out. It basically means that you'll constantly be challenged up until the final stretch of the game because there's always something stronger than you. Death is very easy to come by because most enemies will, at various times, kill you in just a few hits, so you will die a lot. This makes quick-save an essential tool to getting around the game and makes it so that you have to be careful of what you're doing at any time. The world feels very dangerous and makes you cautious, which is something that few other games accomplish.
Human NPCs are, for the most part, exceptionally well-voiced. There are some characters that are naturally more generic and bland than others, but this is fitting of their character – a downtrodden farmer isn't going to have a lively, energetic voice or use a bunch of complex language. Others are right around the adequate mark, the point where the execution is so good because it's subtle. If you have the opportunity to sit back and think “Wow, this is some great voice acting!” then you've already lost the immersion because you've remembered that you're playing a game. Most characters won't impress you with their voice acting, but that's part of the unsung brilliance of it because it feels so natural and convincing.
Most characters have their own daily schedules – they work in the mornings, they go to the taverns in the evening, and they sleep at night. “Work” sometimes means standing in front of their stalls if they're merchants, but there are a lot of people who spend time cooking on fires, sweeping the floor, sawing logs, tilling land and picking crops, and so forth. Sometimes you'll catch them have a swig of beer or take a puff on a cigarette, while others might be found playing a lute or chatting with each other. There are a couple of characters who seems to stand around 24/7 doing absolutely nothing, which can be an immersion breaker if you think about it, but these characters are relatively few and it's easy to disregard.
The soundtrack is subdued for the most part. There aren't any catchy jingles or easily recognizable melodies which you'll hear, and you certainly won't find yourself humming any of the tunes. The music plays the role that it's supposed to: ambiance. Most of the time you won't even notice it because it's just very simple and subtle chords with musical sound effects. Every so often an acoustic guitar will come in and play a harmonious theme, and this is about the closest to conventional “music” that you'll hear. All-the-while you can hear other ambient sound effects – vegetation rustling in the wind, birds chirping, rocks sliding down a cliff, sometimes the roar of the volcano, the waves on the beach, people talking in town, etc. These are all very easy to overlook, again, because they feel so natural and convincing, but they add so many layers to the immersion that it's simply indescribable.
[The Gameplay]
A majority of your interest and enjoyment in Risen will come from the simple minute-by-minute gameplay. In terms of adventure style gameplay, you spend a lot of time talking to people, fulfilling quests, and exploring the island. The quests are pretty well-implemented, and very few involve simple item fetching or monster slaying (excluding the glaring main questline which is nothing but fetching and slaying).
Side-quests, however, usually have some flavor of detective work and problem solving typical of an adventure game. They usually begin with a simple prompt which only gives you a vague notion of what must eventually be accomplished. For example, you might get a quest to find someone to buy a fish stall, or to figure out who's behind the local robberies, or to break a treasure seeker out of jail, or to find a pirate's treasure. To solve these quests, you almost always have to go around and talk to people to gather information and find evidence. In most cases, you'll have to snoop around and find the evidence yourself because the game won't explicitly tell you where to get it.
There's relatively little hand-holding in Risen. The quests require you to figure things out for yourself through exploration, and sometimes even trial and error. Even the start of the game doesn't give you a whole lot of guidance on what you should be doing, you're merely let loose and it's up to you to get things done. This is incredibly satisfying because it (generally) makes it feel like you have actual, substantial input on the game. Even if what you do is scripted to happen that way, it feels creative and rewarding because you got from point A to point B on your own.
For those who might be less patient, there's a quest map which will indicate a basic location or character on the quest map. This sometimes feels like cheating to me, because you can come to a solution without really accomplishing it, but it will be necessary at times (notably, when you get a quest to find a series of unmarked graves, which are marked on your map. Even then, the actual graves will be difficult to find because the map isn't as detailed as the actual environment is).
Although most quests tend to have only one outcome, various faction quests (which you have to do in the first chapter, in order to join the faction) have various outcomes and consequences depending on which side you want to support. Most of the quests in Harbor Town will require you to make permanent changes to the composition of the town based on what you do. The faction quests within town almost always overlap – both the Don's men and the Order might want the same item, and you have to decide whom to give to, or whether you should root out one of the Don's moles to the Inquisition or pull one over their eyes. It's often the case that quests become intertwined, where you have to complete some quests alongside one another in order to make progress in either one. Think of it like side-quests of side-quests of side-quests that create a web of chain reactions.
Exploration of the island is also done on a free leash. You have access to virtually everywhere at the start of the game, and aside from plot-centric ruins, you can choose to go wherever you want, whenever you want. The manner and pace in which you level up and explore is entirely up to you. It usually requires trial and error to figure out what enemies you're capable of handling throughout the game. The great thing is that you're usually rewarded for taking the effort to kill enemies before you chronologically (or statistically) *should* be fighting them.
Every time you level up you gain 10 Learning Points, which you can use with a human NPC known as a “trainer” who will instruct you in whatever task it is you seek. Most combat skills require a full 10 LP to “level up” (each can go up to level 10), while most of the non-combat related skills and talents (such as sneaking, pick-pocketing, alchemy, smithing, etc) cost only 5. Aside from these areas, you can also improve your strength, dexterity, and mana at a one-to-one ratio for LP. Strength and dexterity add damage values to melee weapons and bows, respectively, but are also the threshold requirements in order to equip the various weaponry.
On average, you should reach level 27-30 in one playthrough, which equals 270-300 LP to spend. As a general rule you can specialize in one combat area, gain proficiency is a second field, and still have enough LP to raise your stats and learn some of the peripheral talents and skills, but it won't be possible to master all builds unless you're extremely diligent about what you invest in. However, any more than two combat skills will probably be a moot accomplishment because you can only effectively use one at a time, and in all likelihood you'll prefer one over the other anyway.
Alchemy allows you brew potions, which at lower levels limits you to simple HP/MP recovery by gathering herbs and other ingredients. At level 3 you can make permanent stat-boosting potions using limited, rare ingredients, but this can save you a lot of LP if you can find the valuable Hero's Crown necessary for the permanent potions. Smithing allows you to create swords, though the selection is pretty limited. You can find better swords for free, but it might allow you to get stronger weapons sooner. The actual smithing process is more complex than just one button click, however – it involves the full process of heating a steel blank in a forge, hammering it into shape on an anvil, cooling it in a water trough, and then sharpening it on a circular whetstone. With the smithing talent, you can also forge magical rings and amulets which give you stat bonuses and defensive attributes.
Lock-picking will allow you to pick locks of various difficulties with lock-picks, while pick-pocketing will allow you to take items directly out of a character's inventory (though again, the selection isn't always great). With animal gutting, you can take trophies like claws, wings, teeth, horns, and skins from animals, which you can sell for profit or use as ingredients in scroll-making, another talent which allows you to make your own spell scrolls from raw materials. Sneaking is self-explanatory. Prospecting is only essential if you intend to smith, because that's essentially the only way to get valuable iron, gold, and obsidian ore. Acrobatics halves the damage when you fall from distances.
Ultimately, some of the skills are more useful than others – alchemy and lock-picking are perhaps the only strongly recommended skills, because the others are useless to certain builds, can be learned with a magic ring, or can be circumvented entirely. Still, it's nice that the options exist. You can also interact with many pieces of the environment like fires, stoves, and cauldrons to cook food if you have the recipe and ingredients. Many other things in the environment can be interacted with, though they have less practical use, such as chairs, beds, hookahs, benches, table saws, etc.
Armor is a rare item in Piranha Bytes' games, because these are tied to your faction. Your armor represents who you are, so you only get armor in complete sets (as opposed to individual items) as you move through the ranks of your faction. You'll start the game with absolutely nothing, but you can get some basic clothes from merchants (or through dexterous theft), and you can get an upgrade usually at the start of new chapters in the story. Weapons, on the other hand, are far easier to come by.
Each faction has its own basic specializations. Don Esteban's crew and the Mages of the Holy Flame are the two opposite ends of the spectrum – the mages can use all forms of magic, while the Don's men are limited to scroll magic, which anyone can use. Thus, aligning with the Don will mean being a dexterous hunter or a burly warrior, while aligning with the Mages in the monastery will mean casting fireballs, magic bullets, and casting various other buffs and support spells. They get melee combat proficiency in the form of staves, but can't effectively use swords or axes (you technically can if you train these areas before joining). The Warriors of the Order are a balance between the two extremes because they can learn all melee combat and even use Crystal magic, basic offensive damage-dealing spells.
Combat is arguably one of Risen's greatest strengths, despite some hiccups in the system. (I never used magic in my first playthrough, since I aligned with the Don – I'll update this review when I get around to a Mage replay.) Combat is done in real-time, which means that you control each movement and each sword stroke you make. At the start you have no training in combat fields, so the number of attacks and combos you have is limited, but you can unlock more diverse attacks as you level up your skill with the weapon. Aside from forward combos, you can also make lateral swings which will attack a wide area, and at later levels you can charge your attacks to do increased damage and recoil. You can combine the attacks in virtually any way possible, with the limitation being either 3 or 4 at a time before you have to start the combo again.
You can use your melee weapons to defend attacks from some enemies, but only a shield will block all enemies' attacks. If you intend to use axes or two-handed swords, you'll need to rely on the game's dodging mechanics to avoid damage, since you won't have a free hand to equip a shield (though at higher levels you can equip two-handed weapons in one-hand, sacrificing a little bit of power and reach for extra defense). By double-tapping a direction key (or the jump key as you move a certain direction) you perform something equivalent to a jedi-ninja slide, which quickly moves you out of the way. You can do this to circle around an enemy's flank as it attacks or to simply back out of the way. You can still perform these maneuvers with a shield, but you have to drop your defensive state to do so.
As you engage enemies, the game will auto-lock on the target, which will allow you to strafe circles around and it and (generally) keep your eyes on it. It's possible for the opponent to break your target lock, though, if it jumps to the side, which will require you to manually turn and face it again. It works well against single opponents, but can be problematic against groups because it might not target the one you wanted, and in order to break the target you have to drop your offensive or defensive stance (which leaves you vulnerable to attack).
The system is well-balanced between the skill of the player and the statistics of the combatants. Most stronger enemies can be defeated at level 1 if you're patient and skilled enough, but it will only take them one or two hits to kill you. In realistic terms, it means that you have to be at a certain level to face certain enemies, but if you're determined enough you can get by most obstacles on pure skill.
Each enemy has a different set of attacks and movement patterns which you have to learn to interpret and react to. It incorporates both the twitch-based reaction speed of, for example, a first person shooter, yet attacks and sequences are methodical enough that if you keep a mindful eye on what's happening, you can still approach it in a strategic manner. You'll have to time counter-parries in order to deflect attacks with a sword and dodge at the critical moments. The timing of your sword clicks also determines how fast you do your combos; if you get it right, your attacks are fast, but if you click too fast or too slow, or click irregularly out of rhythm, your attacks go much slower.
Ranged combat seems to function on a more consistent basis than melee combat. Bows and Crossbows, aside from having different dexterity and strength requirements, work differently from one another. With bows, you remain in a third-person perspective (though the camera tilts down and back a little to match your aiming axis) and a vertical cross hair appears. Arrows will arc with gravity, so you have to aim higher up if the targets are further away, and the longer you pull back on the bowstring the further the arrow flies. With practice you can easily get used to the limits of the arrows and can use them accordingly. Crossbows are similar, except you can right-click to zoom the camera to an extreme over-the-shoulder angle. Bolts fly straight, they don't arc, and you can't determine the amount of pressure behind it, which means reloading takes longer. However, crossbows tends to do more damage, at the expense of their slower firing rate.
In all fairness, ranged combat works. It gets the job done on a minimal, required level, but it lacks a certain amount of input that the melee combat requires. To me, it just wasn't satisfying to use ranged combat on a regular basis, because all it amounts to is “point and click” and a bunch of backwards running. It doesn't require as much skill as melee, since enemies will charge pretty much straight at you, making it easy to line shots up, and doesn't have any sort of dynamic qualities to it; if you can outrun your enemies, every fight will be the same, excepting how many bolts or arrows you use.
Of course, by late game you'll have explored enough and leveled up enough that combat really won't be a challenge. But, I suppose at that point you sort of deserve it given how challenging the beginning is.
[The Issues]
That said, every fight seems to also add an extra computation to the balance of skill and stats, something that I will officially refer to as the Bull$#!%-Factor. This BS-Factor has perhaps a 60% chance of throwing itself into the middle of your fights and can make the combat imbalanced, flawed, and maddeningly frustrating if it strikes.
The most notable example of the BS-Factor is that, when you're fighting groups of enemies (which is pretty frequent) the auto lock will sometimes switch targets in the middle of the fight and in-between sword swings. It's unpredictable and often causes you to swing at an enemy that's out of reach (while closer enemies rip your ribs out from your flanks) or to turn and expose yourself to enemies that you had wanted to keep in front of you. Most of the problems could have been avoided had there been no locking feature at all (which just feels restrictive if you can't control it), or if you could have manually selected and toggled your locks like in the original Gothics.
The auto lock will sometimes wind up on one enemy which is relatively close to you, with another enemy or two immediately behind them. Logically, you'd think the enemy behind the one you have targeted would not be able to hit you, but it seems that the target on lock will defend your attacks while the one behind it will clip its attack through its comrade and blast you.
Other than that, it seems like all of the enemies have quicker animations for their attacks than you do. If every attack takes 1 second to perform, perhaps the first 0.5 seconds of that swing will involve you pulling the sword back. This is reasonable considering that's how a sword actually works (unless you're holding it in a stance that can just go right into a swing, but that's neither here nor there), however, the enemies' damage and animation can happen *after* you begin your swing but *before* you actually land your attack.
It also makes it impossible to counter-parry some enemies because you can't realistically react to a 0.25 second attack animation, because there's simply nothing to react to. It means that you have to sometimes blindly guess at when they're going to be attacking you. This sort of means that it takes skill to *anticipate* what's going to happen, rather than react to, but some enemies are inconsistent in their attack patterns and are just unpredictable and frustrating to try to anticipate. Not to mention it seemed like half of the time, my counter-parries didn't register, and instead of doing the parry, the character raised his shield for a second, or worse, did nothing at all (note that a parry is a single click of the right mouse button, whereas a full block is a full hold of the RMB). Maybe my mouse is just faulty, I don't know.
It's equally annoying when these same enemies are the ones who seem to block 90% of the time, which means you just pound on them for zero damage. When you go to charge your attack to send their shield into recoil, thus exposing them, they interrupt your attack. And if you sit and wait for them to attack, hoping to counter-parry, you're back to the impossible anticipation problem.
Sometimes, enemies will do forward attacks, and you can still get hit as you're sliding around to their flank, despite the fact that it was not a lateral attack that they were doing. Boars are infamous for this.
Furthermore, whenever you're hit, you recoil. It's normally not that big of a deal, but it seems excessive in this case. Aside from flailing your arms wildly and grunting like a seal each time you get hit (an animation that seems to be the game laughing at you for being such an idiot), taking damage cancels and interrupts any action that you were already in the process of making – most crucially, that means that your attacks get interrupted and never get to land.
It might have been nice if at least when you were already doing something, the recoil effect was negated. If you're standing there and an opponent hits your flank or your backside or genuinely breaks through your defenses, that would be acceptable for the recoil, but it drives me crazy when I try to string a combo forward and an enemy gets three or four hits on me while I'm trying to make my clicks because I've gotten “chain stunned.”
With all of these potential BS-Factors, it's easily possible to do the same fight twice and have the outcomes be polar opposites, purely based on the random factor of whether the game decides to screw you over or not. Generally, however, it rewards the patient player who takes their time with each fight.
The problem with this is that, by mid to late game, you've probably already explored a majority of the island, you've already reached maximum proficiency in your weapons, you've already fought most varieties of enemies, and you're ready to just get on with the story. It's easy to become impatient, especially when the plot sends you on endless fetch quests and dungeon crawls.
There also comes a time in the game where, statistically, you're strong enough that enemies just shouldn't be much of a threat because you can kill them in two or three hits, a point where it shouldn't have to take a bunch delicate mind games to win. I normally would praise this, but Chapters 3 and 4 notoriously paste Lizardmen all over the map with no other variety of enemy to fight (alright, sometimes you get an Ashbeast or a Ghoul, or perhaps even a Brontok or a Scorpion, but there are about 20 Lizardmen for every one of these). I think I had literally killed over 200 Lizardmen by the end of the game, which, simply to say, gets incredibly repetitive and I lose patience for it.
The amount of game content is disproportionately balanced; you'll probably spend 15-20 hours in the first chapter alone, and then no more than 5 hours in each of the remaining three. It kind of gives you a false impression of what you can expect, because after the incredibly atmospheric non-linear first chapter, the rest of the content just feels stale and tasteless.
After all of the complex questing, character development, and exploration, you're tasked with two chapters worth of item collecting. This isn't even the item collecting typical of JRPGs or Fantasy-RPGs in general, where you have to travel across continents, go on epic journeys, conquer diverse dungeons and bosses, or even go on massive side-quests for the items. Each item in the final chapter is hidden in one of the risen ruins, which should take no more than 30 minutes worth of Lizard-slaying, Switch-flipping, Puzzle-solving, and Trap-avoiding to walk in, get the item, and walk out like nothing happened. And each dungeon uses the exact same puzzles so there's really not a lot of diversity.
Although you can do a lot of exploring on your own pace, it's sometimes not advisable to do so because you can complete quests without ever actually picking them up. This may sound like a benefit (and indeed it is, because you don't want to break the game or quests by inadvertently doing things out of order), but it's an immersion breaker when you're off doing your own thing and see a floating message pop up that says “Quest Completed!” Not to mention, whenever this happens I feel like I've just missed out on game content and other opportunities for experience points, because I'd effectively skipped all of the in-between stages. Each time it happens it makes me regret going off on my own so much and so early, like it discourages free roaming gameplay.
There's a really limited number of weapons and magic spells available compared to the other Gothics (especially in terms of bows and crossbows), which is definitely a disappointment. There just aren't enough weapons for you to make small progressions as you go through the chapters. I practically went from the starting 15-damage Sword straight to an 80-damage Berserker Sword within the first chapter, and only got two swords (which are only obtainable through the main quest) which were better. In this regard, there's really not much for you to save up for because you can easily get 6 or 7 levels and have enough strength to use some of the strongest weapons in the game within only a few hours (if you know where to get them). Or, you accumulate a mass of LP with nothing to spend them on, because there aren't any weapons with higher thresholds readily available – you often don't have goals to be striving for, in this regard.
Compared to the environment and architecture (and even to wild animals and monsters), human NPCs look kind of pathetic in quality. Generic NPCs (nameless people dropped in to populate the town, who have no purpose for any quests or services) look the same, or at least you'll see different combinations of the same clothes and faces with a few color changes, and even a few important characters' faces show up in other places. Even though you probably wouldn't want to, you can't actually talk to the generic filler characters; they just make snide or impatient comments at you. Even unique, named NPCs won't talk to you if you've exhausted your dialogue trees with them, which is simply an immersion breaker when an NPC whom you're supposed to be good buddies with tells you “stop bothering me” and shrugs you off. There are perhaps only three faces and character models for females, which you'll notice very quickly, and some of them just have odd proportions in their chests.
In conversation, characters blink, move their mouths, and make very basic upper body gestures, but there's no other facial expression or good lip syncing. This doesn't bother me too much since I prefer to read the subtitles and let their voice “fill in the gaps in my head,” but if you like cinematic quality “cut scenes” then it's definitely sub-par. If you pay attention to their gestures, you begin to notice that there are maybe only five things that they can do, and they're obligated to make some kind of motion at the start of each line of dialogue. It just makes it seem formulaic and not very sincere, because the motions may as well be randomly pasted into it.
The story doesn't really go anywhere at the end. After your mindless item collecting you're sent to face the final boss (which is itself kind of a childish platforming boss, and the immersion is broken when floating tutorial messages tell you exactly what to do to beat it (but still, it's an improvement on Gothic and Gothic 2's bosses)) and then it cuts to an abrupt end. The feeling upon completing this 30-40 hour game is “so what was the point of all of that” because there's simply no explanation of what becomes of your efforts at the end. Even though the first chapter is great, and bits and pieces in the later chapters are good, the ending can almost invalidate all the fun you had at the start.
One of the more noticeable flaws of Risen is that there's really only one town (it's not truly a *flaw* but this decision caused a lot of missed potential). There are two other outposts, Don Esteban's bandit camp in the swamp and the Mages' Monastery, but both of these are pretty much central to their respective faction. If you decide to join the Don, you won't spend much time at all in the Monastery and will miss a lot of quests there until it's time to get on with the main story. Had there been one or two other major outposts with human NPCs and quests which would become central in a later chapter, a lot of the shallow feeling could have been alleviated.
The action leading up to the final boss fight also lacks a certain amount of polish to make it memorable or even that exciting. Essentially, all that happens is a bunch of Lizardmen get spread across the island and the volcano starts to spew a massive column of black smoke in the air. Now this is just me, but armor-clad, bipedal lizards wielding swords running around on the island (and seemingly standing around doing nothing at all) just isn't End-Of-The-World quality chaos. Had the armies of evil been something more alien/foreign (in the sense that it is something unfamiliar and truly mysterious) it could have been convincing, but the lizards are just kind of cheesy when you think about it.
Furthermore, I wish the game world were more dynamic at this critical point in the story when the forces of evil are actually unleashed on the island. The Monastery has a brief moment of excitement when you walk in and find Lizardmen literally killing everyone depending on how quickly you move to fight them, but nowhere else really shows a dramatic change. If some of the terrain could have been converted to burning wastelands, segments of the island could have been completely sliced through and cut off from the rest of the island, then I might have been feeling a stronger sense of dread and impending doom.
It might have been nice if the titular ruins hadn't risen before the player even starts the game. There's much less of a “holy crap” feeling to them (which I would think is the intention) when they're just sort of there and some random guy tells you about them. It would have been much more dramatic, for example, to play the first chapter and *then* have the ruins rise up and unleash the various beasts (there could still be wild animals in the environment, but not the monsters), especially since you don't gain access to most of them until later anyway.
[The Run-Down]
Graphics: 8/10
The graphics processing “only” uses DirectX 9, so it's not pushing any technological boundaries or reaching into new territories. It makes up for this with the level of detail and artistic direction, however. Everything looks not only believably realistic, but it even goes one step further to the realm of fantastic. I may never have seen such a beautiful sunset in a game before. There's a lot of variety to the scenery, from swamps, meadows, lakes, forests, cliffs, mountains, volcanoes, crypts, ruins, beaches, and volcanoes, each scene having a distinct and memorable look and feel. Some of the character models don't look quite right – faces in particular look rigid and “plastic-y” and many are re-used for multiple characters. The gestures and animations that people make in conversation can seem really contrived and repetitive if you look at them too closely, and there's next to no actual facial expressions and weak lip syncing during dialogue, but these are minor issues. The look and feel of jumping is definitely weird.
Sound: 9/10
The level of auditory ambiance is phenomenal; crickets and birds chirping, bullfrogs croaking, the rustling of leaves and branches in the wind, the dull roar of the wind itself, the sound of the volcano whenever it quakes, the echoes of the waves against the beach. Every sound effect seems to have been deliberately recorded for that specific purpose; none are noticeably recycled or sound out of place. Because of how dense the vegetation is you often hear wild beasts rustling around or snorting before you can actually see them, which is simply delightful. Although no melodies stand out as truly distinct or memorable, the music does a superb job of setting the mood as you roam around and never becomes intrusive enough to distract you from the immersion. I was absolutely elated to hear a Gothic riff in the end credits.
Gameplay: 7/10
Aside from a few glaring problems, this would have scored at least a 9. It's got a lot of great “old school RPG” aspects to it, reminiscent of RPGs from the mid 80s to mid 90s and is definitely in the vein of Piranha Bytes' Gothic series, which is a blessing and a curse; it's refreshing to play a game like this in today's market, and to see some nostalgia to the original Gothics, but at the same time Risen hasn't moved forward substantially from them, so it does feel like an old experience at times. Regardless, the first chapter is brilliant with lots to explore, complex quests with different outcomes, and sincere input from the player. After that it begins to go from excellence to mere adequacy, and the latter half simply doesn't stack up to the first. Combat is surprisingly deep but has a lot of surface-level problems that become frustrating. Overall, it means that the sum is less than its parts; while it provides a lot of great moments at the start, and a few as you go along, the rest begins to feel shallow and not worth its weight in gold.
Story: 6/10
There's really nothing here that's all that unique or interesting. In fact, what little plot there actually is feel more like a general premise than an actual plot. A plot is supposed to be a series of linear events that lead from a beginning to a conclusion, usually with forms of rising action and conflict. Once Risen's story gets going (I don't fault the game for not having any plot in the first chapter) it really doesn't go anywhere. Instead you're given distractions which seem like arbitrary gameplay-lengthening gimmicks, rather than sincere attempts at a plot. As I said earlier, this really wouldn't be an issue in this kind of an RPG, but the shallow feeling of the whole second half could easily have been spared had there been some substantial plot and questing involved. Despite this, the actual premise is quite good, and the amount of detail in which the exposition is set up is pretty engaging. This makes the island (and notably, the atmosphere) compelling right from the start of the game, even if the plot doesn't contribute in later chapters.
Replayability: 7/10
There's definitely good possibility for replay here, because you can try a different faction (which should have you doing different quests at the start of the game, as well as give you a different perspective on the story), and you can also take a different approach to combat. However, these differences may only have a strong effect on the first chapter and the rest of the game may become even more tedious a second time around since you've already done the shallow fetch quests. It's possible to become burned out after 15-20 hours and not feel a strong urge to finish a second playthrough, especially since ultimately, the final boss fight has you in the same situation regardless of class or faction. Since there's no random loot, terrain, or monster generation it's possible to plan ahead a second time around and do things that you missed, and get things done sooner and more efficiently, which might prove satisfying.
[The Conclusion]
Risen does a lot of things well, but unfortunately there have been games in the past which have done these same things even better, so there's really nothing new to see here. It can be a treat if you're looking for more of the old-school RPG-style gameplay, but that's about all it truly amounts to, “more of the same.”
Many of the complaints that I mentioned in the [Issues] section can be written off as nitpicking, but the biggest flaws remain: the tendency for the combat system to hiccup and cause a lot of unnecessary deaths and reloading, a *whole* lot of missed potential (which is just disappointing because you know it was possible at one point), and imbalanced game content making the last half feel rushed and shallow.
As a long time fan of the Gothic games, Risen is a fun game for a while but doesn't have the same overall quality as the originals. It's definitely worth playing if you have a taste and appreciation for WRPGs, but I suspect that gamers who have grown up on Oblivion and Fable may find it a difficult game to get into. If 30-40 hours of play time is worth $50 to you, then by all means get Risen; if you're looking for a truly great game with lasting impressions and a sweet aftertaste, then $50 may be steep.
Ultimately, Risen is a solid game, but lacks a certain amount of content, quality, and sheer “oomph” to warrant the label of a classic. Worth the time and money to play, but don't expect too much from it.
