Risen
Reviewed by Z

I like to say that I give every game more than it’s fair chance, and with the exception of the latest Tomb Raider (so far anywho) I have managed to actually beat every game I have posted a review on thus far. This also made me regret my decision to do Risen, at first anyway. Declaring one game unfit for the public is fine in my view, but two in a row and there may be some deeper issues, so I had to stick to my guns… for my integrity’s sake, you know? Well lucky me that I did, probably the best way I can describe Risen is a shit stained gem.

I’m noticing a pattern in my reviews, even though I’ve only done a couple. What I tend to do is give my overall view of the game right off the bat, then proceed to blast the hell out of it for the next half a review or so. Oh, why break tradition.

The combat, oh the combat.

The first thing, and probably one of the most important things that should be said about Risen is the combat system is terrible. Extremely terrible. It starts out deceptively simple, left click to attack, right click to block, and middle mouse to ready or unready your weapons. The readying and unreadying is annoying at first, but the way it’s used, such as guards getting pissed off when you run around with your sword in your hand, tends to fall in place and, after a while, work rather well. Right click to block is something I did a lot, against most of the enemies in the game, you can block them infinitely. And left click to attack is explanatory enough. The issues come when you dig deeper into the system, and fight the various baddies along the way.

A little side note should probably be made clear here. There are three different play styles to my knowledge, magic users, staff fighters who get a bit of magic, and then every else who can only use scrolls. I have only played through the game once, and I choose to fight with an axe and a shield. Also fairly early in the game you have to pick an allegiance, I choose the don. Because of this, I’m going to try to refrain from writing in the second person, as my experience will not necessarily, nor will it probably for that matter, be your own.

So back on track with the combat and the sucking. As I leveled I learned more ways to use my weapon, parrying, counter-parrying, swinging faster, bigger combo’s etc. The game does a horrible job of explaining some of these things, to the point where it’s explanation of parrying was completely wrong, and I had to look it up online.

The game forces you to learn how every type of enemy in the game acts in combat. Everything attacks differently, dodges differently, and work differently in groups. By the end of the game I knew by heart how every single thing on the island was going to act in combat, because I had to. From things like boars charging me to knock my shield aside, to ash beasts and their long jumps onto my face, by the end of the game I could go through most of these encounters without being hit even once. The game shoves it’s terrible combat system in your face, relentlessly, until you get good at it, there is no other choice. And while some enemies, such as boars for example, which will utterly and completely dominate you at the beginning, are killed in 1 hit later in the game. Other enemies, like skeletons and war mantis’s, like to parry everything you do, meaning that even if you can 1 shot them all, you’ve still got a fight on your hands.

Don’t mind me, just plundering your ruins (wow, that didn’t sound good).

I could write pages and pages on how much I hated the combat system, but the simple fact is that after a while I got used to it. Something that you don’t see in a lot of games though, is because combat is so difficult, nearly every fight can end up being an epic battle. Overall I got more satisfaction out of killing things in Risen than many games because it was so hard, which is odd because normally I just get pissed at the game. Enemies do not respawn either, so once you clear an area, it’s cleared for good, which is completely necessary in my opinion. I don’t think I would have lasted the whole game if I had to fight every wolf and suicidal bird on the attacked me as I ran around.

Speaking of which… You will be running on this game, A LOT. There are four chapters in the game, and you get the ability to fast travel at the beginning of chapter two, but even still you can only travel to places you have explored already. But even still, I believe I put in at least twenty hours into chapter one, that’s a lot of running. It’s not overly helped by your character who seems unwilling to strain himself, and lopes along at a nice leisurely pace. This is an exploration game to it’s core, which is probably one of the reasons why I ended up liking it so much. Nearly everywhere you go you’re going to end up finding some cave, or little tucked away gnome camp, or maybe just a treasure chest sitting up against the wall. And while you’re not going to find the epic sword of god slaying just laying around in a box somewhere, a couple extra health potions and some swords to sell never hurt anyone.

Oh yeah, there’s infinite inventory space. I fucking love that.

You too can be a pack rat.

So let me talk about gamplay for a bit. You start out with a rather terrible cutscene about some dude with an eye patch fighting a monster and failing. Then you wake up on a beach with some Barbie-shaped woman, both of you are wreck survivors. You pick up a stick and start beating things up for a while until she gets tired or something, then you’re on your own. Very soon after you make a choice where to go, I chose the swamps, as they’re bandits. My choice paid off early, as I proceeded to steal everything on the island that wasn’t bolted down and pick pocket every single person. Pick pocketing is dialogue based, and you’d have to be legally retarded to manage to fuck it up and get caught. Lock picking however, is a trial and error system, and every time you mess up you break your lock pick, which cost 10 gold a piece. It sucks. By the end of the game I was quick saving before every chest I encountered, just to save cash on lock picks. Well by the end of the game I was quick saving every 2 minutes or so anyway.

I have never played a Gothic game before, and as such the game that I’m comparing this to in my head is Oblivion, and I’m not sure if that’s fair (for either game) but it can’t be helped. To me this game was like a smaller, much more fun Oblivion. The world itself is not terribly large, but it’s packed full of stuff. Before you go about decimating all wildlife population on the island, there’s usually something to fight every 20 feet or so, so the initial journeys from place to place to place tend to be rather action packed.

Never fear, the dungeons are here.

The enemies you will fight throughout the game, while extremely memorable (due mostly to my initial point of how damn hard even the most lowly fight can bew) are not exactly varied. There’s your wild life, boards, wolves, some humanoids like gnomes, ogres, and lizard men, and undead like skeletons and ghouls. It’s a point that I would normally rail on more, but quite frankly, even at the end of the game, when I saw a ghoul I was not looking forward to the encounter. It’s a prime example of the combat system coloring the entire experience, as the variety of enemies is pretty terrible, but I didn’t mind in the slightest when I was playing the game.

Graphically the game can be pretty varied. The environments can be top notch, though not often, some of the enemies look quite good, but most of the character models are anywhere from poor to abysmal. There are many, many times where you will have 2 or more of the exact same character models on your screen at one time. To apparently rub the terrible in your face, at one point there are three brothers that you deal with for an hour or so, and they all have the same damn character model, it’s so bad it’s almost comical. Other than major plot characters, there’s maybe six or seven male models, and, I shit you not, one female model that they use for basically everything. There is one blond prostitute, but other than that, yeah, they’re all the same.

Me pretty.

The music is pretty non-invasive, works well. Nothing memorable, but nothing horrid. The voice acting is, surprisingly, pretty damn good. While some voice actors will be more than one character, it’s not bad by any means, no where near as bad as Oblivion, that’s for sure. The main character is a middle between an average Joe and someone from Gears of War, a nice change of pace.

The plot is okay, nothing that’s going to make your head explode. One thing that’s nice is the pacing, however. It started with me as a shipwrecked nobody, then I was trying to get back help get back a town, then trying to save the island, and finally the fate of the world was left in my capable hands. The specifics are pretty epic, and generally cover all their bases, but it wasn’t the plot that kept me playing, let’s put it that way.

One thing about this game that is a little different from most I’ve played is you won’t be upgrading all that often. Now normally the gear is a good part of the motivation to keep going in a game like this, so when I say that I wore five sets of armor total through the whole game, it might seem a bit odd. But it didn’t feel like a negative think, on the contrary, every time I got an armor upgraded, or finally got a new weapon, it was a memorable event. There are rings and amulet’s that I swapped out frequently, but for all the important items, it was a rare enough even that I stopped thinking about it, so when it did happen, it was awesome. As such, there are several weapons throughout the game that you have to quest for, and possibly assemble yourself, adding to the overall feeling of epic.

I could gripe about many things in this game, as it definitely has its fair share of issues. But I think the most important thing for me was that no matter how incredibly terrible the game got, I managed to keep going. It’s not a great game, hell, a lot of times it’s not even a good game, but despite its faults it manages to come together to be a whole greater than its parts. Just don’t try to plow your way through the game like I did. Quick save frequently, and don’t be afraid to take a break, possibly for a few days or more. It can be hard to get along with but I reluctantly found that I was enjoying myself.

Not the most cheerful camp in the middle of the swamp.

Gameplay 3/5: The game likes to balance itself out. While combat can be frustrating, the NPC interaction and world exploring are satisfying enough to let you swallow it.

Looks 2/5: Ugly models, bad textures, and not a whole lot of variety. While some parts of the game manage to look good, on the whole this game looks far too dated for being a new release.

Noise 4/5: The voice acting quality in this game is remarkably good. Some of the sound effects can be repetitive, but the music works well.

Additiveness 1/5: This is a game you really have to want to like. Lucky for it it’s riding on Gothic’s coattails, so many people are giving it probably more than it’s fair chance. Once you hit around the 15 hour mark though, you may find yourself reluctantly having fun.

Replayability 3/5: A tough one to call. On one hand, there is no random, everything will be exactly the same the second time through, but on the other, the way the classes and skills break down it’s impossible to play every aspect one time through.

Overall: 3/5

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