Risen

Piranha Bytes at its finest, totally recommend this game,

The game is visually very attractive, good story, development ETC, most of the other reviews cover this in more detail, but we need to talk about the bugs. Do game devs properly test software anymore? One major bug in the game is you can walk off a long drop and basically just walk down like there are stairs there, quite useful if you're not stuck on realism. Another more critical bug seems to occur when you try to climb up ledges, sometimes it works OK, more often than not the character disappears and you have to kill the process and restart the game. Save frequently, not just because the game is challenging, but because it has flaws in the software. That being said I completed the game today and I did enjoy it, apart from the second mentioned bug. If I am going to shell out money on software I would expect better QA testing, seriously.

the game starts gothic like with a deep atmosphere and character progression. there are quests everywhere, sometimes even without qlog entry if you listen to dialouges carefully. at some point the devs stopped to work on the quest design i believe. the second half of the game is just hack n slay like killing of everything non human in the world of barely an explanation or dialouge

I found the game to be pretty good overall. The biggest issue was getting started, but it doesn't take long to get used to it. The controls seemed a bit difficult at the start, but does become easier as you level up. The worst part is, at the beginning, not knowing if you are going into an area that has creatures that are too strong. I always loved to explore and get as much of the map as possible, but you have to be careful at the start or you could end up dead. Once I got past the initial issues and difficulties, it was rather smooth and fun. I gave it 4 stars only because of issuse at the start.

Risen follows the same pattern of Gothic 2 where you start as a bum who has to work their way up in favor so you can join one of three factions to get you toward your goal. It has some extra polish and features that make it less janky than G2, but overall it is subpar compared to it. The people of the world are more stiff and boring, and the definition of bland voice direction. The main character rather than being a simple rogue character with some personality like in G2 lacks personality and could have been replaced with a silent protagonist for equal or better effect. Like previous PB games, the main quest and writing isn't good, but has a certain level of charm to it. The combat had a little more put into it this time, but it lacks the polish. Since the difficulty is still hard, what matters most is if you hit things and cause them to stagger and are able to not get hit. This means finding the right distance and animations to use. The problem is adding to your fighting skill increases your combo, but combos don't add anything more to this simple equation and mesh with the overall combat, so you might as well barely add to weapon skill. The system lacks polish and ends up being less than the first two Gothic games which while more simple on the surface, still used most their parts competently. While combat and storytelling are lacking, all of the small quality of life things have improved since Gothic series. It's not easy now to get super rich, the inventory system is better, and UI have improved. The game just lacks a lot of the qualities that made PB's first two games work, and the personality. It makes the game easy to put down half way through, as I have tried beating 3 times but never get past chapter 3 or 4. The magic system seemed like it could have been better than previous installments but I never got far enough to check.