Risen

I played as mage, and in my opiion mage path is even better than Gothic. Plot was simple but there was some good moments but it is not the wicher level of advance. This game reminds me old Gothic and Gothic II but unfortunatly there is one big cons - bugs, expecially when you want to jump higher on on stairs - 50% of my jumps crushed the game xD So all in all this is good game but many times it is frustrating becouse of bugs in phisict. Really - 80% of my save was before rock shelfs :P.

quite old,but in trend with its epoch...too complicated for me,not easy to swap weapons,to reach some piont and so...good for past time,but not too long.

I would honestly give the game 2 or 2.5 stars, but since I haven't played *that* much of it, I'm giving it a courtesy star despite not recommending it. I've played 8-10 hours, and have liked it here and hated it there, but I've gotten pretty bored of the quest design. I've done the bandit camp up to meeting the Don, and I've spent a bit of time in Harbor Town. WHAT I LIKED I like the environments; they don't feel too cramped or too sprawling and empty. Also like the ambient music, although it's a bit too "sleepy" sometimes. The upgrade system, which I didn't understand at first, seems pretty cool; you get points upon level-up that you can spend at a trainer (along with gold) to increase different skills. The pickpocketing system is interesting. WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE The quests. They're usually fetch quests, and you often need to talk to seemingly random people in order to progress them. The quest tracker doesn't help either; it just keeps a log of conversations, and has a (usually unhelpful) bit of text to go with them. Combat. Some people apparently love the combat, but I find it far too janky and inconsistent to be enjoyable. Enemies barely have patterns, but attack VERY quickly. You also die very easily (2-4 hits without armor - see below) and the enemies take a lot of hits to kill. Whenever you see two NPCs fighting, it actually looks pretty cool; it's what I imagine they *wanted* the combat to feel like. However, it never felt that way for me. I can appreciate when a game lets you encounter things that are too strong for you, but for this game, that's almost everything you find, which ends up being more annoying than anything. Progress is also painfully slow, and is apparently by design. In my ~9 hours, I've only had the opportunity of getting 1 set of "armor", and it was too expensive at the time - so I've been running around with the starting clothes that don't even count as armor. An interesting game overall, but usually a bit too "interesting".

story is cool, choices are cool. But i could not finish it, 10 hours into the game and i can't deal with this combat anymore, it's extremely frustrating. I'm lazy so i'll make it short : - can't cancel actions - no control on target lock, can't deactivate it. - if you want to parry you need to predict enemys attacks, paterns. they aren't hard but it's unpleasent to spend time for that. - enemys will always block/dodge so even if you come across low levels enemys you will have to spend the same amount of time dealing with them than high level enemys. there is a lot more about that combat system, to resume it it's FRUSTRATING.

8/10 - 2 points for no russian