A mysterious volcanic island.
The heavy tremors on the island bode ill for its inhabitants. Ancient temples have risen from the ground recently, bizarre creatures are terrorizing the area. Fear and terror is spreading among the population.
The end of all hope?
A group of powerful men who call the...
A mysterious volcanic island.
The heavy tremors on the island bode ill for its inhabitants. Ancient temples have risen from the ground recently, bizarre creatures are terrorizing the area. Fear and terror is spreading among the population.
The end of all hope?
A group of powerful men who call themselves "The Inquisitors" have taken it upon them-selves to put an end to these events. They send an expedition to this remote island, but a storm takes hold of the ship and destroys it at sea.
A hero will come.
As if by a miracle, you survive the shipwreck and are stranded on the volcanic island alone. You find yourself amidst a chaos of rebellion, tyranny, and mystic rituals. It is up to you to decide to which side the pendulum of fate will swing.
Delve into a gritty, raw, and atmospheric fantasy world in which every action has a consequence. In the epic world of Risen, filled with mysterious earthquakes, fearsome monsters, and unimaginable treasures, forge your path with the sword, learn the art of staff fighting, or become a powerful mage.
Alter the destiny of the island by the actions you take.
Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility
Recommended system requirements:
Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility
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This game has the usual flaws of Piranha Bytes games:
- crafting is almost useless (but NWN is worst)
- you MUST join a faction
- the physic engine is not so good.
Except for those little things, even from the beginning this game is a gem.
- The gameplay experience is immersive
- the music is hypnotic
- it's playable on a GT 730.
- the quests are cool and appropriate for the main plot.
- the combat system makes you feel a real badass, totally unassisted fights: not like the Witcher and similar.
It's an old game, but very enjoyable. In the past I would gave it a 5/5, but on ELEX 1 they did even better.
Personally never playied Piranha games before, so didn't know what to expect. The first impressions were in fact intimidating: My character (who is like Sam Worthington) was a weakling and everyone, literally everyone was faster and stronger than me. Then I realized I needed to slow down, check what I'm able to do, what quests can be done and with progression I return to explore and kill monsters. Patience is required for playing Risen. It is an open world game but strong monsters are like barriers which block your way. So do something else first. And you can and you need to do a lot to make your character powerful. The game lets you introduce to the world offering easier but mostly fun quests to give you the chance to level up. But not so fast: the levelling up costs a lot of money which you don't have, so what to do? I enjoyed how many skills you need to develop to play well the game. Pickpocketing, sneaking and picklocking are necessary to get gold. Alchemy is important to make healing and other potions, smeathing is good to forge weapons, better than your enemies have, and then fighting (or magic) skills to deal with the monsters. I enjoyed this kind of character development that you need to boost up all of the skills to get better. I loved the game's atmosphere: it was medieval, but caribbean as well. The npc-s were fun, you can have some hilarious dialogues with them. The side quests are mostly interesting, some of them are fetch quests though. And the best thing of all: exploration. In every corner you can find chests, loot, caves, other npc-s, even legendary weapon sets. You are on an island, which is not so big but carefully designed so it is fantastic to explore everything. Negatives? Tons of bugs and glitches sometimes in quests and in character's movement. Fighting is underwhelming first but gets better later, and the last chapter is about dungeon crawling which is a problem if you don't like excessive dungeons. But overall it is a solid 8/10.
Risen itself isn't bad and if you're looking for a decent RPG experience then this might not be a bad choice for you. However those who have played Gothic a great deal might get a feeling of "been there, done that" while playing this game.
I won't go into much detail about the graphics with this review. I found them to be nice, and detailed enough to satisfy my taste. The models for some of the characters were odd and a bit freakish looking to be blunt.
The combat has been called challenging, but it's not very deep at all. If you're a melee character, the majority of the time you're just blocking with your shield and attempting to strike the enemy in hopes that they won't block or dodge your attack. From there you essentially rinse and repeat till either one of you are dead. Once you have a hold of the combat, even some tougher enemies become a push over.
The quest and main story are interesting enough. If you've played Gothic then you'll sense a little bit of deja vu because the structure of the story is very familiar.
A lot of the side quest are very boring. Some of them can be avoided altogether by just killing one of the people involved with the quest. Don't worry, you'll be rewarded all the same.
If you're a fan of the Gothic series, you might like this, or it might bore you. If you've never played the Gothic series, skip this game and go play those because they're much better so long as you don't mind dated visuals.
...and I'm not talking about the critters you have to kill.
Nope, I'm talking about my character continually getting stuck into walls, particularly in or around caves. Once you're stuck, you can't get unstuck, can't do anything else and have to CTRL+ALT+DELETE to get out of the game.
Net result? Happened way too often and too frustrating = uninstalled.
Shame really, because this looked a really interesting game.
Rating: I would give a 3.5, but went for 4, as it one of very few games that is drawing me to finish it.
The game play a LOT similar to Gothic 1, perhaps a bit too much.
You are a no-one at the beginning (not even a name) and you have endure hours of humiliation from the game world: flee to most combat. Die-reload-retry until you better understand the combat system and grow the character stronger.
Read some guide on how to build a decent character, as you can really make yourself for a frustrating experience, if you start spending skill points on non essential skills (aka strength).
Aside combat, that is not overly nice, the most annoying things, not in particular order:
* A lot of backtrack
* Not much to do with money. Equipment is scarce and rarely useful.
* Mage are heavily penalised
* World is stiff: everyone is waiting for you to do their job. 60% of the time is just ludicrous (E.g. go searching for someone that is in the next room... voice distance).
* No sense of urge
* Unkillable NPC
* Too many fetch quests.
* Animal attack patterns.
Anyway, is a solid RPG, that make itself play.
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