Risen

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.

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.

There are many things about this game that deserve praise. I love the combat system, I enjoy the landscapes, I like the quests. But what matters for me is that this game, like literally every other Piranha Bytes' game, is a heaven for my inner perfectionist. The game rewards you for being a perfectionist, for picking up every single herb in a location, for doing every single quest, for killing every single monster. How so? Because your resourses in this game, unlike in many others, are limited. You can't keep walking around and farm until your character is strong enough to progress - you have limited opportunities and you are encouraged to use them, as the game is also quite demanding. Every coin counts, every treasure chest that you found matters, and what's important is that you can, if you wish so, actually pick up every single coin. And you can be sure, those coins won't remain unused in your pocket.

Risen is a pretty fun RPG, it has some good with some bad a bit of ugly: The good: Open world action, some interesting characters, all fully voice acted. The graphics are decent enough , nothing super great but they aren't distracting . most of the writing is pretty good and it's nice that all the "supposed" antagonists aren't one dimensionally evil The Bad: The game can start a bit slow then very rapidly your power will plateau. Most of my time int he game was spent in chapter 1 and 2. Combat is pretty meh. It seems like it should be nice, you have parrying and side steps and lateral blows. In the end none of the melee really works out that well and while magic is much better it's pretty lack luster. 3 different projectiles. you will beat the game probably < level 30 so you can really only max one or 2 skills. The ugly: Interaction with the landscape is laughably bad. There are tons of places you will get stuck in walls or on rocks in trees or bushes. If you run off a cliff you will "jump" down invisible stairs until you land, taking no damage. if you need to jump up a ledge in a cave *SAVE* sometimes it would take 5-10 restarts before i could get lucky and not literally jump through the ceiling and get stuck. Overall: not a bad RPG, i'd give it a solid "C" nothing too notable but nothing too terrible (other than getting stuck in walls)