Risen

Beautiful visuals with a low demand on my system, and a satisfying challenge in a day when many games are not satisfying nor challenging. I am very pleased with my purchase and strongly recommend this one. :)

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.

The game itself is great - you can get really sucked into the world, and it gives you this Gothic-like challenge to work your way up from a guy who starts washed up on a beach with no shoes and a branch for a weapon to a monster slayer. The characters are interesting and their acts are believable, and the main plot keeps you engaged. Some people mention annoying combat - I'd say it's only annoying at first. Your guy moves slow and can get eaten by a stingrat if he makes a mistake, but that's because he's a nobody and has no idea how to fight. As you progress with your combat skills, he starts to move faster and gains access to more moves, that make the combat easier and more fun. To me, it's a plus. The game is hard, but in a good way - instead of a mastery in clicking your mouse in all the right moments, the challenge is often in using your head to get through traps and blockages waiting for you in ancient temples and knowing when to sneak through your opponents and come back to fight them when you're stronger. The game has 2 issues: first, it's a bit buggy, but you can live with it if you save often. Sometimes you'll try to jump and your guy will get launched miles into the sky, either dying immediately or getting stuck with the only way out being reloading game. It takes away a bit of immersion, so that's half a star down. And now the ending - without spoilers, it's just leaves you with huge "That's it?". You don't feel like you really finished the game, and since the sequel is in my opinion unplayable, you're just left hanging for all the eternity. All in all, it's still one of the best games I've played.

Overall an interesting story, the one gripe I have is that it felt a bit long by the end, but I would not know what to take out. There is a lot crammed into the game, yet it doesn't feel small or overly forced, and everything is there for a reason. There are the usual Piranha Bytes features, most of which are great. A tough rise to power, opposing factions, fully open world neatly compressed with very little wasted space, a ham-fisted approach to romance (endure it for a half hour out of 50, then its gone and you can get back to your game) The failures of such a setup of the game is that you'll need to decide on a playstyle before having experienced it. I expected to be two-handing a greatsword by the end, but by that point my character had learned how to 1-hand such weapons, so sword-and-board it was. Eventually I was basically forced in an entirely different direction by the gear. In the same way, if you follow direction and heed certain warnings, no magic for you. My playstyle choice was only affected for the last few hours though, yours may not be at all. Regardless, there is some definite replayability to it. Because the different choices at the start will make your path through the game clearly very different. The voice acting overall is fairly good, excluding the usual romance-part that Piranha seems dead-set on putting in their games. It's not as a bad as Elex, but mostly since it didn't go anywhere. That may well have been my choices, but I felt no interest in pursuing a person I talked to twice during a 50-hour game. Overall, well worth its price. The visuals are good, though my standard is on artstyle more than fps or realism. There is some jank regarding this, as should be expected of Piranha. One particularly annoying bug I ran into being because it does not work above 90 FPS and will bug out leaving you unable to control anything and force-closing the game being your only solution. Forcing the FPS below 90 will fix that.