It's your usual Piranha Bytes game. Beautiful world, to the brim filled with stuff to find and do, something around every corner, tough beginning with lots of dying, easy endgame because you reach the point of being overpowered. Sometimes clunky controls in the fights, but good enough to get through it. I love Piranha Bytes games, and the Risen series is no exception. Like always, you can feel the love and dedication they put into their titles and handcrafted worlds, and I take that over any Diablo 4 or Skyrim with their generic gameplay loops. It runs out of the box on Windows 10, but you might want to check PCGamingWiki and the GOG forum to fine tune it, the time is worth it!
I am too old for this. My reactions are not the best any more, and chaining fluid movement combos together like it's nothing while bullets fly around you in the thousands is too much for me now. Still I gave it a shot, and THANK YOU developers, for including an super easy mode, with unlimited slow motion. Thanks to this it was fairly easy going, and I could enjoy the absurd movement and ridiculous action without frustration. For the veterans here this game should be tough enough on higher difficulties to give you a challenge. I completed it in 2 1/2 hours, on easy. Worth the ten-ish Euro I paid, it was pure fun!
Having played 1+2 and New Vegas just before this maybe was a mistake. It can't compete in any way, that they had a major update that broke most mods did not help at all, getting working mods is such a hassle now at the moment. The game itself is not really bad, but it's bland. So bland. I don't really know what went wrong after New Vegas, there is not much interesting stuff happening, it's just more of the same. The world adds nothing new to the table, the same old houses, the same old loot, the same old everything. Where Fallout 1 + 2 delivered the ultimate role play experience, New Vegas had interesting characters and great story telling. 4 has neither, nothing to stick out. After now twenty hours in I finally decided to give up disappointed. Oh, and it runs and looks pretty bad on my pretty modern PC that even gets Cyberpunk to run in 4k.
I can't zoom up on the map to see everything. I can't customize keys for the "fps" parts. Enemies appear out of thin air half a meter behind me when I'm defending my fort. It's not fun. The (fun) original had it's frustrating moments, but I expect a modern version to be better. It came out 2020, there is no excuse for these mistakes. Back to the original then.
I don't know much about the Uncharted series, I've seen the movie, it was fun, but that's about it. I was expecting something in the line of Tomb Raider, but this was a mistake on my end. This clearly is a homage to the old adventure pulp stories from the 50s, like Indiana Jones was, with high stakes, elaborate set pieces, over the top villains and cliffhanger like action scenes. On the gameplay side this game is kind of frustrating, out of it's linearity. In Tomb Raider you often got this huge level, going back and forth, figuring out what to do to progress, opening up new paths as you went. Here at first it seems to have huge open levels, but in reality you just run forward without any alternative ways or the need to deviate from the path. Or you were a little to clever for your own good, and did something that the game did not expect, leaving you standing there not knowing where to go next, just because the game expected you to stand on a trigger two meters behind you to have something happen. I learned pretty fast to do what was expected from me, and then it became a much more fluid experience. The controls are also kind of a mixed bag, often very forgiving in your jumps, sometimes ignoring a keystroke just on a whim. But the controls are fine, not perfect and precise, but fine for this kind of game. Be aware you will have to do a lot of Quick Time Events. Overall I would have dropped this from a gameplay perspective, but what kept me going were the characters and the story. Those are grandiose! It's like an interactive movie that really deserves this description, with beautiful exotic vistas you would like to see for yourself and cutscenes that are entertaining like a good old, well, pulp movie from the 50s. Not for fans of Tomb Raider gameplay, but for fans of Indiana Jones adventures. Four stars seems fair.
Even though it can be finished in three hours or less, this game is worth every cent. It's mysterious, gets a little creepy in the middle and heads on to a fitting finale that becomes more of a walking simulator. Wholesome! The puzzles are usually on the easy side, with lots of variety and fascinating solutions. But if you need more than ren minutes on the "fan" puzzle (you will know what I mean), do yourself a favour, go to youtube and check out the solution. Chances are you won't be figuring that one out. Well, now that I finished Superliminal, I must say this was quality time well spent!
The open world is very nice, and has the right size for this kind of game, not too big, not too small. The crafting is all right, nothing special, the weapons are all right, nothing special, the characters are all right, nothing special. The story is all right for this kind of game, a fight of survival and people banding together for the greater good (most of them anyway). So why five stars? What let's this game stand out is the atmosphere. Howling zombies in the distance, the creepy atmosphere of a post apocalyptic landscape, looters and bandits that set traps to catch unsuspecting people off guard, the clear nights, the hot days, the rays of the sun that break through the mist in the early morning, the environmental story telling around small tents or in an abandoned house, the growling of a horde somewhere near... The hordes, my god, must be one of the most terrifying things I've ever saw in a computer game. Once they start chasing you, hundreds of them, the heart beat goes up! Later in the game, with the right weapons and the right tactic they become way less scary, but until then I kept my distance hoping they would not notice me. I went in suspecting a decent open world schlock, and left after eighty hours with complete satisfaction. Riding a motorbike has never been more fun. Some minor nitpicks: The in game menus are clearly made for consoles, so don't expect a smooth inventory for example. Your survival instinct highlights stuff in your vicinity, crafting materials for example. But it highlights also stuff you can't pick up because your inventory is full, so walking through a house and don't find the stuff you need can be frustrating. But like I wrote, those are minor nitpicks.
Interesting series, the first being a traditional, the second a cinematic, and the third a 3D adventure, all point&click. This one is as great as the others, good story telling, great controls which is unusual for a 3D game, and great voice acting, also the illusion of unlimited freedom since you can travel anywhere and look around freely. It's sad that this is the last part of the series, I would have loved to continue playing Gabriel's and Grace's adventures. Regarding the controls: It's traditional point and click, you can move the camera anywhere you want, and the moment you get the hang of it you can travel from one side of the map to another one in mere seconds. Leaving the room in the hotel for example and get to the train station takes you about 10 seconds. Gabriel is on the screen, yes, but he's just a placeholder. If you move the camera somewhere it does not matter where he is standing, he will appear right from behind it. Some people mentioned he walks to slow, but his walking speed does not matter at all since it's the camera that's the "protagonist". Regarding the technical aspects: This game is a beast and hard to tame on modern systems. But with a few tricks (see the forum) it's actually pretty easy to get it running. I had no crashes after tempering any more, but the occasional drop of frame rate for a few seconds, but that's not a problem at all. Hold the mouse still for two seconds and it again runs smooth as butter. What's extremely IMPORTANT is that you start the computer in the hotel on Day 2 ONLY with a standard resolution the game offers you, for example 640*480!!! After that you save your game and you can customize your resolution again. If you don't do this there will be a dead end later. You are warned. The puzzles are fun, you can miss stuff since the people have their own schedules (like The Colonel's Bequest), but you can still finish it, no matter what you missed. I'm glad I gave it a shot!
I made it for ten hours, destroyed two towers. But I can't go on, the gameplay is just horrible. The controls are clunky, unresponsive at times, the camera is by far to close to my character. Inventory and stat screens are clearly made for consoles, not for PC. The graphical quality is, even for 2004, just plain bad. On the plus side, the dialogue is fantastic, which is the reason I made it for ten hours. But even though it's great, the game itself is not. I even activated god mode later in the game, just to get faster through the boring gameplay and levels, forward to the next dialogue/cut scene. But even with that I don't want to start the game anymore. It's hard to believe this was made by the same team that made Wasteland.
