Risen

Risen
Release Date: 10/09
Overall 5.5
Story:8
Graphics:5
Sound:7
Control:6
Expandability:5
Replay Value:2

From the makers of the popular Gothic 3 (now Pluto 13 GmbH) comes a story beginning on a mysterious shoreline with an unplayable NPC pal named Sara. You are lost in this new place and there is no-one else around. You eventually find some people and have to decide where you want to go. Your initial conception will be that this will be like Fable/Gothic but upgraded. Well its not, but the good stuff first.

  Streams are ooooohhh so sparkly

The best part of the game is how well the characters are developed. The voice acting is absolutely phenomenal and it really draws you in. Kind of makes you feel like your character is actually part of a t.v. show or something. Imagine Risen like your first studio apartment. Most of the time its fine. You can fit all your shit in there and do most of what you normally do just fine but you know in your heart that you are unhappy with it. Why what do you mean? First of all, there are a very limited number of weapons and maybe 20 or so different creatures to battle. Though it is an open world, the island is small and the cool underground temples you heard about are just a step from being small caves. You find a few different kinds of traps repeated and are 3 attack spells. These things combined make for a boring action/strategy experience. The world  needed to be bigger and more variety of everything in it. You spend the whole game hoping and praying that you will get off the island. Sadly you don't. The maps are awful and completely unusable. It seems like they tried to make them too realistic. Half the time you aren't even on the map. In fact, I think they finished half the game and then for some reason instead of expanding; they just polished it. Other than that my only complaint I can think of is that you get stuck in places sometimes, so save often.

 The arrow in the lower right is where I am. Wait. Where the hell am I?

The music is pretty good and no complaints about the sound. Playing this just makes me want to play Fable2 even more (for PC *sigh*) The graphics are hit and miss. It looks like Gothic 3 color shaders. When you are in a cave and its dark, it is REALLY DARK. One of my favorite features in Risen is if you are in a cave and you are wielding a torch then you see something you need to kill, you will drop your torch when you equip your weapon and you fight around the fire for light.

This would be considered bright for a cave in Risen. The stream looks incredible here.

Special detail was given to the sky, weather, fire effects and water yet more obvious textures look 2006. Example, the bark on the trees look good but the leaves don't. Yes, I have high graphical expectations for a game released in late 2009. The camera works very well and the fighting system works OK with parries, blocks and sidesteps. I could see what they were trying to do with a combo and skill upgrade system. Good effort but in reality it is only mediocre. Even when I had upgraded to the top in sword fighting and I was high level I still found that I was not fast enough and even wimpy creatures would get hits on me 4-5 times if I tried a combo on them. Trying to attack a group of enemies at once? Forget it. The only effective tactic for attacking more than one is going in for a hit then backing off over and over. With the lack of spells you can imagine that battle gets old fast. You can always just crossbow or use the bow which works like lucky charms.

A beautifully done foggy swamp area. Creeeeeeapy.

As far as expandability goes I found a user texture pack online that will update some of the stone walls and interiors to par but it doesn't help the greenery sadly. It is also confusing to install mods. Risen is pretty new still so I guess there might be some expansions and patches in the future. Gothic 3 was unplayable when it first released so it will be interesting to see if they follow suit with Risen.

Sometimes you want to jump off a cliff. Guess what? You can! Ooooo, pretty water.

Nice 2004 quality explosion. Yay for budget cuts.