Did you ever want to just sit down at your computer, start a game, put on your headphones and just have a consistent and satisfying gaming session? The kind that sucks you in, that has you looking out the window in the morning, see the sunrise and wondering where the night went?  I do.. and sadly, few games nowadays have what it takes to do that to me. Risen, the new RPG from Piranha Bytes, the original makers of Gothic I/II and III, does that, and more.

Risen can be viewed as a spiritual successor to the Gothic franchise and that people that have played any of the previous titles will most likely feel right at home with it. For most, Risen is what Gothic 3 should have been.. it’s a pretty polished, involving and immersive action-RPG. Still, let’s take it from the top and delve into the game as a new player, judging the game on its merits alone.

The game is an action-rpg, where you take the role of a nameless hero that managed to survive a shipwreck alongside a busty woman named Sara. You end up on an island, where ruins seemed to rise from the ground shortly after you shipwrecked and from there on end, you’re in control of what happens and eventually responsible for the fate of the entire island. The story unfolds slowly, mostly in the later part of the game since the first part of the game features you trying to get the attention and support of one of the two major groups on the island. You can either side with the previous ‘owners’ of the island, and join Don’s Camp, or side with the Inquisition, that took control of the island’s main city and are scouring the land for secrets hidden in the ruins, either voluntarily or forcefully.

The factions are pretty interesting  in the way they are designed. There are no ‘bad’ factions or factions that are made distinctly evil. Don’s Camp, lead by Don Esteban, the previous ‘ruler’ of the island, seems initially to look like the rebels in the story, fighting the oppressive rule of the freshly instated Order of the Holy Flame, The Inquisition. Seeing how that’s the faction you initially get pushed towards might mix with the stereotype that they’re the good guys.

The Inquisition are the guys that you get a feel that they’re the bad guys at the start of the game. If you fight them and lose, they will take you to the Monastery and  force you to become a Recruit for the Inquisition. This is happening all over the island, so you can understand why people get a bad feeling about them. If you manage to stay clear of them for a while, eventually you’ll get the opportunity to join them voluntarily. Seeing how they are the only faction that allows you become a mage, it’s a very important, gameplay wise, decision that you have to make.

The thing is, that the more you advance in the story, the more you realize that everything is not exactly as you’ve been told. While Don’s gang isn’t exactly bad, they’re the mafia of the island. I usually play a good-aligned character in RPGs and i chose early on to stick to Don’s Camp.. imagine my surprise later on, when i’ve been creeped into becoming a thug for them. There was this one quest where i had to get protection money out of a local trader, and to do that i had to kill his livestock and place a skull of  his favorite cow on his bed. That was the point where i stopped and went “did i really just side with the bad guys?”. I was surprised i was duped so easily and had my emotions so easily messed with by surface conclusions and what i’ve been told. The shock was even greater later on, when some things happened and actually made me want to have joined the Order of the Holy Flame earlier in the game.

This was a great use of RPG stereotypes to make a unique experience and i solidly mark this as being a great success.

One of the main stars of the game is the island itself. It’s pretty big, and lush with plants and wildlife, but the main problem i have with it is that it’s incredibly hard to get around. I’m not talking long distances, but more of places where you scratch your head and just purely can’t figure out how to get there. You check your map but it doesn’t really help. I’ve literally had to jump huge heights and hope i won’t die just to get where i wanted to go, since i couldn’t find a way down.  This problem gets exceedingly more annoying the more you advance in the game, since you’ll have to get to points you never even seen. Still, the game makes the island look pretty barren and unforgiving. Aside from Don’s Camp, Harbor Town, the Monastery and small settlements that litter the forests and plains of the game, you rarely, if it all, see any people or interesting locales. It also lacks a deal of focus points. Places that you can point a finger at and say, “that area was awesome” or “i remember this one quest in this area”. You have two swamps, a huge volcano, a lot of dungeons, a nice lake area and.. that’s all that pops in my head for the moment. The graphics make the island look gorgeous but clearly the landscape was done without any real ‘feeling’ behind it. Ofcourse, i don’t want snowy hills on a volcanic island, but i would have appreciated more variety. Since there aren’t really any ‘unlockable’ parts to the island, the places you go to when you start the game, will be the same ones that you will cross when going to battle the boss.. so it’s inevitable that you will get tired of seeing the same creek the 56′th time. You do eventually manage to get teleportation stones to move around but oddly, it doesn’t ease the feeling any.

As said, the game has you on an island doing quests for the faction of your choosing and engaging in small dramas and sidequests. Most quests are interesting enough so that they are fun to do, to solve and get a reaction out of the NPC’s. The feeling of false right/wrong is also present here, you ending up frequently helping people that sometimes you wish you wouldn’t, and sometimes, even backfiring on you.

The game itself is divided in chapters. The first chapter has you roaming the island and joining a side while the second chapter involves Harbor Town, and deciding which faction controls it. The third chapter and fourth chapter have the most story-related content of the game and have you  in an underground dungeon fighting through tons of baddies and then gathering up different artifacts around the game world for.. well.. you’ll have to see for yourself. Some quests are sadly chapter based, so if you don’t finish them in that chapter, they automatically fail.

Risen, as said, is an action-RPG. What this means is that while combat is reliant on stats and gear, whether you win or lose is entirely dictated on how well you play the game. Ofcourse that this system, the combat system of the game, has to be extremely well done since you’ll be doing a lot of it. Oddly.. it isn’t. It has the same fixation and problems that it had in the previous Gothic games. The game itself is challenging, even on Normal, but what makes it even more so, is the combat. Often enemies are either extremely hard when they should not be, or are extremely easy when they should be hard.  Some enemies will even plague you hours after passing them in the ‘level bracket’ that you should have fought them in. You have three choices for combat in this game. Melee combat, featuring swords, shields, axes or staves, ranged combat featuring bows and crossbows and magic attacks, generally ranged damage dealing.

Melee combat is a mix of luck and stats. It all falls down to whether the enemy combos or not. When you’re pretty far in the game, and still scared of a pack of wolves that you were when you were starting, then there’s a problem. The fact of the matter is, that some battles you end up winning, and others loosing, even thou they are the same enemies, and you did the exact same things. While the game allows you to parry, dodge and offer a good deal of combos to use, it all comes down to doing charge attacks and hoping they won’t hit back. This becomes supremely clear in the mini-boss-fight before the ‘real’ boss-fight where the guy can kill you with exactly TWO hits, even thou you’re all geared up and ready to rock.

Ranged combat, while allowing you some certainty in the outcome of a situation, has you backtracking a good deal, all while poking arrows or bolts into your enemies. Bows are lower damage, but can be fired earlier, have greater mobility while aiming,  and use dexterity to be able to wield them. Crossbows have higher damage, a fixed reload time, low mobility while aiming and use strength to wield them. The problem with crossbows is that DEXTERITY is what you need to do more damage, so you end up dual-speccing both Strength and Dexterity to get the most out of them and be able to use them. The fact that with the initial release, the skill itself is bugged, progressing from level 1 to level 9 offering NO reload bonuses, even thou each level should reduce reload time by 10%, does not help the matter one bit. Only upgrading to level 10 will it offer the full bonus that it should.

Magic is also a tad unbalanced, taking a long time to head up to Rune Magic, and having to use the same “shoot, run back, shoot” tactic as ranged users do. Also now you have to bother with mana plants and potions aswell, since your mana is non-regenerable.

Overall, the combat while being a pain in the ass sometimes, generally works, and can even be fun in certain situations. But in the end, the marvels of great action-RPG combat like that of The Witcher greatly overshadows this simplistic run-and-poke gameplay.Also i’d like to note that the final boss battle is entirely unreliant on what you’ve trained so far. You can theoretically go in with a level 1 character with the required items and you can finish the game with no problems. It is kind of a let down and a good ending could have made the game really outshine it’s flaws.

Still, while the combat is generally unfulfilling and quirky , the social/crafting/utility sector is not. Sneaking around, lockpicking chests and doors, crafting potions and making magic amulets from ore you mined yourself is very fun. There’s nothing like making your own permanent +5 stat bonus potions and gulping them down afterwards, or the thrill of sneaking into a warehouse and robbing the place blind.

I’ve talked of places and people, but how is that represented in the world? How does the game presents itself and how does it look?

It looks great. The lush vegetation greets you the moment you get your character’s face out of the sand. The sandy beaches and the blue sea lets you know you are truly far from any mainland. The game handles shadow similarly to Far Cry 2, paving a dark black soft shadow on the ground, really contrasting with the blooming vegetation around you. The game looks great and really drags in the atmosphere home. While the exteriors look amazing, the interiors of the temples sadly lack any real ‘look’ and seem pale and unimaginative.

They could have done something like we’ve seen in X:Men Origins: Wolverine, and have the lush jungle landscape blend beautifully with the age-old temples. Sadly, we get dusty and VERY DARK temples/dungeons, with rare squirts of lava. Really, sometimes i had to turn my brightness to max on both ingame and on my monitor since i purely could not see anything, and the ingame offers of a torch and Light Spell were far from perfect. Performance-wise, while having just a slightly high system requirement, runs smoothly on even medium PC’s nowadays, and on maximum, an E4300@2.4ghz, 3GB of ram with a Geforce 8800GTX covers it with the minimum of 30 frames per second atleast.

I’ve mentioned atmosphere.. And the graphics really do couple with the music to create an immersive experiance. I hate to mention Gothic again, but really, the style and sound of the soundtracks are highly reminiscent of it. It’s soothing and ambient while also making a lasting impression. It doesn’t go as high or heroic like Jeremy Soule’s work, but it has it’s own style. While we’re at sound, i’m also going to mention great voice acting. While a bit stereotypical, and lacking any real memorable  characters or lines, it’s well-done and make the characters sound exactly like you’d like them to. They went to great lengths to do it right and also managed to translate the amusing snips from the original german, into a perceptible and  natural english. All the media elements come together nicely and form a great cohesive ‘whole’ really pushing home the concept and the ideas behind the game.

You’ve probably seen me complain a bit in this review, and by now, you’re expecting something to justify why i made that very lofty and uplifting introduction. Risen is that RPG that even thou it has it’s problems and bugs.. it’s done right in that way that makes you keep playing it. If it were any other game, i would have given up after the first few hours, but the landscapes, the interesting and subtle hints that the game offers and it’s general appeal was something that i’ve not had for a good while. It’s a hardcore, old-school, level up, kill monsters and do quests type of RPG. It doesn’t try to be fancy, introduce new gameplay systems or mix it up by hybridizing with other genre systems. It’s a solid game with a solid concept done right. In the tumble and mix of games today, trying to be new and fresh, it’s welcoming to see a game still doing it the old way. It’s almost like meeting an old friend and getting reacquainted.

So, as usual in my reviews, the base line is.. Is this game worth your 40$? Yes. It’s a core RPG that any player will get some enjoyment out of it. Oldschool gamers and even those only acquainted with the last few years of role-playing-games have something waiting for them in Risen. I recommend you don’t miss out.

If you want to buy it, and want to support Cosmo’s Reviews aswell, you can click the boxart picture below to get a copy shipped from Amazon.