Monday 09 Nov 2009

Risen is a game that has not received a lot of media coverage. It snuck in under the radar wearing a Golden Cloak of Anonymity. Nobody expected much from it. Nobody even saw it coming. With a long heritage of RPG’s in the Gothic franchise, it was not expected to be completely terrible, just not a star. With my Review Sword +1 and my Ring of Subjectivity +3 I took the plunge into this mysterious world.

Good games consist of lots of good moments. Great games are one big great moment. Bad games are filled up with bad moments. Terrible games prevent you from finding out if it has any good moments because you stop playing before the good moments show up. Risen falls in that last category. It was so nearly a bad game. But not even a lot of perseverance saw this game pull itself from mediocrity.

LOST

The game starts off with your stowaway character surviving a shipwreck and washing up on the shore of an unknown island. You do not get to choose any of your character’s traits, skills, class or gender. You are the unknown male simply known as… “me.”

It seems the island is infested with angry animals and right off the bat you need to fight for your very survival. You are faced with a similar option as the survivors in Lost: stay on the beach, hoping to be rescued, or move inland to find fresh supplies. OK, you don’t really have that choice in the game. You need to move inland or the game turns into a screensaver. Running around forms a big part of the game. Whether you are exploring, running errands or simply moving from one part of the island to the next, your character should be fit enough to run the Comrades. The island is also not nearly as big as some other RPG’s out there. Compared to Fallout 3 it is tiny. But this works to its advantage. It is big enough so you don’t feel like you are rehashing the same territory over and over, yet small enough to get to know the island and familiarize yourself with the environment.

The first three hours of exploration have no purpose. The story is not exposed properly and you kind of feel lost. You slowly come to the conclusion that there are two factions on the island, and at some point you will have to align yourself with one or the other in order to make progress. Staying neutral will not progress the story. On the one side you have the Bandits who control the swamps on the western side of the island. They are the locals on the island, forced to live a life of banditry by the island’s newest inhabitants, the Inquisitors. You also have the Order, a group of mages who set up camp close to a volcano in the middle of the island. Apparently some mages somewhere did something bad, and now the island is on the verge of being overrun by all sorts of baddies. The story is so uninspired and dramatic that I lost track of why I am doing what I am doing. There are no funny moments in the game to lighten the mood either. However, if the game gets you down, simply reload the game and watch the Piranha Bytes clip. That’s about as funny as it gets in this game.

Be all you can be!

Aligning with different factions opens up different classes to you. The bandits are fighters, thieves and hunters. The Order are fighters and mages. Progressing in your chosen class is a laborious task. You kill creatures and complete quests, you get XP. With enough XP you gain a level. With each level you have a limited amount of Learning Points available. You can then use these learning points at a trainer to train you in specific skills. However, they not only require learning points before they can train you, but also exorbitant amounts of your hard earned gold. So you work twice as hard progressing your skills as you would in a normal RPG. Role playing is also taken too far for the more mundane tasks. Before you have access to health potions you need to find a stick, beat an animal, take its meat, find a pan, find a fire, fry the meat in the pan, eat the meat and then gain 5 health points. Frustrating!

Finding out what happened on the island and deciding who to align with takes forever. Endless tasks and missions gather up quickly, and before you know it you have 30 quests to complete for each side. The clunky quest journal makes it hard to find quests and the details of the quests are hidden in very long conversational scripts. The map interface is equally annoying. You only ever have a use for it to see the general location of a character required to complete a quest. The compass has no indicators pointing you to anywhere but North. This is a real confusing environment you find yourself in. Painful!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… and he must be blind

The environment caused the biggest rift in my opinion of the game. I could not decide if I liked the island. There were moments when it looked so realistic that I could feel the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair. But around the corner I came across a piece of land so barren and featureless, with textures so bad that it could have been hand drawn using MS Paint. The models are also varied in quality. Some creatures were crafted with love and attention, and others were mashed together with a random polygon creator. NPC’s look stiff and lifeless, yet some of the effects from magic and sparks when swords clash were very well done. It feels like the game is not quite done. Ugly!

Combat in the game is rather painful at times as well. The variety of weapons are obviously very limited in the beginning, starting you off with a sturdy branch, enticing you to play a little longer, just in case you find a better weapon on the carcass of your next victim. However, I have not come across any special weapons. But the weapons are pretty pointless in most situations as you can beat someone barehanded. That’s right, your fists are fast enough to interrupt your opponent’s attacks and they won’t get a chance to hit you. In one trial I had to beat a master staff fighter. I felt like Bruce Lee, beating him to a pulp before he had a chance to swing his staff. Combat magic is under utilized as well, and is basically a ranged weapon with tough as nails targeting. I only hit 1 in every 4 targets. Disappointing!

In short, the game had moments in which I thought it could turn out great. But I always ended up being disappointed. The environment, the combat, the story, they all have moments of being pretty good, yet feel incomplete and rushed. Given an extra year of development, this game could be good. But after around 40 hours of play I decided to not force myself to play any longer. Look at key words of each paragraph above for a summary of the Risen: frustrating, painful, ugly, disappointing! It gets 2 stars. 1 star for the Piranha Bytes intro, the second for the few good moments in the game.

The good: Moments of pure beauty
The bad: Moments of pure frustration, confusion, and ugliness
The ugly: Frying your own food!

Rating:
Contributor:	Oltman

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