Risen

[MoBiUGeArSkIn]

Whilst playing Risen I was reminded of a similar game released a few years back.
No, not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion but Two Worlds. I know what you’re thinking, Two
Worlds was terrible but the same cannot be said here. The comparison comes from
the nagging sense of over ambition. With Risen, it feels like the developers
have bitten off more than they can chew, despite being able to fit plenty into
their mouths.

It seems almost a little too early to speak of other games
but the opening few hours of Risen won’t grab you like last year’s Fallout 3, or
the earlier Oblivion. Playing as a neutral character, you wash up on an island
after the ship you stow away on is sunk. There is no face creation tool, no
names chosen and no class selected. In the opening stages you play as a blank
slate.

This introductory sequence betrays the open world nature of the
game and forces you through a linear tutorial complete with stunted voice acting
and poor attempts to mask the fact that you’re being taught how to play a game
in what is supposed to be an organic setting. Your female accomplice will ask
you to find something to defend yourself with, like a club, in case you need to
fight. She’ll tell you to put it on your back, equip it, for easy access. The
whole thing feels goofy.

Once you’re done picking up items and beating on
a few indigenous creatures the game begins proper. The story, on the face of it,
isn’t that interesting. The mysterious island has a small number of factions and
depending on which path you take you’ll ultimately ally yourself with one, which
puts you in awkward standing with the others. They each offer specialisations,
at this point you are effectively selecting your archetype, and actually
choosing a side is a fair bit of fun. Each will have you perform a set number of
tasks before allowing you entry.

Whilst Risen might falter in many
important areas, it does a great job of adding some gravity to your decision
making. Not through obvious set pieces, like nuking the town of Megaton in
Fallout 3, but through an occasionally surprising script. Early on I came across
a town controlled by one major faction, but infiltrated by another. Both
factions where looking for help and when I chose one over the other, the
resulting conversation I had with a neutral NPC actually made me feel a little
bad for what I’d done. That’s no small feat.

That’s not to say that the
dialogue is Risen is always good. Whilst it is all voice acted, with a few
notable Hollywood actors in the mix, many performances are wooden and some of
the exchanges, that should sound dynamic, are poorly delivered. A number of the
NPCs also look identical, which is off putting and quite confusing. Presentation
in general is fairly weak.

On PC, Risen looks decent. The console port,
handled by an outsourced team, is visually reminiscent of the Elder Scrolls:
Morrowind. It looks incredibly dated with muddy textures, an inconsistent frame
rate, repetitive character models and a feeble draw distance considering the
size of the world. It makes exploring the place, which is pretty vast, quite
uninteresting.

The menus and their navigation with a pad also look and
feel cumbersome. You’ll be switching from analogue sticks to face buttons to
bumpers just to cycle through inventory and equip items. It’s impossible to do
on the fly, always requiring that you stop and fiddle for a number of seconds.
The items in your inventory also appear tiny on a 720p display, making it almost
impossible to read the numbers of items you’re actually holding.

Although
it’s technically not broken, I even have to be hard on the combat system itself.
I chose to play with sword and shield and, unless you actually unlock more
elaborate combos later in the game, enemy engagement does not change. You’ve a
three strike combo, a parry and a dodge button. You automatically lock onto your
target, making it near impossible to miss. If you do, you simply dodge their
attack and repeat the process.

It’s not as if the Xbox 360 is starved of
open world role playing games and the ones released thus far have received
mighty praise. They are, no doubt, much larger budgeted productions but the real
question is how much do you, personally, need Risen? It’s familiar, perhaps
overly so. There’s a vast world to explore, people to help, dungeons to raid,
skills to learn. For all the minor flourishes there’s another fetch quest to
complete.

In terms of content, Risen is nothing to scoff at. There are a
good few hundred quests available, a whole bunch of items to either find or
forge and, on occasion, you’ll come up against a genuine moral dilemma. It may
not be pretty and may not feel at home on the console but if you honestly
haven’t had enough of the genre you’ll perhaps be able to overlook the foibles
and enjoy what Risen has to offer. Even if it does feel stretched.

6/10

unless you actually unlock more elaborate combos later in the game, enemy engagement does not change

Didn't finish it then?

[MoBiUGeArSkIn]

Nah, the main quest-line is reported to last around 30 hours alone and there are diversions all over the place.
Those screenshots are from the PC version too. It definitely doesn't look that nice on 360.

EDIT - Eurogamer liked it less than me.

I watched some streams of the pc version so probably pick it up for that rather than the 360.