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.