Risen
Review
Gothic is back! Erm... Risen, arose!
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Experience
With favoring one faction, I mean fulfilling tasks for them. Many of the people that you meet will give you tasks and these come in four flavors. There are the "unconnected side quests" that give you some experience along with some gold or an item. Fulfilling these is important to level up so you can handle the trials ahead, but they do not further the overall storyline. Next up are the quests that align you with one of the factions. These are necessary to gain the trust of your future allies which in turn means access to better equipment and training. Faction related quests - do - further the storyline up to a certain point. After that, the quests for both factions seem to converge into a single path that follows the overall storyline.
Missions are varied, even if they do follow the traditional "talk to person x" and "get item y". The missions serve to slowly introduce you to the gameplay mechanics, the island and its inhabitants as well as its many locations. As you solve quests and gain experience, Learning Points become available that - together with some gold - can be used to ask people with special skills to share their talents with you.
Early on in the game both missions and training, and of course trade, will have you run your legs out from under you. Soon though, you have access to one of the 14 teleport stones that can instantly transfer you to convenient locations across the map. The map itself isn't huge, but big enough to have believable different weather conditions depending on your location. If it rains on one side of the island, you may well find great tanning conditions on the other.
The day and night cycle can be truly unnerving. Even in good conditions it is easy enough to accidentally trip over the island's monstrous inhabitants but in the dark you will find it hard to navigate without even falling off the edge of the island's many treacherous cliffs. This adds a level of suspense to the game that is usually reserved only for games catering to the horror genre.
Combat
Risen is an epic role-playing game, which means I did not have enough time to play a sizable portion of the game testing multiple ways of developing my character. Joining Esteban, I trained my character in fighting with the longbow and sword and as such I cannot comment on how the game plays with a mage-trained character. Bow-fighting is fairly straightforward. You select your bow, pull an arrow, point at your intended target and shoot. The distance that you can see is the distance that you can shoot even if you will have to aim a little higher to hit far-off enemies. It takes a while to prime your arrow to the point that it will do maximum damage which causes ranged fighting to feel a bit slow. The basic yet functional enemy AI will see your opponent running towards you but running and firing is a difficult task, slowing your travel speed down considerably. In many cases, a fight that starts with a bow will end with a sword or an axe. Swordplay changes as you receive more training but despite some cool moves from sword skill level five and up, it remains simply a hack&slash type of affair. I am not sure if a more fleshed out combat system would have served the game better but while I enjoyed this simplicity, I can certainly imagine some people not getting their RPG fix out of Risen's combat system.
8.5
fun score
Pros
Warmly familiar to fans of the Gothic series. Stable.
Cons
Very few, but did they really have to use F8 for Quick Save and F9 for Quick load?
