Risen
Review
Gothic is back! Erm... Risen, arose!
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Combat (cntd)
While the combat mechanics are fairly simple, the actual winning of a battle is not. You would expect your character to be severely underpowered at the early stages of the game but difficult battles continue throughout the game. Even the lowliest creatures remain deadly when you are a fighting powerhouse and this is not because of a particularly clever AI or facing too many enemies at the same time. The problem lies in the fact that your action is 'reset' after a successful hit from your opponent. As many of your opponents are simply faster than you, the chances are that they will hit your first, resetting your own swing, and getting in another hit before you can finish your next action. This... flaw makes combat unreasonably difficult at times and advocates the use of ranged combat techniques over melee fighting. From a distance, at least, your opponent can't get close enough to hit you in quick succession. So besides learning to fight, you better learn to run as well if you want to survive in Risen.
While on the topic of flaws: more recent Gothic games were not known for their stability or even patches to fix the countless issues that players encountered while playing them. Many fans, including myself, often blamed Jowood for pushing the games out too fast and for the lack of support after launch. Jowood certainly has that reputation so I had high hopes for Piranha Bytes association with publisher Deep Silver. While it is too early to say anything definite about the aftercare for Risen, I am glad to report that the game is quite stable. I played over a period of 4 days and have not experienced a single crash. Once the game froze on me but this happened while I was loading a (working) savegame, so the 'damage' in time was none. I have not experienced any of the broken quests that plagued some of the Gothic games as well. In the later stages of the game you will run into some 'cases of mistaken identities' as a quests requires you to talk to person X, but actually means person Y. Annoying, but hardly a real issue. The same is true for a handful of dialogue issues where the spoken words conflict with the subtitles. Both these issues are so rare that I have not let them affect the score at all.
Risen, a Gothic tale
If you have played any of the Gothic games, you will feel right at home in Risen. Piranha Bytes did little to hide the fact that it is business as usual, and why should they? They created the Gothic franchise and its rather unique role-playing system of training your character rather than having you chose your new skills the moment you level up. If you think that this slows down progress, then I can't completely deny that assessment. However, the trip to the nearest specialist who can train you also forces you to take time to consider what skill you need improved most. The background story is certainly worthy of the series. It took me a while to get into the spirit of the story, but once I had committed myself to the Don I found that the plot unfolded so rapidly that it was perhaps a bit too fast. Fortunately you have time to explore freely and even fulfill some of the quests given by the other faction.
Risen provides the player with hours upon hours of role-playing goodness. A sign that you are playing a great game is when it becomes more difficult to put it aside for a couple of hours and this was certainly the case with Risen. There is always someone who needs a hand or a cave or temple to be explored. I often found myself thinking "I'll just finish this quest and then I'll...", and then had my wife tell me it was time for bed several hours later. So, here is some sage advice to those considering buying this game: place a clock on your desk, right next to your screen or suffer sleep deprivation. You have been warned.
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?
