by Risen is an RPG in the style of Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights 2 – moral decisions to make, monsters to fight, places to explore (sadly no character creation, which is a pity). Of course, there’s a reason I chose those two RPGs to compare it – the graphics are about on par with Morrowind (or maybe my memory is just smoothing out the polygons) and not quite as good as NWN2. Still, I’m not a stickler for fantastic graphics – in fact, I’d prefer if mechanics and worldbuilding came first more often. I only mention it because in an open-world RPG, you are quite often looking at the scenery for long periods of time. Particularly in Risen, when your movement speed isn’t quite as fast as you would like, poor graphics can start to wear you down. And don’t get me started on whoever modeled the female characters. I’m surprised they can stand upright.
My real issue with Risen comes from the combat. Read practically any review of Risen and you’ll see people saying it’s a great RPG hidden behind a terrible combat system. And they’re probably right – it does seem like there’s quite the branching, fleshed-out world behind the clunky combat. Extremely clunky combat. Unreasonably clunky combat. It’s probably unfair to compare it to Dark Souls, since it was another three years before Dark Souls came out, but that is the most readily available comparison, since Risen features very dangerous combat and a lock-on targeting system – much like Dark Souls. But where Dark Souls lock-on works wonderfully and allows you to keep or switch targets readily, Risen will automatically lock on to whatever is directly in front of you. This means that when enemies lunge and you side-step, you lose your lock-on and not get it back for a couple seconds – an eternity in combat time. I also feel that the dangerous combat is less precise and more luck-based than Dark Souls’, making quicksaves unfortunately mandatory. This may just be my lack of experience with the system, so take that with a grain of salt.
In the end, this goes into Tier Two because I’m just not having fun with the combat and exploration – two of the three main components (the other being plot/relationships) of an open-world RPG. Maybe I’ll go play NWN2 again.