Risen Review

Written by: Adam Tewkesbury Posted: 2nd October 2009

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Half-baked!

Risen Details:

	RPG
	PC/Xbox 360
	Piranha Bytes
	Deep Silver

16+

Out Now

New RPG's brave enough to grace this generation of consoles inevitably set themselves up for comparison to some seriously established and much loved titles. Tolkein-esque questing will have to face up to the legacy of Oblivion whilst a lighter tone will invite consideration of Fable 2, and for every game that falls short of these lofty heights there are a hatful of competitors vying for attention. To succeed, newcomers have to bring fresh ideas, carving their own niche and a piece of the RPG pie. Lesser games such as Risen simply pinch ideas from the successful games that came before in the hope that they can be cobbled together to form a coherent game, and deserve to languish at the bottom of bargain bins nationwide.

The concept is reasonable, if a little generic. Risen is based on a remote island, where you find yourself washed up after a run in with a big ugly monster causes the boat you’re stowing away on to sink under a big tidal wave. With nothing but the rags on your back, you then set off with the only other survivor (a busty woman in a medieval boob tube, obviously) and a sturdy stick with which to batter the local wildlife, to find out where you are and seek your fortune

Would-be adventurers are unlikely to reach the first quest before alarm bells start ringing. First impressions count and Risen immediately comes across as distinctly last-gen, with basic, rough textures and alarmingly abrupt pop-up. Animation is clunky with plenty of clipping, and collectable items are laughably prominent within the landscape (often balanced on the flat texture supposedly meant to represent dense Mediterranean foliage). This does a great job of destroying any immersion or association within the bland world you’re asked to explore. Remember the organic woods that flowed into the settlements of Fable 2? As blocky buildings appear abruptly between the pixellated trees it is quickly apparent that there is nothing of that craft on show here, with the overriding impression being that of a slightly below par PS2 title. Characters and foes are as generic and repetitive as you might expect (with some notable exceptions, including giant killer moths that stutter pointlessly across the landscape and practically throw themselves onto the tip of your sword), but all are presented in such a slap-dash and jerky way that it can be almost comical. It is honestly difficult to believe that the same hardware is capable of running Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Bad design extends well beyond the graphics and presentation. Straying into the numerous caverns and crypts highlights a problem common to many RPG’s- darkness pretty much obscures your environment and anything lurking therein. The most common solution would be to tweak the gamma so you can see enough to collect stuff and hit whatever it is waiting in the shadows, but Risen mystifyingly does not allow you to play with the brightness settings, instead forcing you to throw torches about in preparation for a scrap, or (more commonly) flail about in the dark until you or your unseen foe take one lucky hit too many and hit the dust.

Where other RPG’s have worked on the combat elements to create some semblance of variety and adaptability (Fable 2 again providing a shining example), Risen is content to hark back to simpler times with an almost Gauntlet-style swing/block/repeat-until-dead real-time system. The rudimentary lock-on (activated when you block) means it is also bewilderingly easy to face one enemy only to be outflanked by another and quickly beaten to a pulp with little opportunity to defend yourself from anyone/anything that doesn’t come straight at you. Offering a challenge is one thing, but being unfairly creamed because you’re stuck facing a bad guy who’s only interested in shuffling backwards is something else entirely. In 2009, gaming mechanics of this order have become mercifully rare, and add further credence to the view that we’re dealing with an especially shoddy experience.

In fact, I’m struggling to find anything positive to say. Torches create a relatively nice flicker in dingy areas, and I chuckled when one of the pigs in a farm started to roll around in its own poo, but such minor points are completely wasted given the horrors experienced elsewhere. Loading times are long, in-level loading is frequent, and despite the paucity of detail or anything going on the game still somehow manages to suffer from slowdown. Your character can’t run so getting places takes an age, even when the points of interest are crammed together so as to be completely unconvincing as a game world. It is common to be told that a ‘long and arduous journey’ awaits you, only for the same character to lead you around a corner and bid you good luck now you’ve reached your destination. And speech is an arduous affair too- the olde world vocabulary grates almost before you start, whilst pre-determined speech options lead to exactly the same conclusion and are therefore a complete waste of time. All this, plus a lot of the character models have an odd texture effect that makes them look a bit see-through. Really, nothing works!

The thing that annoys me most about Risen is the brazen way it steals ideas from so many better sources and pretends that they are in some way original. After half an hour an experienced RPG-er will likely be suffering from severe gamer deja-vu: chests are hidden and opened exactly as they are in Fable, the item collection and filing is practically the same as in Monster Hunter, dialogue and character interactions are a very poor copy of the system used by Bethesda, the setting has been done a hundred times before and the whole thing ends up feeling like a collection of leftovers. With the performance issues, there is practically nothing to keep you playing beyond an urge to find out how much worse things can get.

Up against such revered and critically acclaimed competition, Risen cannot help but come across as a shabby, underdeveloped pretender with none of the polish or insight shown by much older games. The core idea is sound (if unoriginal) and the idea of being shipwrecked on an island is a good one (a medieval Lost, if you will) but this is unfortunately left unexplored after the initial opening FMV. What follows is the worst kind of gaming experience- part shameless copy of what has been done (much better) before, part outdated design and presentation, all bad. One to avoid.

(Update) We’ve received a number of comments rightly pointing out that some of the generic RPG building blocks referred to above were in fact in place in the Gothic series, which predates Fable, Monster Hunter and Oblivion. This doesn’t make Risen any better, but coming from the same stable as Gothic might’ve given it the moral high ground if only the rest of the game could drag itself into 2009.