Risen Review page 2

02 Oct 2009 at 11:00:01 by Spanner Spencer
Systems used to review this title: (360)

Choosing your weapon is important, though, as the early part of the game demonstrates. The combat is very aye-aye with a low powered weapon, as your character tends to keep repeating his weak combos while your opponent moves around the side. The slow responses of the character and regular number of dropped frames mean that you're inclined to bash the buttons, which only exacerbates the problem and leaves you swinging a sword wildly at thin air, while a vicious ostrich pecks your back.

It improves as you're given training, but avoiding combat altogether becomes the prevailing method of winning a fight, which might be a good life lesson but doesn't make for a particularly entertaining gameplay mechanic.

Side quests aren't especially prevalent in Risen, which is a little unusual for an epic RPG, but that's more than made up for in its use of piffling tasks and hoop-jumping exercises before you can convince the many NPCs to do what you actually want them to. This does keep the game on track better than side quests tend to do, but the triviality of some of these jobs is often a little grating - especially as you grow into something of a local superhero then find yourself picking crops for an idle farmer just so he'll tell you who to talk to next.

Talking with these NPCs isn't a chore in itself, as you can skip to the end and get things moving, but listening to the woefully lacklustre voice acting does nothing for the game's personality. The main characters sound utterly bored, while others struggle to read their lines or overact to the point at which you'd like to beat them with Yorick's decapitated skull right there on the empty stage.

But the actors are working with some weak dialogue, which often treats you as a bit stupid and fails to entertain or inform; merely spout expositional guff that reduces 50% of the game's characters to the role of a single, Deus Ex Machina narrator (who has no qualms about spoiling the ending).

Generally the moral choices telegraphed throughout the game lead to a couple of different possibilities for your character, and do bring the intriguing story hinted at during the intro to a satisfying conclusion; even if the game goes off tangent and loses tempo regularly through the journey, and finds itself lost in the sandbox rather than embracing it. That said, Risen is very forgiving, and isn't weighed down with the complexities of leading a virtual life, and that could be a significant blessing for many role players out there who want to jump right in.

If you've played Fable II to and are looking for an RPG distraction to tide you over until Fable 3 comes out, you could do worse than Risen. I'd just wait until the first price drop before picking it up.

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