In Risen 3, The world has been abandoned by its gods and is scarred from the rampage of the Titans. Humanity is struggling to regain strength and rally its forces. You, however, have more pressing concerns: your own life has been shattered and you must set off to reclaim what is lost amidst the darkness that is spreading throughout the world. Who knows, maybe you’ll even save the world at the same time?
In my opinion, Risen has always been a very niche RPG series, with half the RPG fans loving it, and the other hating it. Unfortunately, Risen 3 will split the verdict between these groups of people yet again as it is more of what we have come to expect from the series.
You start the game playing as a pirate, a familiar character which you remember from the second game , and through some unfortunate circumstances find yourself 6 feet under. However death is only the beginning, as you find yourself resurrected for unknown reasons. The story most of the time isn’t exactly well written or paced, and players may find the scale tipping to the cheesiness side as the things that are mentioned seem either too ambitious or just dead right weird. You usually come to these points in the game where you think about why exactly you are even doing most of the things in the first place. Also don’t get me started on Patty’s model.
Now, I understand developers have all their rights to express their creative freedom, but modelling some characters so stereotypically, is shoddy work. Especially, without any viable reason. Take the big chested, scantily clad sister of our hero. I usually don’t have any problems with these kinds of things, but they have to have a reason. Here, it just feels like it is forcefully put in, because for some reason they still think we need more of these in this day and age where furious debates about male to female morality run rampant. Basically put, in my opinion, it is tasteless. Sure there are a lot of games that do this, but why is it that only this irritated me?
The dialogue you engage in with most NPC’s is pretty basic, with each repeating the same thing the others have said. It’s just a shame that the Titan storyline isn’t as epic as it was promoted to be. Even the voice work require some more polish. It isn’t that the actors are doing a bad job, in fact they are pretty spot on with their accents and pronunciations, but it could’ve used more time in the mixing booth.
The gameplay does seem to be a bit more diverse from the second game, and with the combat usually ending with execution animations every time you hit someone who is on the edge of their life. Sure it does look really cool at times, and seems to be inspired by how the combat is animated in the Assassin’s Creed games, but you can only sit through it so many times before getting bored of it. At least with games like Assassin’s Creed, the animations are either varied or not too consistent. Still, the combat isn’t completely bad and is definitely fun at times. However, if you were to compare it to heavy RPG games like lets say, the Gothic, or The Witcher series, you would see that it is pretty washed down in terms of what you can do, and how many powers you can use.
One thing I absolutely love about this game though, is the UI layout and PC control customization. One innovative aspect the Risen series has always had is the brisk and logical UI design, where each menu was easy to navigate at the convenient press of a few buttons. Luckily, the case still remains with the latest Risen game and you will rarely see yourself get stuck or frustrated with how the menu system works. Furthermore, adding control customization that supports multitude of buttons on top of it, really helps with the flow of the game.
The other thing I like is how creative some of the character models for the enemies and bosses are, with each mark on their bodies telling a distinct story. Speaking about bosses, some fights are actually pretty clever and fun which I rather enjoyed and wish there were more of. I even liked the beautiful wildlife present in the game, as they are fun to fight with and looked absolutely dashing.
One thing most RPG games like this rely on, are their open worlds. If a game is well and cleverly crafted, you will be lost in the never ending tasks that the worlds present, however if those are not present, the open world is nothing but a mere prop where the play takes place, devoid of any life whatsoever. In my opinion, a good open world feels breathtaking and lively, something like The Witcher 2’s towns where everyone is joyfully trotting along their business and interacting with the environment around them. This game unfortunately, doesn’t have that spark of energy.
As for the graphics and the PC version itself, I have several problems. Now, unless you run the game at 1080p, chances are the game is going to look like a complete mess with blurry character models, and low-res textures. Now even though the game does run good at times, has several performance issues. Issues that could’ve been fixed if they had at least utilized DX 10.1 or more VRAM for the texture, but as it stands the game has modest requirements that feel like a bottleneck on most modern computers. As I said, just by utilizing DX10.1, they’d have better performance, and by requiring more Vram (which mostly everyone has 1gb of anyways) could have afforded better, more crisp hi-res textures. However, it rarely uses more than half a GB of Vram for the game.
Now, I would’ve called this a poor man’s RPG, but even that isn’t possible as the game is ridiculously priced at £39.99. If you are a Risen fan, you may want to play this for the lore, but I would advice you to wait for a sale. Otherwise, there isn’t anything you will be missing if you decide to skip this game.