Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective

Risen is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three Gothic games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the Gothic name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved Gothic series. As such, Risen sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by Gothic 1 and 2, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with Risen.

For the uninitiated, the Gothic games, and by extension Risen, are more old-school computer-RPGs that aim to create highly immersive worlds that also challenge you to learn their systems and to improve your character before tackling more difficult aspects of their open-world designs, which in the early stages of the games are pretty much everything, everywhere. In all three games you start out as a pathetic weakling before joining one of three factions, which grants access to better armor, weapons, and skills, and then you get stronger by exploring the world, defeating enemies, and completing quests, spending Skill Points that you earn with each level-up to improve your character's stats and skills with various trainers. Despite offering relatively large open worlds, the main quest is ultimately the main focus of these games; it advances through a series of chapters, with each new chapter bringing dynamic changes to the world. All-the-while you're free to explore the world as freely as you desire, finding hidden secrets and completing assorted side quests, with the only restrictions being that some areas may be off-limits until they're unlocked via the main quest, or might have enemies that are too difficult for you to handle.

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Risen takes place in a world in which humanity banished their gods from existence, which had the consequence of also releasing the formerly-imprisoned titans to wreak havoc on the world. With the mainland and coastal islands now being literally torn apart by violent earthquakes and storms caused by the titans, one island seems to be protected from the ensuing devastation, although it has been witness to the strange appearance of ancient ruins rising out of the ground. The island hosts a small harbor town, normally run by Don Esteban, but with the arrival of the Warriors of the Inquisition, led by Inquisitor Mendoza who've come to investigate the circumstances around the island, the Inquisition has basically taken over the city and forced the Don and his men to retreat into the swamp. There's also a monastery where a group of mages live and practice their arts. You play as a nameless stowaway on a ship bound for this island, who washes ashore after his ship is attacked and subsequently wrecked by a titan. Starting on the beach with nothing more than the clothes on your back and a tree branch for a weapon, you set out to explore the island and soon find yourself wrapped up in the mystery of uncovering what lies at the heart of the volcano keep at the center of the island, and saving the island from its eventual destruction.

The game gives the island an alluring element of mystery to it; it looks like a relatively ordinary tropical island but you just get this pervasive sense that there's something mystical lying just underneath the surface, waiting to erupt. That element is symbolized quite literally by the presence of the volcano and the ancient ruins rising from the ground, but there's also the Holy Flame which is a literal source of magic that the mages have built their monastery around as a means to protect it. With the island somehow being protected from the violent storms ravaging the rest of the world, likely as a result of whatever strange magic seems to radiate from the heart of the island, the story is initially about discovering the source of this strange magic, and ultimately finding a way to stop it once you realize that unleashing it could prove disastrous for the island. This quest is set off by Inquisitor Mendoza, who's searching for a way to defeat the titans and suspects that there's an ancient power hidden inside the volcano keep that might help.

It's a decent premise for a story, but unfortunately the story never really develops into anything more substantial -- it always feels like it's just a premise the entire game, a simple backdrop to setup video game objectives in place of a real story. In a nutshell, this is the basic plot progression of Risen: wash up on the island, join a faction, collect five items, enter the main dungeon, collect five more items, fight the final boss. There is backstory explaining the presence of the final dungeon, what's inside it, and even why you have to collect the various items, but a lot of it feels like retrofitted explanations to justify the item collecting, and there aren't many story beats along the way that contribute to the rising action, or that add extra complications or challenges for the main character. Meanwhile, the stakes never really feel like they're all that high because you never get to see or experience the destruction that the titans are supposedly wreaking on the mainland, and a convenient plot device explains that the island will remain safe indefinitely, as long as you don't act to unleash whatever power is hidden in the volcano.

As it turns out, there's actually a fire titan still imprisoned in the volcano, which is why the other titans don't attack the island; Mendoza suspected this, and was intending to try to control the fire titan to fight the other titans, with no solid guarantee that he'd actually be able to control it and being willing to risk the destruction of the entire island if it meant saving the rest of the world. You join forces with him early on, before he reveals his full intentions, to find a way inside the volcano, which has been sealed for hundreds or thousands of years by an ancient lock, which then sets you on a quest to explore a bunch of smaller ruins that have risen out of the ground in search of five golden disks, which act as keys to open the door into the volcano. Once inside, you explore the fortress and learn that it (and the other ruins rising up across the island) were made by an ancient race of lizard people, and that this is where the gods originally trapped the fire titan, with the spirit of a man named Ursegor who helped to imprison the titan bound to the fortress to be its eternal guardian. At that point, Mendoza reveals his plans and goes rogue on you, which then sets you on another quest to assume Ursegor's role by assembling his ancient armor set and releasing his spirit so that you can enter the titan's lair, stop Mendoza, and defeat the titan.

Again, it's a decent story premise but it doesn't feel as fleshed out as it probably could've been. For starters, the story is only four chapters long, compared to the usual six in Gothic 1 and 2, and you spend the entire first chapter exploring the island and joining a faction, which is something you do entirely of your own initiative with no story element driving any of that action forward. So the story is really only three chapters long, with chapter two being a preliminary collect-a-thon to get inside the main dungeon, meaning that it doesn't really even start until chapter three, when you start exploring the main dungeon and actually uncovering the island's backstory and the central conflict with Mendoza, which is about two hours long, and then chapter four is another collect-a-thon to gather all of the pieces of titan armor to fight the final boss, another process that takes about two or three hours. You spend probably three quarters of the game in the first two chapters, before the story even gets itself going, and then the game rushes through the story so quickly that it feels like it ends almost as soon as it begins. The final cutscene doesn't even offer any resolution, as it simply shows your character walking away from the camera after defeating the fire titan before fading to black screen where a voice quickly summarizes the lore about humanity banishing the gods, and then proclaims that "humanity has risen" because one person managed to defeat a titan, and then rolling the credits.

There also aren't a whole lot of memorable events in either the main story or any of the various side quests, other than, say, when the lizardmen invade the monastery and start killing a bunch NPC's unless you can move quickly enough to stop them, or the entire quest line with Patty hunting for her father's buried treasure. A lot of the story, and by extension, the gameplay you perform in service of the story, feels somewhat mundane and subdued -- the game doesn't set up a lot of unique or interesting scenarios, and when it does they tend to blend into the ordinary gameplay and with everything else because so many of the game's more unique scenarios deal with exploring the risen ruins and ancient Saurian temples. Exploring the eastern temple and rescuing the triplets is fun and interesting because of your interactions with the triplets, but at the end of the day you're just exploring another ruin using the same tools to solve the same puzzles that you do a dozen or more times elsewhere throughout the game. Finding the druid Eldric is interesting since you have to follow his trail by searching for clues, even enlisting the aid of a wolf, but ultimately he's locked inside another temple where you use the same tools to solve the same puzzles as elsewhere in the game. Retrieving the stolen delivery from the gnomes on the ruined peninsula offers a unique and interesting environment at first, but ultimately winds up with you inside another fortress like the ones in the monastery or any of the other half-dozen fortresses scattered around the island. Finding the five pieces of titan armor is just a matter of going through basically the same dungeon five times but with remixed puzzle solutions.

None of this really compares to similar quests in Gothic 1 and 2, which despite being much older games with less technical capabilities somehow managed to offer more spectacle, variety, and excitement in their main quests. Getting the four remaining focus stones for Saturas by transforming into a meat bug to get inside the old monastery and hunting snappers with Gorn, getting past the rock golem and exploring the stone fortress with Lester, using divine magic with Milten to fight skeletons in an ancient crypt, and doing battle with a troll by using magic to shrink it down with Diego are all shorter, simpler affairs than what you do in Risen to retrieve the four remaining golden disks for Mendoza, but they feel more unique and memorable. Restoring power to the Eye of Innos involved repairing the eye socket, which required freeing Bennett from jail by proving his innocence in a framed murder, and then convincing Vatras, Pyrokar, and Xardas to meet at the sun circle to perform a ritual, which involved fetching a special book to deliver to Pyrokar and making sure you have enough swamp weed for them, and then meeting them in a special altar in a remote location where they perform a spectacular-looking ritual. In Risen, restoring power to the disk involves grabbing a magic crystal from a chest in Eldric's hut literally right behind him, walking 15 seconds to an altar, and then watching a two-second animation where you do nothing of importance in the whole process, other than rescuing Eldric from the temple, which was already part of getting the disk in the first place.

The most interesting aspect of the story probably has to be the presentation of Mendoza as the villain, in the sense that he's not a conventional villain. Mendoza actually has noble intentions in trying to save the world and stop the other titans, which is more than can be said about the other faction leaders, since Don Esteban has more selfish goals with regaining control of Harbor Town while fattening his wallet with gold from the temples, and Master Ignatius and the rest of the leaders of the monastery would rather not get involved as they only want to focus on protecting the Holy Flame. Mendoza starts out as a good guy, who's seen actually trying to fight off a titan, and seems to be the only person on the island with any interest in trying to stop the threat that the titans pose to the rest of the world -- it's just that he's willing to sacrifice the entire island (and everyone on it) to do so. Which, of course, is a moral grey area of whether the ends justify the means or if it's "right" to kill 100 people to save 1000.

In fact, it's really nice that all three factions (or at least the two opposing ones, the Don and the Inquisition) are painted in a moral grey area where there's no clear right or wrong. Both sides will try to badmouth the other and convince you that their faction is the one with the noble intentions, and both sides really do make a reasonable argument in their own favor -- the Don's men have been wrongfully exiled from their own town and are supposedly looking out for the good of the townspeople who're being repressed by the Inquisition's martial law, while the Inquisition are trying to look out for the island's safety by keeping everyone in town and keeping the monsters spewing from the ruins at bay. Ultimately it's up to you to decide which faction's story and ideology you believe in most, but there are also strong gameplay implications since the faction you choose to join will determine what skills become available to you. Don Esteban's bandits are basically the melee combat specialists, the mages have access to both crystal and rune magic, and the Warriors of the Order are a sort of hybrid with access to crystal magic, but not rune magic.

As an RPG, stats and skills are pretty important to your character development, and you get a variety of different fields to invest skill points in, ranging from three different types of melee combat specializations, ranged combat with bows and crossbows, to assorted crafting skills like blacksmithing, alchemy, animal skinning, and ore prospecting, to thieving skills like sneaking, lockpicking, acrobatics, and pickpocketing, to magic skills like rune magic, crystal magic, and scroll writing, in addition to basic stats like strength, dexterity, and mana. It's pretty much exactly what we had in Gothic 2, except with a little more depth since there are more tiers for most skills. Instead of only having two levels of melee combat proficiency, Risen offers 10 for three different types of weapons (as opposed to two), with each new level granting one new attack or ability, or with locked doors and chests requiring higher tiers of proficiency to pick more difficult locks. The only place where the skill system seems to get streamlined is the animal skinning, where you only have to invest a mere five points into a single umbrella skill that teaches you everything, as long as you have the right tools, as opposed to learning how to take individual trophies separately by putting points into teeth, claws, furs, lizard skins, and so on. Gothic 3 added a magic stat that determined what spells you could learn, which makes a come back in Risen except now it's no longer a trainable stat; rather it's something you increase by exploring the world and finding stone tablets and books to read, which is kind of an interesting idea since it gives direct skill rewards for exploration while also being a way for the developers to restrict your character's Wisdom to certain values at certain stages of the game by locking some of those items behind main quest barriers.

This might be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but I do find it a little bland that the skill system is basically lifted straight out of Gothic 2 without too many notable twists or additions. One thing I neglected to mention in my Gothic 3 video is that I liked how that game added a bunch of auxiliary "perk" skills that gave you more situational bonuses, like doing extra damage to orcs, or having to learn a separate skill to sneak up on animals, or regenerating health and mana, or being able to sprint further by consuming less stamina, and so on. Overall, I prefer the system in Risen, but it would've been nice if they could've retained some of these fun side skills to give you a little more variety in terms of character builds. As it is, it's a little too easy to learn every skill you could possibly want, since there are plenty of skill points to go around, not a whole lot of skills to invest in, and opportunities to use jewelry to enhance skills further, or even to use skills you don't even have. As a mage, for instance, I was able to max out the fireball crystal, sword combat (as far as I could go without being a bandit), and rune magic, while learning every utility skill except level three pickpocketing (only because that skill is restricted to bandits), level three smithing (only because I didn't like any of the options for level three crafting), and acrobatics (because I had a ring that I could equip any time I needed to fall a great distance). So I was effectively a master magician, master craftsman, master thief, and advanced swordsman using the best bastard sword in the game.

On the bright side, the leveling system is at least spread out sufficiently that I was still making interesting skill point decisions right up until the final boss -- it wasn't like I'd hit a soft level cap where I had no more worthwhile skills to learn thus rendering future level ups pointless. And even though it was possible to learn every skill I wanted, it still required me to make strategic choices about how I should prioritize different stats and skills, and that I invest points carefully and deliberately so as not to waste them. It's also nice that every skill in the game is legitimately useful, as there aren't any "dump stats" or skills you should obviously avoid due to them being straight-up inferior to other options -- if you learn a skill, it will be significantly useful to you. In fact, you basically can't waste skill points in this game unless you go halfway into swords and then decide to switch to axes, or something like that, since you can only ever use one type of melee weapon at a time, or likewise spread skill points among three different crystals and never becoming a master of any of them.

Skills don't generally play a role in how you solve quests, but that's not really how these games operate. These aren't like the Fallout games, for instance, where you get skill checks in dialogue and while attempting to perform certain actions in the world that will lead to branching outcomes in the questline; rather, quests in Risen follow more of an adventure game logic where success and progression is based more on your decision-making as a player than your abilities as a character. In most cases, solving a quest simply involves going to the right place and finding the right person or thing, and doing what the game expects you to do in that situation, with occasional choices about how to resolve the outcome of the quest. In the monastery, for instance, a novice is murdered just before you arrive, and so as the only person definitively ruled out as a suspect you're placed in charge of the investigation, which involves searching the crime scene for evidence and talking to various people to identify the evidence and what it could mean, discovering that he was involved in smuggling drugs in from outside and checking alibis and motives of people with authority to leave the monastery, figuring out who might have beef with the victim, then posing as a drug-dealer to bring the killer out of hiding and finally confronting him, with a choice of whether to let him go, kill him, or report him to the masters. Mechanically speaking, this quest is just a simple matter of finding the right things in the environment and talking to the right people, sometimes saying the right things to make it easier, but the game doesn't drag you through it every step of the way with obnoxious quest arrows or journal entries or "witcher senses" spoiling the solutions for you; it's a quest that requires you to think logically and connect the dots on your own.

Patty's questline, likewise, showcases interesting quest design where it follows a multi-step process spanning multiple chapters with twists along the way. In Harbor Town you run into Patty, who runs the tavern in the harbor district; she tells you that she's the illegitimate child of a famous sailor whom she's trying to find, which leads you into two other quests dealing with Romanov -- a pirate who's locked in the jail cell, which requires you to figure out a way inside to talk to him (and also likely sets you on another side-quest to find Romanov's treasure in town) -- and another with one of Romanov's henchmen, whom the ladies in the brothel want you to get rid of. These interwoven quests lead you to a house in town which apparently belonged to the infamous pirate Gregorius Steelbeard, confirming that Patty's father was a pirate who had a history with Romanov. This triggers another quest to help Patty get out of town, which then leads to another quest where you help Patty search for Steelbeard's treasure by seeking out buried chests scattered over the island, which serve as clues to his final treasure, which requires a little bit of puzzle-solving logic to figure out which chest is the safe one to open. Patty then gets kidnapped by Romanov, who's bartering Patty's life in exchange for the treasure, which brings up a decision about what to do with the treasure. If you give it up in exchange for Patty's freedom, then you have to rescue her, and then set off with her for revenge against Romanov. Again, these are pretty simple quests mechanically, since for the most part it's just a matter of going places and talking to people, and they don't have a whole lot of dramatic spectacle to them, but in this case there's at least an interesting story with strong characters who're also involved in other quests.

A lot of quests actually overlap with other quests, which really helps to make the world design feel more rich and complex since the various quests and characters coexist and relate to one another so closely. In the swamp, for instance, you have to obtain a golden sword fragment from Brogar so that Oscar can craft a sword as an offering for Don Esteban, while Rachel thinks that Brogar is trying to undermine the Don's order and wants to figure out what he's up to, while Sam is being put to work doing Brogar's tasks around the camp and can't hunt to provide food for the camp, while Brogar acts as the final test in the arena and sets you to do various quests of his own, which ends up being part of what you need to do to fulfill Rachel and Sam's quests while also getting you involved with a bunch of other characters involved in Beppo's quest to get the workers working again. Pretty much every character in the swamp has some involvement in at least two different quests, and so whenever you make progress in one quest it often means progress in another quest as well, or at least flows directly into another quest. When Rachel tasks you with getting the hunters hunting again, that takes you to Sam which then triggers his portion of the quest with Brogar, but then you also have to talk to Luis, which then leads you into a cave where you find evidence for Rachel's "Power Struggle" quest with Brogar, which then leads back to doing quests as Brogar's lackey. The actual gameplay involved in solving these quests isn't the most exciting thing in the world (as with everything else, it's mostly a matter of "go here, talk to this person, find this item, etc") but all these interactions create a really engaging pace of play that keeps the game flowing smoothly while also adding extra significance to every quest and everything you do in this area.

Most quests in Harbor Town have some sort of overlap between the two opposing factions, since you typically have the option to side with either the Don's bandits or the Inquisition when completing them. Three valuable golden bowls have made it into town from the ruins but have subsequently gone missing, and both the Don and the Inquisition want to get their hands on them, and so once you acquire them it's up to you choose who gets them; the Don wants a valuable heirloom amulet from a hidden room in his house, which is currently occupied by the Inquisition, and once you acquire it you can either give it to one of the Don's men or turn it over to the Inquisition; the alchemist's apprentice is working with someone to smuggle weed into the town, and once you get the package you can give it to the Don's men or to the Inquisition; the list goes on. These aren't exactly interesting decisions, since it's ultimately a binary choice and you're sort of told to pick one side and do all the quests in that faction's favor to pick which faction you join, but it does cause dynamic changes in the world by completely changing the NPC occupation of Harbor Town. If, for instance, you side with the Inquisition, then all of the Don's men get kicked out of town and make their way back to the swamp where they no longer like you -- one of them actually dies on the way back. Likewise, if you do quests against Brogar in the bandit's camp, then he later comes back to confront you before one of the final temples, which again shows lasting consequences for certain decisions that you make in the game.

Mind you, Risen has its fair share of boring, mindless fetch quests and menial tasks; some of the earliest quests in the game, for instance, come from the novices' farm outside of town, where the novices task you with helping one of them farm his wheat field (by going around picking up pieces of wheat off the ground) and killing five wolves. The objectives themselves are pretty shallow, but these interactions are used as opportunities for lore and world-building, since the novices inform you that their farm was taken over by the Inquisition as a means to sustain their Warriors investigating the ruins throughout the island, and so harvesting wheat for them ties directly into that plot point. They also inform you that the Inquisition has decreed it illegal for anyone to leave town without proper authorization and that if you're caught by the Inquisition they'll draft you into their service, so when you come back from hunting wolves you find an Warrior of the Inquisition there on the farm who's come to collect their daily harvest, and the novices tell you to hide, thus reinforcing both of these story elements. The fact that the Inquisition demands tribute from the farmers, without offering any protection from the wolves, also offers characterization for the Inquisition as a less-than-noble organization. One of the game's more notorious quests involves sweeping up piles of dirt in the monastery, but this quest is done for narrative role-playing purposes that help to establish the tone of the setting and its characters, since it's a consequence for disrespecting Master Aric, which other characters specifically warn you not to do.

World design and exploration have always been Piranha Bytes' greatest strengths as a developer, and it's here that they succeed once again with Risen. The world in Risen takes place entirely on one, singular island, which probably lies somewhere between Gothic 1 and Gothic 2 in terms of size. This, I feel, provides an excellent middle ground between being large enough to offer open-world freedom and the possibility to simply get lost within the world, while also being small enough that exploring it is actually a manageable feat, since it's easier to keep track of where you have and have not been and it doesn't overwhelm you with too many options at one time. In true open-world fashion you're free to go anywhere you want on the island, right from the start of the game (except for some of the bigger temples, which are restricted by magic barriers until later in the story), but the reality is you won't be strong enough to go certain places until you level up and get better stats and equipment to handle more difficult enemies. Thus, any time you encounter a more powerful enemy (like skeleton warriors, or ash beasts, or ghouls) you have to remember where they are and come back for them later, once you've leveled up sufficiently.

Leveling up, therefore, feels pretty rewarding since it takes actual time and effort to improve your character enough to tackle these tougher obstacles. As you explore the world and find better gear and crafting materials, and as you defeat enemies and complete quests, you gain experience towards getting stronger, which at certain stages allows you to explore new areas of the world that were previously too dangerous for you, which in turn opens up new opportunities to gain more experience. And since nothing scales with you in level, and the map isn't designed to be done in any sort of sequential order, exploring the world and figuring out what you can do in it has a pretty organic feel to it where you learn things naturally through your own curiosity and determination -- not because the game is guiding you towards certain areas. And you really do find a lot of genuinely rewarding discoveries tucked away in discreetly hidden areas, like for instance, a little alcove behind some vegetation near the starting beach that'll get you off to an easier start by giving you a shield and a healing potion, or a buried treasure chest tucked into a niche next to a house in Harbor Town that'll give you the sneaking ability, or a fragment of a special sword in a remote corner of an optional beach.

The island's physical design does a great job of creating alluring spaces to explore, which are pretty satisfying to discover on their own, thanks to its twisting pathways and mountainous heights. There's a lot of verticality in this world, with the island quickly rising up in elevation as you go from sea level on the outer beaches up towards the volcano that towers over everything else at the center of the island; meanwhile, there are a lot of canyons, cliffs, and plateaus all over the island which has the interesting effect of allowing you to see certain areas while also blocking them from view based on your vantage point. At lower elevations you can't see what's above you very well because, well, there's a mountain blocking your view, and so you have to climb higher to get a better view, which then lets you see areas below you with a lot more visibility than you had before, but then you usually have to find a circuitous route to get down to them. Trees and rock formations likewise block areas from view until you turn the corner to see what's over there, and so there's often an element of mystery involved in exploring the island as you wonder what's around the next corner, or as you discover intriguing areas off in the distance that you can't quite reach that easily.

I particularly love how things on the island look almost completely different depending on your perspective; above Harbor Town, for instance, you can make out the crumbled remnants of some kind of man-made structure, but from up close it's hard to tell what it really is, until you get some distance away to realize that it's the lower legs of what used to be a colossal statue. Likewise, the monastery which sits against the volcano doesn't seem like it's all that big or all that far away when you're standing at the farm outside the monastery, but when you view it from the eastern plains it looks like a mammoth structure way up in the mountains. The island looks really pretty, too, with its lush vegetation swaying in the breeze, the constant dust, pollen, and spores floating through the air, and rays from the sun all being dynamically affected by clouds and mountains, and the glowing crystals inside of caves, all giving the island a strong feeling of liveliness and brilliance. Even its less pretty areas, like its dank swamps and dark crypts do a good job of creating dense atmospheres that make you feel like you could be in a real swamp or crypt. Although technically inferior to some other games of this era in terms of graphical power, the art design and physical composition of the world look pretty striking.

Where the world design suffers is that the whole island tends to look kind of similar, with the same types of trees, plants, dirt paths, and rocky cliffs everywhere you go. That makes sense, since an island this small isn't going to have any diversity in its climate or ecosystems in real life, but it makes this fictional video game world a little stale to explore because everywhere kind of blurs together after a while. Even while you're discovering interesting new areas that you hadn't seen before, they still have the same general look as everywhere else. Some places, like roads and intersections, are somehow completely devoid of any distinguishing features thus making them almost identical to other roads and intersections, and thus making it harder to tell where you are or where you're going without consulting the map. Wooded areas aren't much better, since the dense vegetation often likes to put a bunch of trees and plants in your face so that you can't really see the forest for the trees, literally. Making matters worse is that all of the ruins and fortresses look pretty much identical to one another, since they're all made from the same palette of assets -- once you've seen one, you've seen all the rest, and the game is going to have you going through these ruins a lot, just with different layouts and combinations of features. Except for the main dungeon, you could probably take a screenshot from each ruin, mix them up, and there'd be no way to tell which goes with which ruin.

The ruins do function well, however, as dungeons in this game, and it's nice that we get a fair amount of dungeon crawling in Risen, seeing as Gothic 3 didn't really have much to offer in this department. I'm always a big advocate of having dungeons or more linearly-structured "levels" in open-world games because it provides a contrasting change of pace to the rhythm of gameplay, and the dungeons in Risen work well to mix up the feel of the gameplay. The ruins all have various types of traps and blocked passages that require some type of observant puzzle-solving to circumvent, like noticing that there are cracks on the floor and that a column is going to drop from the ceiling to crush you, or that the stone tiles here look suspiciously symmetrical, like they're part of a trap floor, or that there's a tiny hole in the wall that you can crawl through if you use the transform into nautilus spell, or that you can deactivate the spike trap by activating a hidden switch. Often times you'll have to track down lizard busts from different areas of the ruin to use as keys to unlock other doors, and sometimes you get branching paths that lead into different areas where you have to do different things elsewhere to open the main path forward. Later ruins are actually a little bit challenging in some areas and had me really slowing down to observe the environments more closely looking for solutions I might've missed when I came to an impasse. It's just a bummer that they all recycle the same gameplay mechanics and look pretty much the same, because after a while of crawling through ruins -- especially in chapter four where that's practically all you do -- it gets to feel pretty monotonous and repetitive.

The lack of variety is especially disappointing considering that all three Gothic games managed to have a lot of diverse areas that not only looked different but that provided more unique gameplay scenarios. Gothic 3 obviously had the vastly different climates with the snowy mountains in Nordmar, the green plains and forests in Myrtana, and the sandy desert in Varant, and Gothic 2 managed to have even more diversity with the main map of Khorinis, the old Valley of Mines map, Jharkendar (which itself had a lot of pretty diverse elements ranging from pirate beaches to fetid swamps to rocky canyons to winding cliffs) and finally the Isle of Irdorath. Even Gothic 1, which was the smallest and most primitive game of the series managed to create different atmospheres and environments -- the orc lands legitimately look and feel different from the rest of the colony because of the washed out colors and dying vegetation, while the old monastery, stone fortress, fog tower, orc shrine, and Xardas's old tower (all of which function similarly to the ruined fortresses scattered about in Risen, as being smaller mini-dungeons embedded in the overworld), all have a unique theme both in their physical appearance and the mythology behind them -- they don't feel like they've been randomly generated from the same building blocks. That's not even to mention its actual dungeons with the old mine and new mine, the orc cemetery, or the temple of Sleeper which offer even more unique variety.

Besides simply adding aesthetic variety to the games, a lot of these environments were also used to add on to the world as you played, such that the world expanded into new areas and literally got bigger as you advanced through the main story. The size of the world in Gothic 2 practically doubles once you enter the Valley of Mines, and then if you have the expansion, Night of the Raven nearly triples it. Risen being set entirely on the one island means that the world doesn't expand in any way as the game progresses -- what you see in chapter one is what you get for the entire game, apart from accessing some of the locked ruins, which are sort of anticlimactic since they all look and function similarly to smaller ruins that you've already explored in the open world. Combined with the rushed story that really only spans the last two chapters of the game, and which has you mostly retreading the same paths on the island that you've already explored multiple times previously, but with a bunch of lizardmen now pasted all over the map, the second half of the game ends up feeling underwhelming because there isn't a lot of new content to experience, and what little new stuff there is feels like stuff we've already seen and done before, or just gets copy/pasted across the map.

This game is really begging to have one more extra chapter somewhere before the final boss where we get to explore a new, different area of the island (say, you have to find a secret passage through the northern mountains to reach the north coast), just to give the game a little more variety, a more expensive world, and a little more extra content in its second half. It would've been really nice to get a new quest hub of NPC's, for instance, because once you finish doing quests in Harbor Town in chapter one it's pretty much done for the rest of the game. If the extra chapter couldn't be part of the main game, then this is where a Night of the Raven-style expansion with an interesting side-quest on a remote, undiscovered part of the island would've helped flesh the game out a little further. Knowing now that Risen 2 would be largely pirate-themed, they could've had a pirate camp hidden on the north coast, that might bridge the gap between the two games a little better or give extra clues leading towards Steelbeard's whereabouts. This is all wishful thinking, of course, but the problem remains that chapters three and four feel noticeably underdeveloped.

The combat system in Risen is pretty good in concept but feels a little too rough around the edges. After Gothic 3's combat proved to be complete garbage, Piranha Bytes thankfully decided to move on from that system completely, but rather than going back to Gothic 1 and 2's combat they went with something entirely new that actually kind of resembles Souls combat, but without a stamina meter. With Risen, you press the left mouse button to do standard attacks in three-hit combos, and can hold the right mouse button to block attacks, using either your weapon or a shield, or double-tap the movement keys to perform quick-dodges. That's all you can do at first, but as you put skill points into the different types of melee weapons, you gain the ability to parry enemy attacks, perform lateral side swipes, charge up attacks for extra damage, perform an extra fourth hit in the combo, do offensive counter-attacks, or use bastard swords and two-handers with one hand. It's a fun and satisfying leveling system since the combat changes and evolve over the course of the game as you put points into combat training, much like in Gothic 1 and 2. The changes aren't quite as dramatic as in those games, but they're more gradual and spread out a little better over the full game. It's also nice that the system adds all new inputs to the equations; in Gothic 1 and 2, better combat training basically just meant you could attack with faster and longer combos, whereas Risen gives you more active abilities and decisions to make in combat, like whether you're going to charge up an attack to try to break through an opponent's defenses, or wait for them to attack so you can counter their attack, and so on.

The system relies heavily on timing and positioning. To perform attacks more quickly, you have to time your mouse clicks just right; if your timing is off then the attacks slow down considerably and you become more likely to get interrupted, or have an enemy dodge out of the attack. Likewise, landing hits and avoiding attacks involves careful positioning to make sure you're close to land hits, or far enough away to avoid hits. Ideally, you want to be able to dodge to an opponent's flank when they attack, so that you can get out of the way of their attacks while also putting yourself in position to strike them. Ultimately, it's a pretty active system that requires a lot of personal skill to execute the controls just right, at the right times, while making good decisions about how you approach a fight, much like the systems in Gothic 1 and 2. Unfortunately, the system is not without some major faults.

The main issue is that attack and dodge animations, for both you and your enemies, are just so fast that it feels like there's rarely any opportunity to react to anything because you just don't get to see animations develop -- they just kind of happen. You might be attacking an enemy and then suddenly find they've teleported to your flank, at which point you have about half-a-second to spin the camera around and throw up a block, or you'll be standing there waiting for an enemy to attack so you can parry them and then they come leaping at you with no preparatory animation to indicate they're about to lunge and only like six frames of animation time before they hit you. Some enemies are just literally faster than you, meaning the enemy can start their attack after you've already initiated yours and still hit you first. Even dodging is kind of questionable. Despite the animation being so fast it's still surprisingly easy to get hit in the middle of a dodge because there don't seem to be any sort of invincibility frames to reward the timing of your dodge -- all that seems to matter is the physical position of your dodge, meaning that you really need to be dodging before the enemy even attacks to be completely out of the way by the time their animation follows through (which again, is almost impossible because of how fast the attack animations are in the first place).

The camera and lock-on system don't help much, either. As with the previous games, Risen uses a lock-on system where the game focuses on one target at a time, directing all attacks towards that enemy and all dodges around them. The problem, here, is that there's no way to manually toggle your lock-on, or to choose which target you want to lock onto -- the game decides for itself which target it thinks you want to focus on, and often picks the wrong target or switches rapidly and unpredictably between targets, even in the middle of an attack combo. So if you have an enemy who's near death and want to get a quick attack to kill it, the game might randomly decide to target the enemy to its left, or you might be in the middle of an attack combo on a certain enemy who dodges out of the way, thus causing the game to direct its focus to some other target and fully exposing your backside to other enemies, or you'll be in a tight choke point and the game will lock on to a target behind the one in front of you so that you can't see the health bar or position yourself relative to the one that's actually a danger to you. It's beyond frustrating, and there's really no excuse for not allowing manual lock-on when it was already in Gothic 1 and 2. The actual controls for certain inputs aren't very consistent, either, since blocking and parrying both use the same button -- you long click to block, and short click to parry -- which sometimes leads the game to interpret your inputs differently than you intended, where you block an attack you meant to parry and miss your opportunity. Even dodging is sometimes problematic, since double-tapping the movement keys adds a slight delay in a system where you already aren't given a lot of reaction time, and if you use the space bar you sometimes end up jumping straight up in the air instead of actually dodging, if, say, you were in the middle of changing direction and didn't have the movement key fully pressed when you hit the space bar.

On top of that, enemies don't follow any sort of predictable patterns where you can reliably anticipate what they're going to do to exploit your knowledge and familiarity of their movesets. Sometimes an enemy will attack you once or twice and then stop, patiently standing around waiting for you to attack them, and other times they'll attack four or five times in a row, forcing you to sit there with your shield up indefinitely waiting and not knowing when they're going to stop. And if there are any sort of tells to indicate that the enemy is going to do one attack or four attacks then they're incredibly subtle and not telegraphed very well. So sometimes you're going "okay, they attacked three times, I haven't seen them attack more than three times, so this is my opportunity to attack" and then suddenly they hit you with a surprise fourth attack, or they finish a second attack and you're still sitting there waiting for a third before realizing "oh, they stopped attacking, let me try to get an attack in," and then they start a new combo up because you waited too long while trying to read what they were doing. Even with a firm understanding of how the combat system works, and having good timing and reaction speeds, it often feels like you're just guessing and hoping for the best because the enemy behavior is so random, which makes melee combat kind of frustrating sometimes.

It's really shocking when you consider that Risen and Demon's Souls came out four days apart from one another, and how much better the combat in Demon's Souls is compared to Risen. Part of the reason combat works so well in the Souls games is because they emphasize predictable tells that will lead to predictable attacks; if the enemy pulls their sword back a certain way, you know they'll be performing a certain type of attack and can plan ahead to avoid it. The difficulty stems from learning what these tells are so that you can react appropriately when you see each one and not get caught off guard. Once you learn the telegraphs, the fight is simply a matter of executing attacks and dodges with the right timing and positioning. Fundamentally, Risen and Demon's Souls have incredibly similar combat systems, and yet Demon's Souls's combat feels so much better because the animations are a lot more smoother, with more obvious tells and wind-ups, and with consistent enemy behavior, whereas in Risen the animations feel choppy and disjointed, and enemies seem to do random things at random times with practically no warning of what they're going to do, or that they're going to do anything at all. Even in Gothic 1 and 2, the enemies follow predictable patterns with consistent AI. Truth be told, the attack animations in those games are sometimes just as fast, if not faster than in Risen, but once you figure out how the AI works you can use consistent and reliable strategies to fight the different enemies. With Risen, it's kind of a crapshoot every time.

The magic system in Risen has likewise been revamped, this time for the worse. Gone are the variety of offensive spells from Gothic 2 like Fire Storm, Ice Wave, Ball Lightning, Wind Fist, Destroy Undead, Geyser, Root Snare, Insect Swarm, and countless others, in favor of distilling that game's vast arsenal of spells down to three: fireball, magic bullet, and ice lance. Each spell functions like a basic point-and-click projectile, and so you basically just pick one of them and then spend the entire game using that one spell, improving its damage and casting speed by investing skill points into it. At two points along each spell's upgrade path it gains extra bonuses, but these just enhance existing properties, like enhancing the AOE radius of fireball, or enhancing the length of time a target will be frozen with ice lance. This is pretty boring, because once you gain access to magic crystals near the end of chapter one, you'll be casting the exact same spell over and over again for the entire remainder of the game, as opposed to progressively learning new spells that add to your arsenal in new and different ways.

As a magician, you do gain access to rune magic, which allows you to cast other types of spells like telekinesis, levitation, transform into nautilus, healing, light, speed, and so on, but these are mostly utility spells that help you interact with the world and are easily replaced with scrolls by non-mages, thanks to the inclusion of the scroll-making skill. I really like the functionality of those utility spells and the role they play in dungeon crawling, but the fact that they're kind of mandatory and so easily accessible via scrolls diminishes their value to mages somewhat. The only combat-related rune spells are two buffs that boost your melee strength and damage resistances, a transform into ashbeast spell, a summon skeleton spell, and the inferno spell. These latter three are decently interesting options, but the inferno spell (which is unlocked in chapter four as the "ultimate" offensive spell) seems to do considerably less damage than a fully-leveled fireball while costing ten times as much mana, and by the time you get the transform into ashbeast spell it performs about the same as your basic melee weapons and armor do, but with fewer attack options, so it's really only an upgrade if you've been completely ignoring melee combat. Those are the only tier four runes in the entire game, and they're both basically worse than options you've likely already unlocked well before gaining access to them, making them a pretty unsatisfying reward for maxing out rune magic. The open locks spell likewise comes so late in the game, after you've already explored the entire island, meaning you're better off learning the thief skills in chapter one so that you can actually open locked chests as you find them, instead of having to come back to them much later after their contents will likely be obsolete for you. Summon skeleton is nice just to have a meatshield to distract enemies, and the speed spell saves a lot of time running around the island, but that's about as exciting as the rune magic gets, other than the utility spells.

The final boss might be the best one in any Piranha Bytes game, at least at the time of its release, because it actually has the feel of a final boss, as opposed to a glorified battle against a normal enemy. Gothic 1's Sleeper was interesting story-wise, but mechanically just amounted to interacting with a few hotspots while dodging fireballs and demons; Gothic 2's Undead Dragon was just another dragon fight, of which you'd already fought five previously; and Gothic 3 didn't even have a final boss, unless you count killing Rhobar or Zuben, which are just mundane NPCs. The fire titan in Risen plays more like a puzzle-platformer boss like you'd see in a modern Zelda game; it has a few special attacks you need to dodge, but mainly you need to watch the floor and make sure you're not standing on any platforms as they're glowing so that you don't drop to your death when they disappear, then reflect attacks back at it with the shield and rush in to hit it when it's weakened. It's fine, and actually kind of interesting, especially for a Piranha Bytes game, but the whole fight is kind of ruined by the floating tutorial messages telling you exactly how to avoid its attacks and how to damage it. And once you know what to do, the fight becomes pretty shallow and repetitive. It's also mechanically bizarre in the sense that it forces you into a warrior archetype at the very end of the game, even if you were playing as a pure mage the entire time. It would've been nice if they could've gotten rid of those tutorial messages and had a better, more immersive feedback system to guide you towards figuring out how to damage him, and if he could've had an extra phase or two with different attacks, and had some kind of option for mages to fight the final boss like an actual mage.

The fight itself is a little anticlimactic, too, because the fire titan just doesn't look or feel like a titan to me. Titans in Greek mythology are supposed to be the sons and daughters of primordial gods, who basically personify the natural aspects of the world. In popular media, they're usually depicted as powerful human deities, or as monstrous golems, but in Risen the fire titan looks like some kind of goofy reject from the Aliens vs Predator universe. Granted, Risen could be doing its own original thing with the concept of titans, but this thing looks more silly than intimidating to me. Plus, the music during this fight is pretty underwhelming -- it's barely even noticeable, and doesn't do a whole lot to bring out the epic stakes of this battle.

Other than that final boss fight, the soundtrack in Risen might be my favorite of Kai Rosenkranz's work with Piranha Bytes. I've already talked at length about how great the music is in Gothic 1 and 2 and how, even though the compositions in Gothic 3 are technically superior they tend to break the immersion for me by being a little overbearing -- Risen strikes a good balance between the two, where it uses simple instrumentation reminiscent of the first two Gothic games to create a more grounded, down-to-earth tone and atmosphere appropriate for the setting, while having a sprinkling of some of those more majestic, stand-out melodies like he used in Gothic 3. I'm also pleased to say he learned his lesson from Gothic 3 and made the combat music not only more subdued, but also more varied -- there's a different combat theme for each area of the island and they all quote the main theme of their respective area, so by gradually fading in the combat music (which usually starts with a few bars of percussion before layering in chords and then finally the main theme) the transition from ambient exploration music to intense combat music is seamless and almost unnoticeable.

Finally, I should point out that the English localization of Risen is surprisingly good, especially considering the history that Piranha Bytes has with translators and voice actors in the Gothic games delivering bizarre lines of dialogue with weird accents and odd cadences and inconsistent pronunciations. In Risen, the voice actors do a really good job with their lines, and the translations make sense for native English speakers -- they even pull off some clever wordplay that might not have come through as naturally in a direct translation. They even managed to hire some big name voice actors, with John Rhys-Davies voicing Don Esteban, Andy Serkis voicing Inquisitor Mendoza, and Lena Heady voicing Patty. The main character's voice is a little dry and monotone but I feel like that's part of making him a more accessible character by understating his vocal presence within the world, relative to the cast around him. At the same time, however, he's a bit of a wise-cracking smartass sometimes, so he's not devoid of personality. The facial animations and lip syncing are pretty mediocre, even for 2009 standards, but the characters are brought to life extremely well by their respective voice actors. I just wish Patty would wear some more practical clothes than... whatever that outfit is.

Ultimately, Risen feels like a solid step in the right direction after Gothic 3, that just didn't step quite as far forward as it could have. You can tell that Piranha Bytes were playing it safe with Risen -- going back to the successful formula from Gothic 1 and 2 that they knew would work, while keeping the scope of the project small enough that they wouldn't stretch themselves too thin and risk running out of time and resources like they did with Gothic 3. That managed effort is certainly respectable, and Risen is truly a solid game that feels very close in both style and quality to the first two Gothic games. It may not say it in the title, but this is a Gothic game. It's not as good as Gothic 1 and 2, but those games were lightning in a bottle and nothing may ever achieve the level of magic that those games achieved. I certainly have some complaints with Risen -- the magic system is too streamlined, melee combat is a little frustrating, there's not enough variety of environments on the island, and most notably, the second half of the game feels underdeveloped and could've benefited from having more content and story twists -- but otherwise the fact that it feels like a Gothic game, from its world design and atmosphere to its quests and characters to its leveling system and character progression, is enough to put Risen on a pedestal and sing its praises.