"Short with an abrupt ending but a good experience nonetheless."

Risen is an action-RPG fantasy game that takes place in an unknown island with interesting characters, good game mechanics and some quirky NPC's which offers a good time, around 35-40hrs long through 4 chapters. I normally don't divide my review under different headings but in this case, it has to be done.

Story/Premise :-
You play as an unnamed character who is a stowaway aboard an Inquisition ship that's hit by a ferocious storm and then capsized by a rogue tidal wave and you end up on a tiny island with its own secrets and power struggles. Later on, as the story progresses, you discover that there's more it than meets the eye and it all happens at an odd pace.

Graphics :-
Risen is a wonderfully rendered game. The graphics are top notch. The weather effects, day and night cycles, the different environments ranging from calm beaches, dense forest, gloomy and foggy swamp, dungeons, volcano and the cliff-side view are just exceptional. You could just stand still and watch the trees and the bushes sway under the heavy rain and marvel at the random flashes of lightning casting a spectacular show through the canopy of trees. The set-piece is just phenomenal. But unfortunately, the same can't be said about the human NPCs. Why? Ofcourse, they're neatly crafted with nice details but there are only about 3 presets to females and maybe 4 for males. In some cases, even the NPCs related to the main storyline look the same. The creatures come in variety of sizes and shapes, from giant sea vultures and wolves to giant scorpions and the undead. But even these are over-used. Wolves come in their own variations like "wolf", "hungry wolf" and "black wolf" and they all behave exactly the same, look the same apart from the colour and the difficulty with which they attack you. There should've been atleast a bit more variety but as it is, it doesn't strike a bad taste. The game looks great, all told.

Sound/Voice acting/ Soundtrack :-
The sound effects are just sublime. The whole ambiance really helps in immersing the player into the game world. The sounds of leaves rustling in the trees, crickets chirping, sound of footsteps on various surfaces, the weapon impact and the sound of pain emanating from the NPCs are all well reproduced.

Voice acting is good in this game. The English version has employed the use of British accents and it's good. There are key NPCs tied to the main storyline that are voiced by well known actors like Andy Serkis from movies like The Prestige and well-known as Smeagol in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, John Rhys-Davies well-known for his role as Sallah in the old Indiana Jones movies and as Gimli in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lena Headey who has acted in movies like 300 and "Imagine Me and You" and also well-known for her role as Sarah Connor in the Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series. Every NPC sounds great though somewhat limited by a short "conversation tree". You won't find it out of place in this game where you previously befriend a NPC, complete a series of quests for him/her only later to have the same NPC tell you to stop bothering him/her or can't help you anymore over and over.

Soundtrack is a bit of a hit and miss. It won't stay in your mind at all as none of them are memorable. As you go about exploring the place, certain parts of the island have a specific soundtrack and if you get into a battle, the soundtrack changes to a more "battle-oriented" music. It's ok; definitely not something that'll stay with you the moment you exit the game.

Game mechanics :-
I say "mechanics" 'cause there are many different aspects of the game play that needs addressing.

(a) Combat : The crux of all action-RPG's. This game is no different. There's plenty of combat to be had here. There are lots and lots of random encounters that you come across while exploring the island and plenty of combat based on quests. The combat revolves around physical attacks like Sword, Axe, Staff, Crossbows and Bows and Magic Attacks like Basic non-elemental magic projectiles and Fire and Frost based elemental magic.

The Melee combat based on swords, axes and staves involve a series of combination attacks that you control by clicking the attack key. But there's a catch. You need to time it with your character's animation. The better your timing, the faster your character attacks. If your timing's off, your character responds slowly giving enough time inbetween his attacks for your enemy to launch their own counters. As you level up, you can improve your skill with these weapons, unlocking diverse moves such as parry, counter-attack, counter-parry, charging your attacks for more damage for breaking through your opponent's parry and ability to combine any number of combination moves to string a long, fierce attack. The more Strength attribute you have, you can equip that much better weapons as well as doing more damage with melee weapons.

Crossbows and Bows form your basic ranged attacks. Increasing your skill in these fields will result in faster loading of arrows. With the Bow, you get faster loading of arrows but you need to compensate for the arrows' arcing trajectory. With the Crossbows, you get more power and no compensation for arcing trajectories of bolts but you pay for a slower re-load time. The ranged damage depends on your Dexterity attribute. However, to equip better bows, you need higher Dexterity but for better Crossbows, you need higher Strength.

Magical attacks is like any other RPG that features magic. You learn different spells based on the 3 choices provided in the game and you cast it at the cost of Mana. You also need the Wisdom attribute to learn and understand better spells. This choice of combat has 3 different options where you can either choose to cast spells using scrolls, learn the use of magic crystals to cast spells or learn to make your own scrolls through the knowledge of Runes and spell writing.

Aside from these, the character also has the ability to dodge and block. Blocking is basically holding a shield in front of you or aligning your weapon to block incoming blows by pressing and holding the right mouse button. Parry is done by tapping the right mouse button but there are cases where the game doesn't recognise the tap correctly and just makes your character block or not do anything. Dodging is done by double-tapping the movement buttons twice in any direction, i.e., tapping the left movement button twice will cause your character to slide left thus dodging the enemies attack.

The combat is based on both player skill as well as learning better abilities by leveling up. So, in short, you could defeat your enemies on skill alone but it'll be heck of a lot harder if you don't reach a high level and learn better abilities.

(b)Talents: This revolves around skills like lock-picking, alchemy, smithing, sneaking, etc. Basically, everything that can be classified as complimentary skills to your character. You can decide to be a thief and learn sneaking, pick-pocketing and lock-picking skills. You can combine those with Smithing to make your own weapons (albeit restricting you to only being able to make swords) and jewelery or learn to "Gut animals" to get more trophies from dead animals using unique tools which can be useful to gain extra gold or find items useful for making spell scrolls. Only some of these skills like Prospecting, Alchemy and Lock-picking will be worth it though as with alchemy, you can create basic healing potions and with max Alchemy, you can create powerful potions that permanently increase your stats. With lock-picking, you can tackle any locked chests in the game for loot and these chests do contain some important stuff. Smithing is good combined with Prospecting as with prospecting, you can mine for ore and gems which can be used in Smithing to create stronger swords and accessories. The rest don't sound as good as they do on paper.

(c)Leveling/Learning skills : You gain levels by completing quests and killing monsters. You can take out human targets too but they don't die unless it's need for a quest. Instead, they fall to ground unconscious and if you don't attack them when they're in this state, they heal and wake up and don't attack you, unless you provoke them.

Learning skills is done by earning and spending skill points and some gold. Everytime you level up, you gain 10 skill points. These points can be spent by going to "trainers" who specialize in specific type of skills and paying them some gold.

With that said, I don't think you can go past level 30 in this game. During my 1st play-through, I managed to get up to 27 and on my 2nd, went to 28. I did all of the quests and killed practically every monster there was on the island. However, I could've missed some and you can make a few potions that give 100 exp upon consuming them but even then, I doubt you'd find enough monsters or make enough of those exp potions to go past lvl 30.

Skills-wise, this is almost what a true RPG should be like. You can't become a jack-of-all trades and master-of-all. No. You need to decide before-hand what kind of skills you want to specialize in and stick with that. You can learn bits and pieces of all skills but you can't effectively rely on these skills to carry you easily through the game. You need to be a specialist to do that. However, with sheer determination and personal skill, you could do the former. I did that during my 2nd play-through and found it fun and challenging. It's nice being versatile while knowing that you're not going to boss anyone.

(d)Loot/Goodies : Loot comes in all shapes and sizes. You have the traditional gold and weapons to jewels and stat accessories and potions to healing herbs all the way to animal parts that can be sold as trophies for extra gold, stuff to make potions from and scrolls and recipes. What you won't find is armour from your dead foes. I'll explain this later.

(e)Joining Factions : The island you ended up on is under a power struggle. There are 3 factions, Don Esteban's bandits, Commandant Carlos's Order of Warriors and then the Mages of the Monastery. The Mages and the Order of Warriors are in cahoots whereas the Bandits are opposed to these two factions. Joining a faction means you have decided on what your character wants to be and you can't learn the other faction's abilities. The armour, thus, depends on which faction you join. However, joining the Mages' faction can be tricky as you could end up getting knocked out and forced to becoming a warrior for the Order.

(f)Exploring/Questing : Right from the get "go", you are thrust into an open world. You are free to go wherever you want, whenever you want. But having to face tough monsters are certain areas at a low level will make you feel less enthusiastic about roaming around aimlessly at the start. You spend a good chunk of time questing in this game as it is heavily "quest-driven". Sometimes, in your wandering about, you could kill some monsters and watch a pop-up display that a quest has been completed and you get the exp. But it'll be a pain to find the NPC that needed this quest to be completed and thereby get more exp and some reward. The quests are simple enough and it requires slight puzzle solving in certain areas to complete the quests. Some depend on your thieving and some can be conflicting as you get two NPC's competing for the same quest and you have to decide which NPC you're going to work for. Joining a faction also determines a specific quest chain but in later chapters, it converges into one.

(g)Interaction with NPCs/Allies during combat : NPCs in this game are quite intelligent and can read a situation like how a normal human being would. If you decide to steal something from a house, you can sneak in and avoid detection but if you're seen and you most often will be if you do this during daytime, the human NPCs first rush inside the house and ask questions like, "What are you sneaking about for"? which is a cue for you to get out immediately. If you stall there or pick up something that's not yours, they attack you. During nighttime however, you can be more successful and there's none of this "psychic" guard nonsense that you found in Oblivion.

If you find a monster that's close to an encampment, you can lure that monster over to where the humans are and these guys will say things like, "I'll join you" or "Wait! I'll help you" and join the fight. The allies are quite strong and adept in fighting and do a great job in helping you. But they're not part of your group so, unless you get the last hit on the monster before it dies, you lose all the exp. During some quests, you need to team up with NPCs to fight against a lot of enemies. During this process, you get the full exp, even if you don't lift a finger and let your comrade(s) do all the work. This could result in dead allies though, if too many monsters charge in.

Technical Issues :-
There are quite a few snags in graphical and sound performance. For starters, there's this nasty stuttering that even if you set the game to minimum graphics settings, it doesn't stop. Before you think that it's PC's problem, it's not. Even if you have a PC capable of running Crysis or any other graphically taxing game without any issues, Risen will still stutter. There have reports that this could be solved by rolling back to an old driver version or tweaking the Nvidia control panel for Nvidia card users but nothing seemed to work for me. My frame rates are fine. It's just that at certain places and certain times, the game chugs. Updating the game to the newest version only the many game-play bugs but not this issue.

Sound issues aren't a lot but I had a weird one. When I first started the game, my speakers sounded like someone was inside them arranging a mic on stage and left it on high frequency and the loud, shrilling noise that came from it, sustained for a few seconds and the sound just cut off. This was rectified by setting the Sound Hardware Acceleration to minimum.

A PC game should be made to work on all different kinds of hardware and drivers. Saying that rolling back to previous versions or tweaking files and settings yourself could improve it is just not professional.

Final thoughts :-
Risen is an enjoyable game but there are certain aspects that stop it short of becoming a great experience. For starters, at the start of the game, you're thrust into an open world, free to do whatever you want. It's great. You can spend a lot of time exploring and doing quests for various NPCs and there are tonnes of quests to do. This game has 4 chapters and I'll bet you that most of your time will be consumed in chapters 1 and 2 whereas 3 and 4 just goes through like a short story. The "find and fetch" quests don't exactly help as in chapters 3 and 4, you'll spend a large chunk of your time inside dungeons solving puzzles and pulling levers and fighting the same old monsters to find objects required for the main storyline. The "open-endedness" just comes to an abrupt half once you start chapter 3.

The ending is even more of a "rush" job. The game in chapter 4 builds up to the final fight. You face a huge Titan and you start to think, "Nice! Now I get to complete the game and watch a cool ending. Might have to discover a new way of killing this creature; could have my work cut-out" but what exactly happens is something that should never have thought of. The game TELLS you how to win the final battle through captions displayed in bold at the centre of your screen. If you thought that was an anti-climax, the end sequence is even more of a let down. The moment you win the final battle, the game shows a short pre-rendered cutscene, takes you to a black-screen with the narrator narrating his final words and the credits roll. That's it! Oh, wait. There's this small black-screen dialogue between the hero and another female character voiced by the aforementioned Lena Headey that gives a very revealing clue that there's a sequel to follow.

Overall, Risen has that "old-school" RPG feel to it mixed with the current trend of action and fancy-ness but none of it have the "Oomph" to it. It's a nice game, worth your money, definitely, even with those technical issues, but it's short and the rushed ending leaves you with mixed feelings.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/20/11, Updated 06/21/11

Game Release: Risen (US, 10/02/09)