Is it possible for someone to comment on Risen without comparing to Gothic games? I'm sure it provides a great frame of reference, but one has to actually have played those games to get it (not just talking about you, swordscythe, but even professional reviewers just assume all have played Gothic games and will understand when most of their reviews are taken up by comparisons).
Well Risen is one of those games that is not easy for a newstarter in this RPG business. You are droped in an island, you start colecting stuff and you follow the instructions of an NPC for about 10 minutes. Then, you are given the first choice to pick between 2 factions you know nothing about, hinted that one is "evil" and one is "good", but the NPC that hints that, is a member of the "good" faction so you imidiately start geting suspicious about who is good or bad. You go a little blind on that decision and you start slowly deciding who are your favorites.
Unfortunately, when you finaly choose what faction you most like, you realize that each faction has a speciality (mage/melee/hybrid). Imagine that based on the plot, you decide you like the rebels, but you dont realy like melee combat and rather be a mage - Then you realize you can't be a full mage in the rebel faction.
THis is, for me, one of the major flaws of the game. YOu should pick the faction you most like based on choice and the plot, not on wich class you want to pick up. For example, i sympathize with the rebels but i just love being a mage = impossible in this game.
So basicaly its a game that you have to make choices, but you are given very little information on some of them, like character development. Its a game that is interesting for people who have played a lot of RPGs and like "open-world", but people more oriented towards action-RPG will probably feel overly lost.
The game also has a very lacking side wich is upgrades in gear. You have a couple full sets of armor, with pre-defined stats and then upgrades are far-and-between. The number of weapons are also limited somewhat, in contrast the amount of herbs/reagents for potions/stats is immense.
On the other hand, character interaction and questing is imho very good. The dialogs are witty and lively and push you forward to continue questing. When you complete a step in a quest, the world sometimes changes, dialogs are diferent to reflect the changes and you feel that you are actualy shaping things around you making you think "hum, i wonder what happen if i do this now".
Generaly the good stuff like questing, exploration, feeling that you are part of a group drives you forward pass the bad combat (imho - some people love it), the repetitive mob encounters (you get tired of boars, moths, wolfs after a while), the shortage of upgrades in gear and the somewhat weird character leveling system (you gain general points when you level up, you exchange them for stats or skill levels).
Kinda like...
"UUUUU, a new nice quest! bahhh, its on the other end of the map.... uuuuuu nice swamp atmosphere! bahhhh, another stupid worm to fight, UUUUUU there's a camp there, bahhhh only a chest with 5 coins, uuuuuuuuuuuu a secret place with a locked chest, bahhhhhhh i didnt level lockpicking yet cause i needed to up my strenght to use this sword."
lots of ups and downs.
