1. MatDerKater

   10

   At the time of release, I was put off from playing this game by the hugely negative response not only from mainstream and largely US centric gaming critics, but also from the Gothic/Risen fanbase. It has been normal in the past for Piranha Byte games to get inexplicably poor ratings from English speaking gaming media, but Piranha Bytes have always had their band of loyal/hooked followers who know differently. So why so much negativity this time around from the PB fan club? Risen 2 is a bit of a departure from the previous PB games in that; the world is split up into smaller areas/islands; that there is not as much freedom in the game world as previously; and also the fighting mechanics have been completely changed from what went before. Therefore, those of us who were chomping at the bit for another Gothic or Risen 1 re-run, were sorely disappointed that PB had for whatever reasons, opted to do things a little differently this time around. However, the fact that PB have made a slightly different RPG to what their fanbase was expecting, doesn't necessarily mean that Risen 2 is bad game. In fact, Risen 2 is an absolutely brilliant game, which is something I have only just found out after months of staying away from the game due to negative publicity.
   
   One of many the criticisms that is levelled at Risen 2 is that the overarching story is generic and cliched. It would be hard to disagree with this but I would like to suggest that it is not the quality of the story, but the quality of the story telling that really matters in an RPG video game. What Piranha Bytes do brilliantly well, is make the dialogue and interaction between the character's in the game interesting, easily digestible, and memorable to the gamer. The NPC's in Risen 2 are colourful, individual, and help to convey the personality and charm that the game has to offer. In this respect, Risen 2 stands in stark contrast to rave review generating American RPG's such as Amalur. Despite Amalur having it's story concocted by a professional fantasy author, the blase generic Disney-esque dialogue and instantly forgettable NPC's in the game resulted in at least this gamer, not giving two craps about anything in the game to find out whether there is a good story or not.
   
   Risen 2 succeeds in getting the gamer emotionally involved in the various plot and sub-plot intrigues in the game, resulting in the imagination of the gamer and his interest in the game world starting to bloom. To this end, Risen 2 also offers the gamer a myriad of neat character progression features, to give just one example amongst many, is the ability to train a monkey as a theif, or a parrot to annoy the f*ck out of other NPC's. In my play through, I made strong use of the trained monkey, vital for getting to some well tucked out the way stash at various points in the game. Another brilliant and fun feature that i have to mention is the Voodoo ability to take control of another NPC's mind. Aside from offering alternative ways to complete quests, stomping around the towns and settlements of the South Sea's as another character in the game, and watching how all the other NPC's react totally differently to this guy than they do to the Nameless Hero, can be great fun. Even better, in situations where the NPC under voodoo mind control is an unpallatable character, there are opportunites to land the NPC in a spot of bother by making hims do/say 'wrong things', or in one case during my playthrough, totally ruin his (virtual) life! There are similarly charming, innovative, and fun aspects to Risen 2 right throughout the game. Furthermore, much of these things are not spelt out for the gamer, but rather the gamer comes to discover them for himself through his own musings and thoughts on the game world. Through the interaction with the NPCs and the various tricks and skills in Risen 2, intrigue in the game world really starts to open up, thus the gamer starts to feel himself to be involved in the world and motivated towards overcoming the various hurdles and challenges that stand in the way of progression. For my money, this exercising of human imagination, supplemented by the lush beautiful graphics that contribute to the wonderfully ornate handcrafted environments is what RPG gaming is all about and is something that Risen 2 brilliantly achieves.
   
   Risen 2 however, does have many flaws. The combat can be a bit clunky and at times very clumsily implemented and the game definitely suffers from balancing issues. However, these and all its other flaws are meaningless to me because I judge a game by how much fun and entertainment that it offered me, and Risen 2 had me totally hooked for around 50 hours of game playing time in a way that no other game released in the last two years has.… Expand

   • Helpful? 5 of 5 users said Yes.
2. CoolDadTx

   8

   Compared to the other Piranha Byte games this is pretty good. The game suffer from the same issues that pretty much every other PB does when it comes to balancing and combat. The combat is flaky at best and generally just relies on chance more than skill. The early part of the game is overly difficult because even when you're being careful you are going to die a lot. Yet the end of the game is really easy. The end boss is a pushover compared to the early encounters. One day I hope PB will learn to craft combat systems that rely on skill more than luck and then balance it so it is even throughout the entire game. As with other PB games every combat involves you swinging wildly with no real tactic in order to do enough dmg to kill your opponent before they kill you. But if your opponent hits you then you stop attacking. When you are surrounded (which happens often) your enemies can effectively keep you off balance so you can never attack. Worse is the fact that defense is all but useless. It works ok against humans but everybody else complete ignore it. Hence trying to defend yourself just doesn't work. Pair this with the fact that taking a defensive posture locks you onto a single opponent allowing all the other enemies to pound on you and you quickly realize that "attack, step back, attack" is the only way to reliably win.
   
   Another big area of failure for this game are the new things that PB added - firearms and voodoo. Both are pretty much useless. If you really wanted to use something other than melee then you're out of luck. Voodoo is just too weak. Firearms are powerful but the odds of hitting anything outside melee range is slim. There was so much potential here and PB just wasted it.
   
   For the most part the graphics in the game were really good. Most of the areas you go to look similar but that is to be expected given the story. But the caves are identical. Walking through any cave in the game and you'll know exactly where to go because they all have the same layout. This is really just sad for a game of this era. The story was good and the various NPCs were mostly satisfactory. I heard a lot of reviews mention racism, sexism and possibly offending people. Honestly nothing in the game could have been read that way. The terms used fit the timeframe of the game and the region. Sexism didn't exist at all. There were only a few women in the game and they were doing things that you'd expect a woman of that era to do. The language is the only thing that some people might take offensive over.
   
   One frustrating area of the game are the traps. There are places in the game where a trap appears out of nowhere. A QTE appears for you to avoid the trap. If you fail, you die. The QTE lasts a second so unless you know the trap is there you're reloading. This could have been handled better by either taking dmg from the trap of making the QTE last longer. It is only a surprise the first time. The quests, overall, are varied and not too difficult. Unfortunately you can't set custom waypoints on the map nor can you see any quest indicators without bringing up the map. So you spend a lot of time toggling between the world and your map which is unfortunate. I also never managed to break a quest line even though I did things out of order. In an RPG this is a really good thing to get right.
   
   Another area PB got right was the stability and performance of the game. I ran it on max settings and I never noticed memory leaks nor did the CPU usage or temperatures get high. This is rare for a modern open-world RPG. Nor did I ever crash the game. Kudos to PB.
   
   If you like PBs other games (like Gothic) and you can overlook the crappy combat then this is a fun, med-size RPG. If you didn't like Gothic then you won't like this game.… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 2 users said Yes.
3. dylanland234

   6

   At times i wanted to love this. At times i wanted to quit and never come back. But i did finish. The story was decent, but it was the beauty of the environments that kept me coming. It was sort of like a poor pirate version of Witcher 2. It tried in so many ways to be unique, but overall was just a time waster waiting for other titles.… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 1 users said Yes.
4. Adanos

   2

   Disgusting...this game should have stayed at least one more year in production...it's the only reasonable explanation why everything is either dumbed down or downright broken. The combat, the tiny worldspace, the limited character development, the boring fetch quests, the horrendous graphics and animations? Piranha Bytes was always a developer of unpolished games and gritty gameplay, but they've never been so broken and uninteresting, they at least used to feature attractive story and character building. This game is too modest in scope, lacks creativity and the broken gameplay looks like it's made by a bunch of secondary school kids in their spare time not by a well established studio with years of experience in RPG development. Also, selling DLC cut from the very game since development? Yeah, you've earned the gamers' respect ... NOT… Expand

   • Helpful? 87 of 100 users said Yes.

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