Risen Review Summary

Immersive, captivating, classic RPG experience: The game offers an immersive and captivating experience with a well-crafted world, engaging story, and rewarding exploration. Many reviewers express nostalgia and consider it a classic RPG, praising its atmosphere and unique charm, even years after its release. The game successfully captures the spirit of older RPGs while providing a compelling and enjoyable adventure.

Detailed world encourages exploration: The game world is detailed, inviting exploration with secrets, surprises, and hidden rewards. The island setting is well-designed, with diverse locations and a sense of discovery. Despite not being particularly large, the world is dense and rewarding to explore.

Meaningful choices, high replayability: The game offers meaningful choices, non-linear gameplay, and a high degree of freedom in exploring the world and interacting with factions. Player actions have a noticeable impact on the game world, creating a sense of change. The game offers high replayability, encouraging multiple playthroughs to explore different builds, decisions, and factions.

Engaging story, interesting quests: The game features an engaging story with interesting quests, well-developed characters, and humorous dialogues. Quests are intricately woven together, with multiple solutions and characters involved in multiple quests, creating a sense of connection. The plot is well-suited for a high degree of freedom, with a narrative structure that is accessible to most RPG fans.

Excellent atmosphere, sound, and graphics: The game features appealing graphics, excellent sound design, and a captivating atmosphere. The soundtrack is well-integrated, enhancing the immersive experience and creating a sense of place. The game's atmosphere is immersive and captivating.

Numerous game-breaking bugs: The game is plagued with numerous bugs, ranging from minor graphical glitches to game-breaking issues that prevent progression. These bugs include disappearing NPCs, broken quests, frequent crashes, and characters getting stuck in the environment. The prevalence of these bugs significantly detracts from the overall experience.

Clunky, flawed combat system: The combat system is widely criticized for being clunky, unresponsive, and poorly designed. Specific issues include: flawed target locking, parry/block inconsistencies, limited combos, interruptible attacks, and excessive input delay. These issues make melee combat frustrating and difficult, especially against groups of enemies.

Unforgiving early-game difficulty: The game has a very high initial difficulty, with even basic enemies posing a significant threat early on. This forces players to rely on save-scumming and makes the beginning of the game frustrating and unforgiving. The steep learning curve and lack of early-game guidance contribute to this difficulty.

Repetitive, unengaging late-game: The game suffers from pacing issues, with the story and gameplay becoming repetitive and less engaging in the later chapters. Many quests devolve into monotonous dungeon crawling and fetch quests, and the main storyline loses its appeal. The ending often feels rushed and unsatisfying.

Repetitive, unappealing character models: The game suffers from repetitive and unappealing character models, with many NPCs sharing the same faces and bodies. This lack of variety makes the world feel less alive and immersive. The character graphics look outdated, and there is a lack of diversity in the appearance of female characters.

Flexible character progression system: The game features a flexible character progression system where players can develop skills in combat, magic, crafting, and thievery. Players improve skills by spending points and learning from trainers, with the chosen faction influencing available skills and playstyle. The game does not have a pre-defined class, allowing players to forge their own path.

Choices impact story and skills: The game features choices that affect the story, outcomes, and even which skills the player can learn. Quests often have different outcomes, especially when involving factions, and can be completed in various ways, with quest details and locations clearly presented in the quest log.

Crafting and magic scrolls: The game features crafting skills like blacksmithing and alchemy, as well as thieving. Magic is implemented through scrolls, such as telekinesis and transformation, and can be used to solve puzzles.

Lacks guidance and explanations: The game world lacks clear guidance and explanations of game systems, leading to confusion and difficulty in understanding objectives. Consequences of actions are often unclear, and the player character has a pre-defined personality, limiting role-playing options.

Teleportation becomes available mid-game: Teleport runes become available to make backtracking quicker, but they appear around the middle of the game. The map size is balanced, making the initial lack of teleport runes feel fair.

Inconsistent technical performance and stability: The game's technical performance is inconsistent. Some players report smooth performance and stability, while others encounter bugs, crashes, and frame rate issues. Optimization is also a concern, with performance varying significantly depending on hardware and settings.

Inconsistent audio quality/mixing: The audio quality and mixing receive mixed reviews. While some appreciate the voice acting and music, others find the audio poorly mixed, too quiet, or unclear. There were also reports of voice acting bugs.

Broken fast save, game freezes: The fast save button (F8) is reported to be non-functional during active gameplay. Players also experience freezes that require loading the last save file, which can be frustrating.

Overheating on high-end hardware: Even with high-end hardware like an RTX 4090, the game can cause overheating issues when run in 4K resolution. Some players have had to reduce their frame rate to maintain stability.

Character invisibility bug: Some players have encountered a bug where characters, including the main character, turn invisible, requiring game reloads. This can be immersion-breaking and frustrating.

Good for Gothic/Piranha fans: Many reviewers recommend Risen, especially to fans of Gothic or Piranha Bytes' other RPGs. They feel it captures the spirit of those games, and some even consider it a spiritual successor or what Gothic 3 should have been. However, newcomers to the series should start with Gothic 2.

Requires community patches/fixes: Many reviewers mention technical issues, bugs, and the need for community patches to improve the experience. Some suggest using specific patches or tweaking settings for optimal performance. Frequent quicksaving is advised to mitigate potential crashes.

Poor melee combat system: The melee combat system is frequently criticized as clunky, annoying, and poorly designed. Some suggest playing as a mage or ranged character to avoid these issues. Becoming a bandit specialized in close-combat is not recommended.

Challenging, requires patience: The game is considered challenging, especially at the beginning, and requires patience. Some reviewers suggest it's not for casual players or those seeking an easy experience. It may appeal more to players who enjoy old-school RPGs.

Artistic richness and freedom: The game is recommended for its artistic richness, freedom of movement and action, guaranteed immersion, impactful choices, character progression, and numerous quests.

Modernized with patches, achievements: Recent patches have improved compatibility and added achievements. The game was originally released in 2009 and takes place on the island of Faranga. Steam achievements were added in 2023.

Shipwrecked on island start: The game begins with the player character shipwrecked on an island after a sea voyage gone wrong. The initial events involve a storm caused by a Titan and the destruction of the ship.

Island setting, escape goal: The game is set on a single, vast island with a harsh atmosphere. The initial goal is to explore the island and find a way to escape.

Studio closed, no future updates: The development studio, Piranha Bytes, has closed, meaning no official updates are expected. This impacts the likelihood of future support or sequels.

Spanish Caribbean atmosphere: The game's setting and architecture evoke a Spanish Caribbean atmosphere. This is reflected in the Spanish names and open buildings found throughout the game.