The Demo Man: Risen

At a Glance:
Risen is billed as a gritty fantasy RPG with open world gameplay, a compelling story, and fantastic immersion.  Does it match its marketing with the demo gamers will use to decide its value?

Demos are one of my favorite things about gaming.  You can get a sense for how a game is going to turn out without spending a single cent.  Over the years, I've used demos, free trials, and all sorts of similar deals to try out games before I bought them.  Back when I was of more limited funds, I would use demos to discern if one game or another was worth my money, and now that I'm a bit more of a cheap bastard, I'm doing it again.


Now, I enjoy myself a good RPG every now and again.  I have fond memories of Baldur's Gate and Morrowind, Final Fantasy and even Diablo.  More recently, I've been taking chances on games that don't have huge AAA development houses behind them, like Space Rangers and the Witcher. They're not always hits, but often times they at least try to do something interesting.

Enter Risen.  Up until it showed up on Steam, I had never heard of it, but hey, it had a demo and it looked interesting.  The cover didn't have a nearly naked chick on it trying to sell it on the merits of the no-sex that was in the game, so I figured they must be confident enough of the game itself.

Play now, my lord!

So much for that theory.  Setting aside the ridiculous size of the poor woman's bosom, what is wrong with her head?  All the other characters have heads that approach normal sizes and textures, which just makes her look more like a deformed robot than she already does.  While they go into the detail of rather nice textures for her skin, clothing, and the models of every other character, her head looks like a shrunken plastic doll's head in comparison.  It's only made worse by her impossibly large and perky chest.  I wasn't aware they had silicone in medieval times.

  

 Were there no female models available for the graphics team?

After some comical dialog which does next to nothing other than establish that you were on a boat, there was a storm, and now you're on some island or other, she tells you to get a weapon.  Any sort of big stick should do for now to fend off wild animals.  Sure enough you can turn around, pick up a stick and use it as a club.

I see you've played Knifey-Clubby before.

Okay, really?  I mean, I get that some of the motions are the same, but really?  This is actually worse than when Oblivion listed axes as blunt weapons, though that point is arguably up for debate.  The idea that a stick picked up off the ground is worth 8 gold is pretty funny too, especially when you see how much a hand-crafted piece of glass is later on.

Who needs skilled craftsmen?  I can gather wood!

Now, I know what you're thinking.  These problems are really pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.  I mean, as long as the game is fun and the story is cool, you can forgive an RPG a lot of flaws.  Just look at Baldur's Gate.  So let's take a look at the rest of the game in that light.  To assist, I'll break it down into three sections: Story, Gameplay, and Interaction.

Story

Okay, first up, story.  You play Ewan McGregor some nameless dude who wakes up on a dark and stormy night upon a shoreline, corpses and wreckage surrounding him.  The only other survivor is someone named Sara, who must be some sort of failed homunculus that survived destruction along with you.  Eventually it's revealed that there is some sort of Inquisitor, you were a stowaway, and that bad things have been happening on the island.  Mages used to have a good time on the island, but now some earthquake caused strange ruins to rise up from underground.  I'd point out that earthquakes don't work like that, but this is a fantasy game and I'm will to accept magic earthquakes that cause buildings to be uncovered with no other real change to the surrounding scenery.

Not much is mentioned about the Inquisition, other than they are at the island to help stop whatever strange thing has been going on, and they're kind of dicks about it, conscripting criminals and the like.  You learn that there are three basic factions, the bandits, led by the cleverly named "Don", the Inquisition, and the Mages.  This appears to break down the class system of the game to Fighter, Monk, and Wizard, but I'm sure there's some subtlety beyond that.

However, as far as story goes, that's it.  Really.  You spend most of the demo wandering about collecting various nick-knacks and learning how the game works.  You also leave behind your hideous love interest sexy female companion to go chase giant moths with torches.  There's no cutscene introducing the mysterious Inquisitor, no reason given for the storm, not even a dream that encourages you to move forward.  You're just sort of there letting things happen.  I know the game is supposed to be gritty, but that doesn't mean you can't make the story a compelling one.

Gameplay

Speaking of how the game works, I'm going to have to hazard this at "not well".  The combat system is pretty bad, consisting entirely of four moves: Attack, Defend, Dodge, and Die.  I think you do more damage if you can chain attacks, but there's really no skill to it, it's pretty random.  You can't interrupt an attack to dodge or block, so if you see an enemy lashing out at you and you're mid swing, you have to sit there and take it.  Dodging consists mostly of jumping back, which you will see enemies doing all the time, making your attacks useless and leaving you open to a counterattack.  The game doesn't even give you a hint as to what the AI is going to do in a given "turn", so it's pretty much a game of RPS with hitpoints attached.  Throw in the sudden change in monster difficulty towards the end, with no indication of why some hungry wolves are tougher and stronger than the other hungry wolves, and you might just find yourself quitting the demo in frustration like I did the first time I tried it.

There are some other sloppy things about the gameplay while I'm at it.  The jumping animation looks like it might be okay if it was sped up to match real speeds, but as is looks like Obi-Wan the bum you play as is jumping on the moon.  In my first run through, I triggered a pit trap in a dungeon I was exploring and due to the wacky nature of gravity, I actually hovered over the last part of the trap and landed safely on the other side.  I then beat on the giant moth through a portcullis and fell in properly to collect my reward.

Another thing the game does is encourage you to loot the bodies of your kills, not because they might drop a +2 Giant Animal slaying knife, but because you can eat the meat of your kills.  A nice concept, though it does lead to a rather amusing line of dialog later on when you find a fry pan.

Nothing of value in there, save this fry pan.  It's +2 against hunger!

This is a case of "It's been done before better" coming to the fore, but I'll let it slide for now.  Cooking food to gain more of a benefit from it is a decent idea, it's just not implemented well here.  What's worse is that buckets of water have a better curative effect that food or even healing potions.  Now, the last game I recall that let you go from no health to full health on what amounted to a water fountain was Duke Nukem 3D, a game where you could climb a ladder while carrying a two-handed gun and kicking with both feet.

Right, realism.

Interaction

This leads me into interaction.  In a game touting realism, a gritty nature, and an amazing story, the process of interacting with the world must really be immersive and fun, right?

Well, NPC interaction is pretty basic, with not-so branching dialogs and lots of exposition, with too-friendly people helping you along even though they've got little reason to trust you.  What gets really weird is that the animations feel like they are cribbed from another game: The Movies.  None of the scripted animations feel particularly unique, and several felt wildly out of place, like every time Lincoln Six Echo your linen-wearing stowaway made a grand gesture referring to nothing in the distance when a line came up.

The dialog is poorly acted as well.  The lines are read, but there's not a lot of feeling in them, which is unfortunate because I rather liked some of the voices I heard.  I understand that the game wasn't really written in English first, but it's really no excuse.

Interacting with the world is a little better, because you'll see your character bend down to pick things up, slurp stagnant water out of barrels with much gusto, and even fry up several servings of rat meat within a few seconds.  However, there aren't really many options beyond that.  You can't mix in some healing herbs to make the meat a but more nutritious, or even add spices to increase the value.  It's all very basic, and to be blunt, boring.  Other RPGs with crafting systems usually allow for enough variation to give players at least a sense of choice.  This is just, well, unfortunate.

Overall

A good demo is designed to grab the attention of a gamer and entice them to buy the full version.  It doesn't even have to be perfect, it just has to be a decent representation of what the game is about, and if it speaks to you, you're sold.  This demo fails on that count.  It's not horrible, mind you, in fact it's not even that bad.  It's just not good by any definition I would use.   It's bland and uninteresting, which is sad to me because a lot of times there are hidden gems in these types of games.

The quick and dirty version is this: if you are hard up for a western style RPG for the PC (the console version is worse from what I hear), Risen might be worth your time to look at if you can stand the demo, but really there are many better options out there.  Risen strikes me as the failed amalgamation of three much better games: The Witcher, Arx Fatalis, and The Elder Scrolls.  Any one of those are better choices to play in place of this game, and are highly recommended by this reviewer.

At the time of this review, Risen's Metascore is 79/100 for the PC version.

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