Risen 3: Titan Lords Review

It’s hard for me to peg down what exactly makes the world of the Risen games feel so alive and full of charm. I think it has something to do with the fact that almost every single NPC has a purpose and a personality, whether it be as an inebriated quest giver, a surly merchant or a condescending trainer. It’s rare to find a NPC that doesn’t have some reason to be there, and even rarer to find a NPC who you can’t talk to. In any case, the world of Risen 3 is once again alive and teeming with stuff to do, but this time the developers have addressed several of the issues that made the last two games feel clunky and unpolished, despite still leaving us with a bland story and some remaining bugs and glitches.

In Risen 3 you play as the nameless son of Steelbeard, a legendary pirate whom you probably remember from the second game. The tutorial is staged with you as a pirate on the high seas in the midst of a scripted battle that will probably leave you with a bad taste in your mouth. Once you get past this mess, things quickly improve as you find yourself on an island with your sister Patty (another returning character) in search of a mysterious treasure. Things predictably go wrong as you encounter a shadow-lord who promptly kills you. Shortly after you are resurrected by a crazy druid named Bones, who informs you that the shadow lord has stolen your Soul while your body remains on Earth. The Risen games have always had clumsy narratives, and the third entry is no exception, with the quest to reunite your body and your soul forming the jumping-off point for the tepid main storyline about once again defeating the shadows/Titans who are now using portals to invade our planet.

Previous Risen games had slow, challenging starts that confined you to a relatively small area for several hours while you got to grips with the game’s various systems. Risen 3 bucks this trend; at the end of the hour-long introductory sequence when you are resurrected, the game opens up completely as you gain access to a small ship that lets you sail between numerous islands. The shear amount of content available from the get-go might seem initially overwhelming; everywhere I went dozens of quests accumulated in my journal and the main storyline quickly became buried behind much more interesting side endeavors. There were times when I wasn’t even sure what the main quest was, given how many side quests seemed just as important and are often linked inherently to the main storyline.

Eventually it became clear that in order to progress further into the game and obtain a proper ship I needed to side with one of the game’s several factions. The Mages offered up powerful Crystal Magic, the Demon Hunters had a cool ancient order vibe going on, while the Pirates offered up Voodoo tricks which return from Risen 2. I eventually sided with the Demon Hunters since they were the first major faction I came across, and after about ten hours I was a full member of this group. Once you join a faction there is no going back; your appearance changes and you gain access to faction-specific equipment and training. The first Risen had a similar story structure where you needed to side with one of two factions, and as with the first game the replay value soars as a result due to faction specific quests, gear and abilities. The overarching story and ending however do not change based on the faction you choose. How long you spend on a single playthrough of Risen 3 will largely depend on how quickly you choose a faction; you can opt to shop around or make your choice immediately.

When you actually settle down and work on completing a single quest, the quality varies significantly. Usually you will start by talking to one of the game’s many interesting characters. The voice acting and writing quality is once again surprisingly high for a game made on a small budget by a German team, and humour is again used quite effectively. Quests vary from fairly pedestrian tasks like killing some monsters or collecting specific items to much grander activities like defeating shadow-lords and helping the main factions retain or regain control of their islands. Other quests are quirky and interesting like helping a Demon Hunter who accidentally turned himself into a skeleton get back into his normal body, or helping a native with a terrible hangover get back to his village.

Of course, the quests mostly serve as reasons for you to head off into the wilderness and explore. Exploration remains the most enjoyable and time consuming activity in Risen 3 thanks to extremely detailed and atmospheric environments that are just packed with interesting things to discover. You might come across a chest full of goodies being guarded by a powerful monster, a man out in the woods tripping on Magic Mushrooms, or a scrap of paper speaking of a legendary item buried on another island. The expertly balanced economy of Risen 2 returns, so there is always reason to head out into the unknown in search of loot you can sell or quests that can be completed for cash rewards.

One sticking point of the previous two games that has seen significant improvement is the melee combat. Now from the get go you can dodge-roll, parry against both humans and monsters, and perform both slow strong attacks or fast, lighter attacks. Improved combat animations also make everything more fluid. Initially the ability to parry might seem useless as enemies usually attack much faster than you so by the time you have stopped parrying to attack, you will have been hit by your opponent and your attack interrupted. However once you learn some skills like Riposte which lets you counter-attack if you time your parry correctly, and Blade Dancer which increases your attack speed, the melee combat becomes quite enjoyable and is easily the best in the series.

Before long you will start finding spells, voodoo dolls and firearms to help mix things up. Spell scrolls are one-time use items that do things like rain fire down on your enemies or send a shockwave out that knocks back surrounding foes. Voodoo tricks let you mess with enemies, some will drive them crazy so they attack whoever is nearby while others might revive fallen enemies and have them fight by your side. Another class of Voodoo dolls lets you turn into a parrot or monkey in order to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. Muskets and Rifles are primary weapons that let you do damage from a distance, although faster enemies means they aren’t exploitable like in Risen 2. Also returning from Risen 2 are Dirty Tricks which let you quickly pull out a pistol or a throwing knife during combat to do a bit of extra damage.

While most of these tools and items serve as additions to sword combat, Crystal Magic is an offensive type of magic returning from Risen 1 that can replace your melee weapon completely. You’ll need to side with the Mages in order to gain access to it, but it makes you feel very powerful to wear a glove that lets you blast enemies with magical charges. Another change from Risen 2 is that you are able to have a companion with you from the start of the game. Companions are greatly helpful in combat and if you let them join, the early stages of the game are made significantly easier, although they can and will fall in combat if left to fight alone. Your companions will make contextual comments both in and out of conversations ala Mass Effect, which vary in quality from banal to highly amusing.

Almost all of your companions will simply attack enemies with swords, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity for mixing up combat encounters. The ability to level up and equip your team mates like in other RPG’s would have gone a long way to fleshing out this system. You will probably find yourself mostly using Bones due to his healing spell that is very useful. The health system in Risen 3 is the same as that in Risen 2; you can restore health slowly using provisions which are widely available, or immediately by using less common alcoholic beverages. As long as you have a companion with you, the difficulty of Risen 3 is manageable if not a bit on the easy side, but there are times when you will need to fight enemies alone. These are some very tough fights, meaning the game has a more traditional difficulty curve than previous entries.

When it comes to leveling up and learning new skills, the glory/trainer system returns from Risen 2. Everything you do from killing monsters to completing quests will earn you glory which can be used to increase base attributes like toughness, cunning and melee. Once these are high enough, you can learn skills from trainers by paying them gold. The skills range from passive buffs to specific abilities like smithing, lock-picking and alchemy, to combat skills like the ability to Riposte or add a fourth attack to your melee combo. There are tons of skills to learn and all of them cost money so you will need to be deliberate about developing your character, especially early on.

One bewildering addition that is linked to the story is your “soul” level, which goes up and down based on how nice you are to people. I found it hard to resist choosing the often hilarious sarcastic or snarky lines that the protagonist delivers in a gravelly deadpan voice, so it annoyed me I was seemingly being punished for doing this. Whenever you choose to sleep, you go to the shadow-world and lose a bit of soul upon your return, but I never figured out what happened when you lost too much. Astral Vision is another fairly useless feature that lets you use the shadow-world in order to make finding items easier but I rarely utilized it. These two features don’t really add anything to the game, but their secondary nature means they don’t take too much away from it either.

Another luke-warm addition to the game are sea battles that seem to take two different forms. When you are sailing between islands, one of your crew members might inform you that an attack is imminent either from a sea monster or a ship. When fighting a sea-monster, you will sail your boat around in a small area and try to shoot it with cannons when it surfaces. These are slow, clumsy battles that add very little to the experience. Ship battles fare slightly better; there will be a cutscene showing two ships blasting each other with cannons, after which you will need to defend your ship against invading pirates or board the enemy ship. These still aren’t great since any kind of scripted sequence feels clumsy in this game and you cannot save during either type of sea battle, although fortunately they are linked to your progress through the story and only happen a few times.

The Risen series has always suffered from a lack of polish, and while the third game is probably the least buggy of the three I still experienced some recurring issues. Your NPC companions sometimes block the camera during conversations so all you see is the back of their neck or their clothing. When in combat, you might get trapped between enemies and the terrain and dodging didn’t always let me escape, making for some glitchy moments of doing summersaults in place. There was one instance of my companion getting stuck in the terrain, forcing me to reload an earlier save, but this seemed to be an isolated incident. There were occasional problems with the ragdoll physics that saw enemies go flying when I delivered the killing blow. Overall these problems were infrequent and minor, with everything working as intended the majority of the time.

Risen 3 seems to use the same game engine as the previous entry but it has seen significant improvements. Lighting and shadows are absolutely top notch and character models look much better than before, although I highly recommend turning off the ugly depth of field effect. Texture quality often leaves much to be desired but overall Risen 3 is a good looking game, and it ran fast and smooth maxed out on my mid-range PC. The islands all have their own look and feel from the rocky, gothic wasteland of Calador to the deep woods of Tiranis to the thick jungle of Kila. Several locations return from Risen 2, but they have been redesigned and feel totally fresh. Each environment is hand crafted and packed with detail, and I found myself constantly hammering the screenshot button as I explored new areas.

The sound in Risen 3 is rock solid across the board. The soundtrack changes between locations and is consistently good. Ambient sounds help develop a sense of place from the bubbling lava on Calador to the chirping of tropical birds on Antigua. As mentioned, voice acting is mostly good, apart from the tiresome Gnomes and the Natives on Kila who have stereotypical indigenous accents. Combat sounds are also good although somewhat lacking in impact.

As with its predecessor, Risen 3 offers excellent escapism, but now there is a pretty solid RPG in place to back it up. The pirate theme is still there, but it isn’t as dominant as in Risen 2 (unless of course you join the Pirate faction). With a stronger story and less fetch-quests, Risen 3 might have found itself shoulder to shoulder with genre greats like The Witcher and Dragon Age Origins. As it stands now however, it is a great RPG with a very generic main story and a few underdeveloped mechanics and ideas. If you have ever been curious about trying a Piranha Bytes game but have been worried about a steep learning curve or a lack of polish, Risen 3 is your best bet.