Risen 2: Dark Waters

Risen 2 is an interesting game. It's a game that I shouldn't like, honestly. The combat is fairly awful, walking around feels like a chore at times, the dialogue is stiff, and the story is nothing particularly special. For some reason, though, I'm still totally intrigued by it.

The exploration is what does it for me. I would describe the game as 'open world lite'. Every area you go to, you can go pretty much anywhere within that environment, and there are a lot of activities to keep you busy in every area. Quests are sometimes pretty obvious to pick up, but others require some real digging. For instance, in the first main area of the game, you can find a hat sitting on a very out-of-the-way walkway. At first you would just think it's a piece of loot, since you can equip it and it has decent stats. But then, if you HAPPEN to talk to the right person while you HAPPEN to be wearing it, you'll go into a dialogue about how it's his hat that he lost, and a fight for it will ensue. A fight that you only have one chance to win, and then the quest is lost to you. But, oddly enough, you get to keep the hat either way. You don't get a bonus if you lose, though.

The environments are a joy to discover. They look decent enough to keep you motivated to find the next point of interest, but at the same time there's nothing too special about them (more on that in a moment). The true fun is discovering a random cave or temple out in the wilds, and clearing it out to plunder whatever treasure is in there.

That leads to my main point of contention with the game, though. The combat sucks. Just flat-out bad. Swordplay feels terrible, and it always feels like the enemy has the upper hand. I relied on my party members to do a lot of the legwork while I just sat back and occasionally shot them with a pistol or something. There's also a magic system (voodoo), but I didn't really get into that. My character was built for swords and guns.

Graphically, the game is nothing to write home about. It looks decent at a glance, but muddy textures and stiff animations knock it down a few notches. A few enemies actually have pretty nice animations (such as the Warriors in the temples you can plunder), which is especially odd considering not even the main character animates so smoothly. Just watch his incredibly awkward jump for proof of that.

Overall, I had a pretty good time with the game. Despite a lot of the parts of the whole just not being any fun, they still somehow added up to an enjoyable game.