The Good: Varied
item types, buried treasure and voodoo
The Not So Good:
Repetitive and dull auto-aimed combat lacks depth and skill, enemies
routinely forget they are attacking you, occasionally vague quest
details, linear mission order with lots of tedious mandatory
sub-quests, slow character growth with expensive training that
injures you, generally useless allies, unfair difficulty, imprecise
item interaction, some graphical bugs
What say you? This
pirate role-playing game is lacking in far, far too many areas:
2/8
MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Pirates and role-playing games are
seemingly made for each other. Many people would like to be pirates,
going on grand adventures around the seven seas, without having to
worry about scurvy and alcoholism (though heavy drinking would
produce a more authentic experience). We’ve seen several
combinations in the past, such as (personal favorite) Sea
Dogs and Risen,
a convenient reference since we are looking at the second Risen game,
entitled Risen 2: Dark Waters. So grab your rum and parrot (don’t
confuse the two, or you’ll end up with a wet shoulder and feathers
in your teeth) and let’s see if Risen 2: Dark Waters advances the
role-playing genre.
GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Risen 2: Dark Waters is a mixed bag in
the graphics department. There are some highlights: character faces
look nice, and a majority of the buildings and ships are well
designed and have high-resolution textures. Fire is also done well.
However, the rest of the character models could use more detailed
textures, and the animations alternate between being too stiff or
overly dramatic. Characters also typically clip into themselves and
other objects, ruining the immersion. Blood effects are underwhelming
as well. In addition, there are some noticeable bugs, such as
flickering shadows (especially with trees) and foliage that magically
expands outward as you walk towards it. Background objects are also
very fuzzy and objects pop in to view, even if the game is on the
maximum graphical settings. On the sound side of things, Risen 2:
Dark Waters includes uninspired battle effects and a wide range of
voice acting quality. Humorously, the game tries to have NPC
characters talk to each other as you pass by, but the game recycles
the same conversations (so you hear the same thing every time) for a
specific set of characters. Even worse, characters will stop
mid-banter after you pass by and resume at the same point minutes
later if you walk past again. It’s like the characters are saying
“here he comes, start talking again!”, and then “he’s gone,
let’s stand here and wait for him to pass again”. The game also
relies on unnecessarily salty language (I get it’s a pirate game,
but it serves no point) that is occasionally poorly translated. The
music sits in the background and increases in volume when the
inevitable attacks start, but it is instantly forgettable. Overall,
Risen 2: Dark Waters is too inconsistent to provide solid graphical
and sound design.
ET AL.
You are the nameless hero, doing pirate
things in a pirate port of. The story has you infiltrating a really
nice bunch of pirates (they are quite welcoming to anonymous
newcomers such as yourself) because some important guy told you to.
The campaign consists of a linear set of mandatory quests that must
be completed in a specific progression, in order to unlock the next
set of linear quests. There are commonly quests within quests within
quests, usually involving fetching a thing to fetch another thing;
indeed, Risen 2: Dark Waters features too many “go here and talk to
this guy” missions (and “this guy” usually tells you to go talk
to someone else first), none of which are fun. A small assortment of
side quests may be activated by talking to other characters, although
most of them are incorporated into the main storyline and must be
completed eventually anyway (although you can finish them early if
you stumble upon them). Typically, scripted conversations with other
characters feature options (persuasion, for example) that you can’t
even use because you haven’t leveled up enough yet; the game should
know that, at an early point of the story, you can’t possibly have
a 10 “silver tongue” rating and it should have removed that
conversation choice altogether. Quests are usually given poor, vague
descriptions in the logbook that lack detail to assist in completing
them. To understand what you’re supposed to do, you must select a
quest in the logbook and then select “set map marker” to place an
“X” on the island map to see its location (it took me several
hours of stumbling through the early game to figure that out).
However, this location is not displayed on the compass, which seems
to defeat the purpose of having one in the first place. You can also
review the game dialogue to narrow down whom you’re supposed to
talk to (if it was discussed), but the descriptions are still too
unclear for my tastes. Quests can also seem finished (further
instructions are not provided) but are not checked off your logbook,
which is confusing. Risen 2: Dark Waters takes place on a handful of
islands, none of which are very extensive. The game lacks a sense of
exploration, as almost every building is directly tied to a quest in
the main story. The islands never feel like a living, breathing
realm, with animals (almost always in groups of three) appearing in
scripted locations. You can save your progress at any time (highly
recommended) and the game does frequently record your progress, so
that’s a nice feature. Starting out in Risen 2: Dark Waters,
though, is made more difficult by the inconsistent tutorial
instructions that explain some game mechanics but ignore others (like
the aforementioned “set map marker”).
As you kill enemies and complete
quests, you earn “glory,” which work as experience points.
Leveling up in Risen 2: Dark Waters is done very, very slowly:
typically, a role-playing game lets you gain a level and unlock
something in the first minutes of playing, but here it takes a good
hour to assign your first attribute point. You certainly are not
given constant rewards to keep you more invested in the game: the
dangled carrot is too far ahead to see. Each time you level up, you
can choose one of five areas to upgrade: blades, firearms, toughness
(health), cunning (giving you more options in conversations), or
voodoo (the game’s take on magic, featuring potions and dolls).
Talents (three more specific attributes in each category, such as
slashing weapons, pistols, thievery, or black magic) are
automatically calculated from your base values, so you sadly can't
tweak these to your liking. Beyond the attributes, there are many
items you can equip, from armor to earrings and amulets, that
increase your attack, defense, and attribute ratings. And beyond
that, there are skills that can be earned by paying for expensive
training, or more directed instruction where your helpful teacher
injures severely you. While Risen 2: Dark Waters theoretically gives
you several choices for upgrading your character, you really only get
direct control over a couple of traits.
Besides the quests, there are some
other things to do in the world of Risen 2: Dark Waters. There is a
limited amount of things to trade, mostly items you purchase with
gold earned by completing missions. The world of Risen 2: Dark Waters
isn’t full of loot, just an occasional money purse or bottle of
rum, so you won’t get rich quick as you wander the countryside. You
might find some buried treasure, though, so that’s something to
keep and eye out for. You can also learn how to make your own weapons
(and improve existing ones) and steal goods by combining lock picking
and sneaking skill sets. You’ll also have to interact with the
colorful inhabitants of the game world, who will ignore you unless
you talk directly to them. Conversation choices aren’t present, as
you’ll always end up at the same result no matter which responses
you choose. However, the game does remember who you’ve interacted
with in the past and adjusts subsequent conversations accordingly,
which is neat. Risen 2: Dark Waters does have some unpolished
cutscenes with hyperactive hand movement, drastic camera cuts, and
characters that occasionally face the wrong direction. This helps to
further reduce whatever small amount of immersion the game had
earned.
The third-person perspective (plus the
lack of an aiming reticule) makes precise aim very difficult: when
items or enemies are placed closely together, it can be impossible to
select exactly what you want. You also can't pick up anything while
weapons are drawn, adding another step when interacting with objects.
As for combat itself, I hate it. There is both melee and ranged
combat (plus stunning your opponent with sand, once you’ve unlocked
it), and Risen 2: Dark Waters relies heavily on auto-aiming, where
the game picks the closest opponent and directs all of your attacks
towards them. The system doesn’t work well, however, as your
character will frequently attack nothing but air as an enemy stands a
short distance to the side. Blocking seldom works, making battles
extremely frustrating, especially since you’ll be facing multiple
opponents almost all of the time and you need to block
something in order to survive. Combo attacks,
automatically scripted once you hammer the left mouse button three
times, cannot be interrupted, so you’ll routinely attack enemies
that aren’t there or are too far away. The enemies themselves
frequently forget they are supposed to be attacking you (they just
stand there or circle around you, especially the animal units), which
I guess is OK since you'll usually be fighting multiple enemies of
similar or better rank than you. Even on the easiest difficulty
setting, being outnumbered three-to-one (the game's favorite odds, as
most animal packs travel in groups of three) usually results in
quick, painful death and a reload. The islands of Risen 2: Dark
Waters are absolutely teeming with unavoidable (they are placed along
the paths to the next quest, and always spawn in the same locations),
annoying monsters. I quickly learned to avoid just about everything
that popped into view, just in case I got surrounded by a team of
three. Of course, odds of success would be a lot higher if your
occasional allies weren't as incompetent as the enemies, only
occasionally offering assistance through an infrequent potshot.
IN CLOSING
Risen 2: Dark Waters adds nothing to
the role-playing genre while being somewhat inaccessible and
definitely frustrating. It starts with periodically vague quests,
with bare descriptions in your logbook that do little to explain what
it is you are supposed to do. You can click on a quest to place a map
marker (something I figured out how to do far too late in my time
with the game) or read the dialogue you skipped over by continually
pressing the “escape” key, but the locations never show up on
your compass, which leads to a lot of switching back and forth to the
map view to see where you are supposed to go. The quests are linear
and rarely interesting, never straying far from the main storyline
and requiring prerequisites (usually several) that might not be
obvious. Your conversations with the NPCs that populate the small
islands do change based on who you’ve talked to previously, but the
end result is always the same. Your nameless character has various
attributes that determine his effectiveness in combat and negotiating
with others, and he can undertake trade and forging, in addition to
more pirate-y activities like sneaking around and searching for
buried treasure. However, the third-person view gets in the way of
targeting closely spaced items, an aspect of the game that’s poorly
designed. In addition, you acquire new skills very slowly, as
experience is gained at a glacial pace and training is quite
expensive. Combat is bland: auto-aiming eliminates the need for
actual skill, and having only two options (attack or block) gets old
very quickly. Your AI allies, and the enemies you encounter, have
very basic behaviors (run towards you, then attack) that are quite
predictable, and sometimes they forget to do even that much. It’s
just as well, since you are routinely, and unfairly, outnumbered.
Finally, while there are some nice aspects to the graphics (namely
the building and ship detail), clipping bugs and shadowing issues
creep through. In the end, Risen 2: Dark Waters doesn't have a single
great feature and plenty that are not.
