Risen 2: Dark Waters Previews

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Written by BuckGB on February 29th, 2012

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To a degree, the team's desire to do right by the console versions can be a seen in the game design: instead of the one huge island of the first game, Risen 2 is spread over multiple, smaller islands, which can be loaded individually and then flushed from the console's memory once the player moves onto the next one. Brolly believes that this island hopping not only allows for greater diversity in the environments, but also fits the pirate fiction on which the game is built. "There are a few islands that are completely different to the rest, such as one that is entirely covered in jungle, another that has a lot of sand and one that's just one entire city. It plays nicely into the fact that it's a pirate game."

Unfortunately, despite the pirates, islands and the fact that you captain a ruddy great ship, there's no gameplay built around sailing or sea warfare, which Brolly attributes to the Piranha Bytes "recognising where its strengths lay" and focussing on telling tales of a pirate life on terra firma instead. The ship will act as a hub: a place to talk to your crew and, once recruited, choose which of your land-lubbing allies will accompany you on quests. You'll also be able to kit out your protagonist the deliberately blank cipher known as The Nameless Hero with numerous changes of clothing, equipment and jewellery that will affect stats as well as making him look rather dashing.

The spider-death is indicative of the kind of RPG that Risen 2 is. It retains that notion of baddies too tough to kill being just down the road, demanding that you spend a bit of time buffing up in the local area before you set off on your quest. After last year's Skyrim and The Witcher 2 I found this a little awkward, but I imagine the effect will wear off after a while.

What hasn't been awkward, so far, at least, is the general gist of the combat. It's quite actiony and lightweight, somewhere between what The Witcher 2 was doing and what Amalur does, but immediately playable. Swish your sword about and hit the enemy, without any need to lock into a specific baddy. As your skills improve, of course, so your capacity to kill dangerous monkeys increases. Your companion gets stuck in, too, although I am not sure if she actually does any damage. What I am also slightly mystified by at the moment is how I supposed to differentiate between particularly baddies being tougher than others. It's been a bit trial and error. What's also been trial and error are the game's traps, which you get a quick time-event style spacebar-hammering chance to avoid, and these have so resulted in my wearing my surprised face, and an instant death for the nameless protagonist.

Risen 2's RPG systems and combat are very similar to its predecessors - both the original Risen and the first three Gothic games. No, the Caribbean-style setting and pirate theme aren't really things that Piranha Bytes' fanbase is too used to seeing, but the mix of RPG and action, along with the overall feel, will be immediately familiar to long-time veterans. You'll be diving into deep RPG systems that involve finding and gaining trust with NPCs before they teach you skills and spells, fighting monsters with a combination of ranged, melee, and spell-based attacks, forging weapons and armor, and trying to survive against a pretty nasty world filled with tough opponents. You'll also complete quests naturally and without modern hand-holding systems that many of today's RPGs use. This means that you'll sometimes get lost or a little stuck when trying to figure out how to complete a quest, and there's no marker on your map pointing exactly where to go. It does feel good to complete a quest without having to be walked through each tiny little step, and I do like that many quests are open enough to include multiple solutions involving stealth, combat, or magic.

The thing that I'm probably the most disappointed with in Risen 2 is its old-and-busted action, something that I doubt will be overhauled between now and the April release date. The developers have put together a wonderful-looking world that has all of the natural environments and organic, exploration-friendly terrain of Gothic 3 and combined it with a lighting and vegetation model that often rivals Crysis' visuals, but all of that effort sometimes feels a bit squandered once you get into the game's clunky and floaty swordfights. Sure, it's fun to use an off-hand pistol for quick and dirty strikes in mid-fight, but the blocking and counter-attack system leaves much to be desired.

Perhaps the most important of these to learn and master is the way conversations are handled and how they tie into the game's navigation. Like the majority of expansive RPGs nowadays, Risen 2 comes packed with conversation options that both progress the story/mission and offer a deeper insight into the world around you. Unlike the majority of expansive RPGs nowadays, Risen 2 does away the likes of a mini-map, in-game 'Fable-line' and other navigational aids.

Therefore, it's vital that you take notice of what you're being told in conversations. When you embark on a mission NPCs will usually give you some verbal info about where to go and what to do, and that's the only hint you will get. Helpfully, conversations are recorded word for word in a tab within your inventory screen for future reference if you get lost.

There's plenty to see and do in Risen 2, with massive islands to explore and plenty of dangers afoot. You'll be fighting plenty of humans and denizens of the sea and using that experience to level up in a rather unique way. As you fight enemies and complete quests that range from completing menial tasks to stalking someone to see where they go at night, you'll earn 'glory' which is used to level up one of five disciplines. Blades, Firearms, Toughness, Cunning, and Voodoo are aspects of your character that can be improved, and each of those has sub-categories that get in to specifics behind your skills. You want to be able to persuade people? Then you'll need to work on your cunning. Want to specialize in magics? Then you'll want to level up those Voodoo skills.

Pretty much everyone has a quest for you to do; the first major town you come upon has enough to do to easily keep you busy for a few hours before you'll want to move on to the next locale. But not before seeing if anyone has something to teach you. Once you've leveled up your skills, its then time to go find masters of the arts who can teach you specialized skills. So while the skill set is initially lacking, it will ramp up and offer more complexity to the game, provided you've got the coin, because learning new skills does not come cheap, and gold is something of a rarity in Risen 2.

Combat in Risen 2: Dark Waters also feels incredibly clunky as of right now -something that made the first game suffer too. While it is possible to do things like parry attacks from human swordsman, it's very difficult (if not outright impossible until you learn appropriate skills) to defend against creature attacks other than by doing my silly-looking jump, which pretty much means I was left jamming the mouse button as much as possible to keep myself from getting stunlocked to death, as well as letting my NPC helper do the majority of the work. At least health items were in clear abundance, and if you get trashed heavily, you can quick-travel back to town for a quick rest and a health refill.

Luckily, Risen 2: Dark Waters does get a bit easier to manage, at least for the portion of the game I had access too. Building your character is largely the same as before, where you build experience (glory in this game) to level up various specialties, which determine what class you play as. You can also learn talents from various trainers scattered throughout the land... for a price, of course. It's even possible to learn magic in this game (referred to as voodoo) if you learn the appropriate skills. Though this doesn't necessarily make the clunky controls any less so, it at least helps give you a small fighting chance once you level yourself up from being easy pickings.

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