Do you remember how last week I said I doubt I could ever play a game more boring than the Price is Right 2010? Well, turns out I was wrong; I just hadn’t played Risen yet.

Risen is a RPG published by Deep Silver and developed by Piranha Bytes. It was originally developed for the PC and ported over to the Xbox 360. It’s a quasi-open world set on an island where gods where real and humanity told them to take a hike. Which turns out to have been a bad idea because there were things, Titans, that the gods were keeping in check.

Sound familiar? Right, it’s like half the plot of any story set during the Classical Greek period. So, yeah, not a lot going on there in the way of interesting or compelling but wait, it gets more boring.

You start play washed up on the shore of the island, a nameless waterlogged hero. I know, it’s the same opening from Age of Conan. I don’t get why European developers love to start a game this way, but they do.

Anyway.

You tromp through this new world, killing and maiming anything in your way until you get to a town. It’s here that things get really boring. There are some factions you can join forces with to fight an evil king that is trying to steal some power or something.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Abraxas, playing a nameless hero that has to choose between three factions to battle an evil overlord does seem pretty generic, but I think I’ve heard this before. Somewhere specific.”

You have. The Gothic series. It’s by Piranha Bytes too. Except they released it 10 years ago. And if they had released Risen 10 years ago, I’d tell you that Risen was brilliant and a lot of fun. I say that because 10 years ago it would have been. 10 years ago hardly anyone was doing the nameless protagonist washed up on the shore bit.

Well, except for Bethesda with the second Daggerfall game The Elder Scrolls. Oh, and Bioware did it with the first Knights of the Old Republic. Except in both cases discovering who you were was part of the story and was directly relevant to what you were doing.

Unlike Risen.

In Risen the nameless protagonist is just a cheap method to lessen the writing load and offer some bland excuse about allowing the player to apply their own character to the story. So, maybe 10 years ago this wasn’t too original either. Maybe 10 years ago I’d tell you that the faction system was interesting and added an interesting dimension to the semi-open world of Risen. And 10 years ago I would have said that the graphics were excellent, and bleeding edge cool. Except that this isn’t 10 years ago, and they’re old-hat.

The environments are bland, and thinly disguised corridors to route the player a long certain paths. The characters look like plastic dolls with 2 points of articulation. Given today’s standard of modeling and environment for the 7^th gen consoles, Risen is woefully inadequate. The collectible objects are laughably obvious, often being the only 3 dimensional things set in the middle of the pathway.

And the world itself is setup like the old-school RPGs where you are the chosen one who can go into any house, rifle through any chest, cabinet or whatever and take what you like with no consequence to your behavior. Which was cool back in the day with Dragon Warrior, you know, 25 years ago but do we have to keep doing this today? There’s just no excuse for that. Oh, and I kept finding money on the ground where ever I went. I’m not talking like a nickle or a dime, but like $10 a pop. Who leaves money laying about like that? No one.

To be honest I was glad I didn’t have to pull a Zelda and break every piece of pottery I found to scrounge yet more money.

But, back to my point, give me a believable world where my actions have consequence, where they help me tell the story the developers have planned out. You know, like Saints Row, Mass Effect, Grand Theft series, Fable II…the list goes on and on and on. The only excuse for not having something like this in place is lazy coding.

And there’s my Positive Comment© for the review: if it wasn’t for laziness Risen could have been an interesting game 10 years ago.

If you’re one of those guys who’s still playing Final Fantasy to see if the combination of 2 Red Mages and a Blackbelt is better than a Black Mage, White Mage and 2 Knights you’re going to love Risen. You get to wander around doing Fed-Ex quests for everyone while digging through the drawers looking for stuff you might want to sell to someone else.

That is if you didn’t pick up any money on the way over.

For the Home-schooled, a Fed-Ex quest is a derogatory term for a certain type of quest in open-world or MMO games. It’s where one NPC wants you to pick up a package and deliver it somewhere else or the opposite go somewhere and pick something up for them. When it comes to quest design, I think that’s about as lazy as you can get.

And there’s a lot of it in Risen. Fed-exing, I mean. Well, there’s a lot of laziness too.

Oh, and did I mention the grind-tastic leveling system that has points you can spend on skills? But not all the skills are unlocked at the beginning so you have to get more levels to release more skills? Because it’s all there in all its grinding glory. You can wile away the hours doing the same Kill X amount of Y creature again and again and again until you’ve unlocked that one last skill.

I hate doing this in MMO’s and JRPG’s, why would I want to do it here?

And don’t get me started on the combat for this game. It’s confusing, overly complex, and hard to work with despite being only 2 buttons. How do you do that? How do you turn a 2 button system into something that’s hard to work with?

I don’t know, but if you want an example, Risen is your game.

I’d say more about the lack-luster voice acting, but I am as uninterested in it as they were in delivering their lines. You know, if one of the actors said in the middle of a dialogue, “Hey, when do I get paid?” I wouldn’t have noticed. Someone might have, I don’t know, that’s how dull it was.

So, in my Un-Humble Opinion©, Risen would have been a great game if the developers hadn’t been so lazy and released it 10 years ago. As it stands now, it’s pretty dull and formulaic with the bright spot being that you can stop at any time because the story isn’t compelling. Unless you’re still out there capturing Chocobo’s to get the rare Black Chocobo so you can feed it “greens” and breed a Gold Chocobo then you’re going to love this game.