Madcap's Mad Rantings - "Risen"

So, yeah, sorry about no review this week, real life keeps getting in the way. I keep meaning to get , Assassin's Creed finished and I do mean to and get it put up here, don't worry (also considering putting my reviews into a biweekly slot now instead of every week, unless I can get where I can do them weekly again). So, to make up for no review this week, let me instead tell you about a game that was so dry and so irritating that I couldn't even finish it: Risen. (This is technically not a review, since I didn't finish it, so...yeah...me, ranting...angrily...)

What is Risen? Well, it's something that by Piranha Bytes (who I will be avoiding in the future) and published by Deep Silver (also off my Christmas card list) that promises to be an epic fantasy adventure. It's not. It's a rather boring, sticky game that irritated me after about half an hour of playing it. I wish I were even joking. Sorry, Piranha Bytes, but you can't establish a vague backstory then throw me into Fantasy World "X" and expect me to be interested in the story. Being washed up on an island would be exciting if something actually happened! I have the same problem with Alice: The Madness Returns, having a story involves having something actually happen!

I would almost say it's giving up it's storyline to showcase and amazing graphics engine, but it doesn't have that. The graphics look bizarrely cartoon-y and realistic, like they couldn't decide if they wanted to go with the Fable look or the Dragon Age look and succeeds at neither one of them. Instead we get something that looks like it could be a Saturday morning cartoon version of Lord of the Rings.

Then again, I seem to remember Lord of the Rings having characters that were interesting and that I wanted to follow from the very beginning. In the half hour I played Risen, I encountered the main character, a bald apparently middle aged man with no discernable personality (but who is oh, so British) and a woman was supposed to be wearing furs (I imagine) but just really looked like she had particularly hairy her breasts and gentalia (Another note to Piranha, TNA will only get you so much!). I literally ran into goblins during the game that had more personality than these two...and I actually felt bad about killing mook NPCs for the first time in my life.

Of course, the killing took place with a ridiculous combat interface. It's depressing to see real-time melee combat done so terrifically bad. The main character (who I will call "Bob") seemed to move half a second slower than I needed him too. Matters weren't helped when Bob decided after hacking through an enemy right in front of him that it was a much better idea to look at the wall nearby instead of going for the next enemy who was less than half a foot away with a sword ready to be rammed in his gut. This game is actually showing it's PC origins. Things ported over to console never seem to do well (I'm sure some have done well, but I can't think of any).

So, in the end. Bad game that has no flow whatsoever and is unintuitive in every way. Nice job, Piranha. Nice job.

This is based on the Xbox 360 version of the game.