What does it say about a game when it slips quietly onto the scene and makes a fairly small impact?  There was probably a great deal of hype surrounding Risen but by the looks of things, I missed it.  We did an article on it back in March, but since then, the first I heard of it was when it appeared on my Steam store home page.  Curious, I bought it and it's not too unkind to say that I'm of two minds about it, partly wishing I'd saved my pennies for Dragon Age: Origins and partly wishing I could penetrate Risen's unwelcoming aspects and actually enjoy the game a great deal more than I do.

What seems to be the problem?  Well.  Read on to find out...

You know when children swear because they think it makes them sound grown-up?  And when children smoke because they think it makes them look grown-up?  And when children have sex because they think it makes them act grown-up?  (Obviously, I'm not talking about seven-year-olds here.) Risen does all of these things.  And it really doesn't do anything for the game.  There are needless drugs references; you buy, steal and sell weed and weed reefers to gain cash.  People sit around and constantly smoke enormous joints as thick as their arms and make loud exhaling noises that can probably be heard from about twelve miles away their sonic velocity is so high.

You know I'm not one to shy away from swearing.  Just listen to a podcast or two and you'll find that I'll happily shit and fuck along with the best of them, but there's something about the delivery of bad language on Risen that makes it stick out, as though it's been gaffer-taped on because they've realised that they can't pass the drugs references off as anything else and are trying to make the best of their mature/16 rating.  (The game was banned in Australia, it's worth noting.)  And clearly the scenes involving hookers don't help matters, so go ahead, just crowbar some rude words in, why don't you.

Along with the awkward swearing, the delivery of the voice acting in itself is pretty bumpy.  Some characters' voices are passably well-delivered, but for the most part, the dialogue is pretty shoddy.  It's written perfectly well, but it sounds as if the voice actors have been pulled off of the street and asked to "read this out," given a tenner and sent on their way.  And with names such as Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies and Lena Headey, you'd expect the rest of the voice acting to be of a similar calibre, but it falls on its face and sounds pretty laughable as well as slowing the pace of the game.

Which is yet another down point.  The game meanders lazily through its storyline in such a way as to be almost infuriating.  I find myself actually wanting to pick up my monitor, shake it and yell, "get the fuck on with it, will you!"  Talk to this person, then go and find something.  But before you actually look for it, you have to talk to someone to ask if it's okay to look for it.  Then they give you the option to give whatever it is you're looking for to them instead of the person who originally asked you to go looking for it.  Once you agree to give it to the person guarding the place you need to look for it, you can look for it.  Then you come out, give it to the person you agreed to give it to and then go and find the person who asked you to look for it in the first place and tell them that you found it.  Then you tell them that you gave it to the other person.  Then they get upset and disappear.  It's all very drawn out.  And perhaps this is an attempt at enhanced realism in the RPG, but I'm afraid all it does is put you off.

Combat's exciting though, isn't it!  In Risen, combat is fairly good.  You get spells, different mêlée weapons, ranged weapons and what-have-you and it's a bit of an MMO-style click-a-thon, but it's quite rewarding at the same time.  What weaken's the appeal of combat is that you cannot block, only parry, unless you have a shield.  This means you have to hit the parry button just at the right time in order to fend off attacks.  This is pretty much a hit-and-miss procedure that usually results in you parrying after being hit and stopping your parry just as your opponent goes to hit you again, resulting in another wound to add to your collection.

And unlike, say, Oblivion, enemies aren't levelled to suit your character.  You can, and will, bump into creatures whose defeat is far beyond your capabilites.  And you have to just turn tail and leg it.

On the plus side, though, there is a great storyline, however slowly it unfolds, and your affect on the people around you is quite cleverly implemented.  And the game looks sumptuously good.  The lighting, the textures, the strange little darkening halo around the characters all look great.  It's certainly a splendid-looking game and it's that, and the promise of the epic storytelling involved that keeps me coming back to it.  That and paying full-price; you sort-of begrudge giving up a game you can't pass along to anyone else, having paid £34.99 for it.

The free-roaming feel to the game is also rather nice.  It's got that open-world feel that is so popular in games and makes you really feel integrated into the game world where nothing seems off-limits.  The game is set on an island, so I guess you have the free reign of the whole place and all its denizens.

If you're having difficulty getting into this game, as I am, becoming more and more frustrated by constantly being killed by creatures that look the same as the ones you're fine at killing, then during gameplay, just type in minsky and press enter.  Then hit the tilde key (the one above TAB) and type god and hit enter.  There you go.  That's better, isn't it.  Also check out typing give and then hitting tab, scrolling through all the things you can create in your inventory (put a number after the item to spawn that number of items) and have a great deal more fun in testing mode than you might have playing it straight.  Though it speaks volumes of a game where you have to cheat in order to enjoy it.  And maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance and didn't play it seriously enough, but games are meant to be, above all else, fun.  Risen felt, at times, like an exercise in dedication.