Risen 3: Titan Lords review

For a game that at least partly feels like an apology for Risen 2, Titan Lords goes out of its way to be hard to like. As it begins, you’re stuck in the middle of a badly animated battle as a pirate who had better be good at drinking rum because his sword-skills are terrible, fighting a ghost pirate whose graphics do indeed suggest that he died some time in 2002. Then you wake up, discover that your sister, another pirate, is dressed like she’s going to a costume party with the theme “What The Hell Do You Think You’re Wearing?!”, and sent with her boobs and also the rest of her into a crap temple of traps to discover that the bad combat wasn’t a bad dream but is actually reality… and then you die. Well, that was easy!

This being an RPG though, death is merely a plot point. Returning as a soulless husk-to-be and with a wiped skill sheet, it’s to a reasonably open world where the quest to not completely become a corpse can be done at your own direction. At this point, things do improve, as you get several islands to explore and a fair amount of freedom to do so, in quests and allegiances and an interesting levelling system where XP (“Glory”) pays for attributes and then trainers turn them into skills like Distilling and Sneakery and Hitting Things Better With Swords. It’s hard to fight the feeling though that all this has been done better before, not least because it absolutely has – especially stepping out of the genre with Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.

Risen 3 is a great example of a game with mostly poor content, but lots of it. Quests are everywhere, opportunities to earn XP are everywhere, and everywhere you go there’s characters and chances to sit through a script full of f-bombs and witless snark and toe-curlingly stereotypical natives. It’s not all bad, not at all, but it’s never more than a big pile of stuff and objectives all thrown into a big fan to see what sticks, but not really caring too much what hits the floor. An early diversion for instance is a totally optional bit of revenge on someone who betrayed you courtesy of a voodoo doll that lets you take over a tough native and make the guy strip to his pants and dance, but just as often quests are bland “Kill 3 Whatevers” or “Collect 5 Doodads” jobs where you don’t officially get the quest until hours later and everyone is left awkwardly muttering “Well. Well, okay then… I guess.”

This wouldn’t be so bad if the combat wasn’t so poor. It’s action RPG style, built on timing and dodging, but with such long animations and such uncontrolled targetting and dodging and being knocked down by enemies that almost always show up in groups of at least three that it’s little but constant frustration for several hours. A while in you get to choose a flavour of magic by joining one of three factions, but that’s about the time that Risen hits the usual action RPG problem that you’ve likely levelled up and got the timing down to the point that the enemies aren’t much of a challenge any more, as well as being able to afford enough instant-healing rum to drink past any challenge, and have worked out that there’s no point going out with anyone except the healer, Bones, for his regular free top-ups in combat. It’s not simply inferior to the likes of The Witcher 2, but other lower tier RPGs like Bound By Flame, with no sense of the rhythm of punch that makes this style satisfying. I was disappointed too when on finally unlocking magic – Voodoo Pirate class, because *of course* – it only came with the option to buy spells for jade I didn’t have, and the cheapest on offer was “Parrot Flight: Turns You Into A Parrot.” This is not how the Ghost Pirate LeChuck got his rep.

Risen 3 does drag a few points back with its general flow, with objectives that involve travelling between the various islands, a few individual diversions like sea battles that you don’t get a choice about but are at least warned about, and interesting plot elements like the regular trips into the underworld when sleeping. It loses many of them soon after though, with characters from Risen 2 reappearing without any real introduction, and the initially pacey and promising plot all too quickly just turning into a To Do list with far more potential than it ever shows any real interest in achieving. It’s a game where a character urges you to hurry for the sake of your immortal soul, only to more or less in the same breath suggest a random detour for some general hero-work, and where nobody ever seems quite concerned enough that hellbeasts are exploding out of the ground. Really, it’s more an annoyance, with your crew barely taking a moment for a “Oh, you’re back.” and your own sister refusing to join her newly returned brother in his quest to save both his soul and the world until he upgrades his borrowed sloop to a real ship. After all, she has standards. Just no sense of fashion.

The whole experience isn’t awful, just thoroughly uninspiring; a box of biscuits where some are moldy and all are digestive. It’s fun to be a pirate, but it’s far, far more fun elsewhere, with Risen 3 once again struggling and failing to rise above anything but its own mediocrity.