Publisher Comment “What a nice review..Thankyou “

Back in 2009 Deep Silver Gave us Risen, now they welcome us back to the Risen Universe in Risen 2: Dark Waters. Deep Silver hopes that this time they can improve upon its poor predecessor, have they this time found the treasure we gamers have been looking for, or will it be just another sunken treasure taken down by the gods.

Dark waters continue where the original game left us, battling against the ‘Titans’ with our nameless hero, who continues to sit on his lazy arse drinking rum. The story starts seeing our nameless hero lying on the bed drinking ” Nothing New” while the gathering of the Inquisition is taking place in the fortress to discuss how to best combat the Titans, however the path is blocked, and they have no way to get their equipment and supplies without combating monster summoned by the Titan’s from the sea.

A Guard gets you off your arse, to get you moving, so up you get as the nameless hero with a sword in your hand you set off on your adventure, with your first area to check, the beach. As you patrol the beach looking for survivors you find Patty, an old friend from the Original game “YAY Awesome”. This is where the story starts for the Nameless hero, take up arms as a swash buckling pirate, with main priority find the ultimate weapon to end the Titans viscous attacks and destruction once and for all.

The story itself is a mixture of humour and seriousness which overall breaks that game down rather well. During the story you can almost guarantee you will be talking to a load of rum drinking, totally pissed pirates, add to that you will also get to chat with the inquisition, which you might recall from the original game, and finally the rip off merchants aka the people of the land. Do not expect an easy life, because this game sucks when you first start, everyone hates you till pull yourself away from the bottle rum and actually do some work for them. Get ready to drink even more rum, fight to survive and finally kiss a lot of butt “Reminds me of a typical day in retail or Customer service”. The game starts off slow, it does however pick up pace as your strive throw the story and explore the very first island. I recon there is around 15 to 25 hours of game play to be had here full of fun and frolics mixed with drunken pirates “ A typical day on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp” what more do you want from a game.

Again Risen is not a pure open world game like Skyrim, which IMO lets the game down a little; you will end up exploring several Islands, of course expect to fight monsters from the sea as well as other pirates and inhabitants. Don’t forget you still need kiss the locals butt to gain their loyalty so expect to do quests and more quests for them. Everything you expect in an RPG is here and more as Deep Silver add its own unique spin on everything to add in a little bit of fun.

Guess what? We have a ship “YAY”, now for the bad news is does nothing apart from travel “Please developers make a DLC with some awesome sea battles’ with our ships” ok I said it travels “ Yeh right on auto pilot this sucks”. So what you get is a remote control ship, no constant loading areas across seas and damn loading screens between islands. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I leave that up to you to decide, I can say right now though almost every Island is huge, providing you with some great and unique places to explore and get lost in.

Before I move on, whoever animated these characters need to be shot, they jump like sodden statues and there animation while speaking is to put in just not up to standard, the character also lack facial emotions, which would have been a good thing to add. Ok rant over back to talking about these huge islands that take OMG so god damn long to walk across, on the lighter side, you will find fast travel points “Phew”. A good thing I found now “smile” once I got to a town or a pirates den I found that every NPC was unique, I was also able to get quests from them that would gain me extra rewards. Quests where great, well one was the rest seem to be a bit tedious, best quest “Drinking” the other quests where rescuing or should I say freeing prisoners and slaves, fighting all kinds of creatures to finding treasure.

NPCs also offer services “OK make this an 18 rated game and bring in the whore house & sex” we get services like Buying Rum, general goods, Weapons and equipment and finally training, I forgot to mention there is a crafting system in game but not the greatest system “It’s good enough I guess”.

So I ask myself is the combat any good with me saying this is a combat RPG? Well it’s not as elaborate as Kingdoms of Amalur, and it’s not as boring as Skyrim, its mix of them both I would say, however it’s not perfect. With Risen there are no Classes to choose, this is great, as you are freely allowed to mould your character to your desire “I became Johnny Depp a drunken pirate”. If you do not like melee why not become a mage “Who has ever heard of a pirate mage” that uses Voodoo and dark magic to combat your enemies.

Experience in this game is called Glory; you gain Glory from doing quests, this in turn allows you to spend on five attributes these include Melee (Blades) Boom Boom Sticks (Guns), Cunning (Stealth), Toughness and voodoo(Magic). Each attribute comes with three talents with multiple skills that you are able to learn off NPSs throughout the world.

So what is the game actually like with its presentations, Sound and voice overs are fantastic, the game world is well designed and beautiful, but not next generation as I expect to see on a PC. This game run on my system very well with everything on max “Spec: Intel I7, ATI 6690HD, 16 GB RAMM” Tried the same game on a low end system turned down specs and it still run rather well and was still a good looking game. Do not expect anything special when you are up-close and personal with objects, they do look pixelated and not up to standard, from a distance though everything looks superb. Like I said earlier some of the animations suck and the facial emotions equals zero, the sound track is perfect when jogging along, or when fighting in epic battles.

So overall what do we think of Risen 2: Dark Waters? This is a great little pirate game, but falls short of feeling like a real pirate with a ship to sail the high seas with and battle royal scum and pillage and rob cities and take wenches for the crew “OK a bit over the top there, but this is what I see a pirate to be”. I would have liked Risen to be more of a full open world game where I was able to go anywhere with almost no loading screens, except Deep Silver have given us a Semi-Open world to play in with extremely large islands to explore, with all the elements expected in any RPG these days. You are free to choose what to be as a class which is awesome if you wish to be a drunken lazy arse like me or a pirate mage “That still don’t sound right” the choice is yours. Graphics, well Risen 2 is differently is not the best looking game out there, but it does do its best and get the job done well. The soundtrack is fantastic and the atmospheric sound effects are superb, Voice acting is done well, with some great over the top acting which will make you laugh.

This is a great game, I feel with some DLC to add ship content to make us feel like a real pirate, maybe a few touches to the graphics system to make things look and feel better this game would be great. For now though it’s a great run of the mill RPG that follows the Risen story well and I would recommend any RPG fan to grab this.

If you love this game, then go grab yourself the DLC:

Risen 2 Dark Waters: Treasure Isle DLC: Est £7.95

Embark on a brand new adventure in pursuit of the legendary treasure of Captain Steelbeard. Join Captain Steelbeard’s daughter, Patty, on a journey to an unknown island that offers new environments to explore and many puzzles to solve, treasures to loot and mysteries to unravel. An all-new exclusive legendary item awaits those who have the courage to undertake this quest.

Risen 2 Dark Waters A Pirate’s Clothes DLC: Est £2.49

A set of stylish premium pirate items that includes a hat, boots, trousers, a pistol and a special ring to increase the rate in which the player accumulates experience by 5%. These items will be part of the player’s inventory right from the beginning of the game.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.

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