Risen 2: Dark Waters
Risen 2 is a third person open world action roleplaying game made by Piranha Bytes, the team that gave us the Gothic games and of course the first Risen game. It’s hard to talk about Risen 2 without referring to their previous games, which I’ll call ‘PB games’ for short.
To summarize: Risen 2 sometimes feels like a ‘PB game lite’ but it’s certainly not completely dumbed down from previous PB games. The atmosphere and the ‘feel’ of the PB games is there, so I’ll enjoy playing this game more than I would 9 out of 10 similar games. The fact that melee combat is almost as bad as it was in Gothic 3 and the absence of ‘real’ magic are the only two problems that certainly knock off some points in the final score for Risen 2.
– Real player with 74.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates RPG Games.
It is very difficult to recommend this game because depending on your personal preferences, it can either be a wealth of unpleasantness or it can, as I have in the end perceived it, be a gem of extraordinary substance and enjoyment although in a wierd way.
Warning: This will be quite a lenghty review where I try to outline in detail the great drawbacks of the game as well as the great features about it.
First off, I will state all of the unpleasant aspects of this game and if anything I mention seems unacceptable, better to stay away from it as it is a game that not everyone will enjoy and it can be difficult to grasp.
– Real player with 69.2 hrs in game
Abandon Ship
Version 0.5.something…
It’s… Okay.
A lot of it is very comfortable fun. You find yourself a combat, you watch your little micro managed crew and you snot your enemy. It’s fun in a non challenging sense. You buy 6 crew as quickly as possible, keep them alive with a bit of micro management and use the play style that amuses you most at the time. Simple really. Learning curve is a bit steep at the start but flattens out after a few combats.
The rest of the game at this stage of it’s release? Yeah…
– Real player with 57.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates Naval Games.
So the first major update hit, Treasures of the Deep, it wasn’t as big of a shift as compared to pre-release builds versus the first EA build. The update itself is not an expansion per say, but more of a refinement to what we already had, aside the two new mechanics that count, you could say that there are more, but it boils down to just two major ones(more on that later).
Here’s the run down of the refinement from when I last edited the review:
-Improved fps on not so amazing computers
-Plenty of bug fixes
– Real player with 48.8 hrs in game
Cursed Lands
An outstanding VN-RPG-quest crossover
I was expecting another bland, unnecessarily dragged out visual novel with uninspired, repetitive missions, but I was taken for a real treat here—kept replaying with different initial conditions (race, job, supporting character branching choice) over and over, enjoying every single play.
Visual Novel (VN) perspective: Story branching is rich and, as general VN WinterWolves titles go, you have an almost immediate option to go back—typically less than half a minute in gameplay, couple minutes or hours in the game world—to the last choice and change it to study other outcomes. I like this unique branching feature—it is like a quick time machine, or a very smooth and synoptic reload action that permits me to change my choice without having to repeat a known portion of play and grind once again.
– Real player with 132.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates RPG Games.
I bought this game on sale, and I’m glad I did, it wasn’t worth the full price. I bought it because it was created by the same team who did Loren Amazon Princess, a game I loved. It’s unfortunate then, that this game is average at best. There are a few problems I have with this game that I feel affected my enjoyment of the game:
1. Characters/Romance
This is the big one, so i’m putting it first. The characters all had great introductions, and are really interesting. Unfortunately, the game screws this up deeply as it progresses. You don’t get to chose when to talk to the characters, their icon’s pop up when the game decides it’s time for their event to start, so you never truly get to know these characters beyond their surface introduction. The game prides itself on giving you romance options, and even advertises that you can trigger more then one romance scene. It isn’t hard, it’s like the game WANTS you to be a serial skirt chaser, and even when you do trigger these scenes, there’s no build up. Characters will spontaneously confess their feeling for you, claiming they always felt something for you. Your character will reply in kind, but you know this is false. Your POV character never felt anything of the sort, their lying.
– Real player with 41.7 hrs in game
Risen 3 - Titan Lords
Risen 3 is a third person open world action roleplaying game made by Piranha Bytes, the team that gave us the Gothic games and of course the first two Risen games. It’s hard to talk about Risen 3 without referring to the previous games, which I’ll call ‘PB games’ for short.
To summarize: Risen 3 is definitely a step up from Risen 2 but all in all, it is probably still a game that only fans of PB games will love and a game that only fans of the genre may learn to like.
To talk about this game more in-depth, I’ll take the list I used for my reviews of ‘Risen’ and ‘Risen 2’.
– Real player with 94.2 hrs in game
This is a long review, so just read the bottom paragraph for a simple summary of my thoughts.
It surprises me that the general consensus for this game is worse than Risen 2: Dark Waters. To be fair, if you hated Risen 2, there likely are not enough redeeming factors about the end of the trilogy to be worth your while. But nevertheless, some substantial improvements to the overall experience have made this a promising step in the right direction for Piranha Bytes as a developer.
Risen 2: Dark Waters was ultimately a failure as an open world, engrossing RPG. It was extremely shallow, overall having one of their smallest and most lackluster world designs to date, with most of the islands consisting of winding pathways with few interesting landmarks leading between major locations. These locations were greatly devoid of life, as the characters were as dull and two-dimensional as wooden boards. The combat wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen in a game, but it took forever to get the necessary skills to stay on top of combat, and by then you just got used to button mashing between prayers. Beyond combat, half the skills in the game were worthless or used in only scripted situations that were easy enough to do without.
– Real player with 84.7 hrs in game
Endless Voyage / 无尽航线
Changed review from Thumbs Up to Thumbs Down.
2.4/5 Card battler. Fantasy with guns and bombs. This would be a pretty great game if it didn’t have language errors in the UI and didn’t have the bugs. The default language is Mandarin and it’s a wiitel complicated to get to an English UI in this game.
The Good:
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B-to-A quality card battler
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Pretty good graphics, cute.
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Decent cards and mechanics
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Value: I got this for $10 and it’s a fine game for 10 USD.
The Bad:
- The game’s tutorials are terrible. If one makes single mistake, you have to replay a dozen stupid battles. That’s not a tutorial, that’s just punishment.
– Real player with 210.1 hrs in game
These are the fun stuff:
1. The idea of building a"squad" is fun. Some combos are fun to execute.
2. Decent stage design. You always get 3 options, which gives flexibility in how you play the game.
3. Certain builds are fun.
These are the issues:
1. Once in a while resolution will be messed up and fixing it take eternity.
2. Game never updates. No new cards/characters/modes being added ever since I purchased this game.
3. Game is fun at the beginning, but once you reach higher levels, you will realize that there are only one or two playable builds. Other build will either become frustratingly bad with higher enemy HP or hard stuck on certain types of enemies.
– Real player with 105.2 hrs in game
Gothic II: Gold Edition
The Gothic series and Gothic 2 (w/ addon) has a cult following in both Germany as well as Eastern Europe. Developed by a tiny indie studio it featured absolutely fantastic storytelling in a fantasy world without any of the usual high fantasy bullcrap. The entire Gothic series is low Fantasy, similar to the Witcher series, but not as grim. What makes Gothic 2 really shine, isn’t grittyness, but roughness. It is an unique RPG in the way that there is a difference between knocking someone out and actually killing them, meaning that bashing in a few heads is a viable strategy for many quests, without actually having to become a mass murderer. This allows for very intricate quest design and many memorable moments. It also spoils the inner child in me when I once again have the ability to verbally announce that the player character is going to plant his fist into the face of someone and most of the time, for good reason.
– Real player with 342.1 hrs in game
With most of the games what you see is what you get. But this isn’t the case. Gothic is a great game but Gothic 2 takes it on a whole new level. The amount of content, creativity and how much work the devs put into it is amazing. Another reminder that quality world building is important in games. Majority of devs don’t realize that having shit world design is a gamebreaker, so they just copy and paste same locations in a huge but empy world, make quests with obvious outcomes and no variety and dumb everything down. With this game though the bar was set so high that the devs from PB never managed to get close again. And likely they never will after Risen\Elex.
– Real player with 196.4 hrs in game
Historic Fighters
This was a really fun game, really enjoyed it! I love historical themes.
– Real player with 0.6 hrs in game