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There is something about a hardcore PC RPG title that really sets me in a good mood.  The idea that you don’t just kill beasts for the kill, but also to provide you sustenance in the form of food to regenerate health feels right in an RPG.  Or the idea that you have to mine ore and gold along with buying sword blanks to create your own weapons is fitting in a hardcore PC RPG title.  RISEN fits all of these hardcore PC RPG traits, however, I am not playing RISEN on the PC.  I am playing it on the Xbox 360, and while I did enjoy the title, most will probably want to pass up this title, because it is such a hardcore experience that does not fit into the hardcore audience.  It is not a bad title, but a title that never slots in with the platform that it is being played on.

Developer Piranha Bytes has done a great job creating a new old school RPG experience that creates logical uses for all of its mechanics.  Your character needs to find a frying pan in order to cook his food to keep up his heath meter.  You have the chance to partake in the use of mood altering drugs to make yourself feel good, and to regain mana.  You even go through the mundane task of mining and crafting to build some of the more exotic weapons in the RISEN universe.  Hell, you can even enjoy the company of less than reputable women while walking through the world.  These activities add a sense of a world that is alive and moving around you.

All of these activities are great for a hardcore PC RPG experience, but on the console, something is lost in the translation.  More times than not, I got lost in the numerous control mechanics that were needed to bring a full keyboard control set over to a 10 button controller.  I ended up missing attack sequences due to forgetting which keys were used for attack and parry.  It also did not help that I played through the first 8 hours of the game without finding one piece of armor for my character, which leads to you dying several times over just trying to get an understanding of the island of Faranga.

The story is well designed, as you have been left stranded on the island of Faranga after your ship is destroyed at sea.  However, this is not the island paradise that might be found in the movie Paradise, or The Blue Lagoon, as two warring factions are embedded in a struggle for dominance over relic temples that have raised from the ground, hence the game’s title, RISEN.  Why in caps?  I don’t know, but I assume that the developer wanted to put a lot of stress on the idea of how important the temple ruins are to the island inhabitants.  Through your journey, you are presented with three different factions vying from control of the temples, Don Esteban and his band of mercenaries, the Inquisitors who are reminiscent of Inquisition officers of the Spanish church in the 1400’s.  You also have a faction of Mages who originally protected the island temples before either faction arrived on the island.

RISEN does offer players a voluminous amount of quests to play through for all the factions, and the quests are rather interesting, with some having no good outcome no matter how hard you try.  These grey moral choices add a lot of the game, and I like the idea of any game that does not present choices in black and white.  The choices make you think that you have to choose the best option to fit your path through the game, offending at least one person in the process.

RISEN will never tax your Xbox 360 graphically at any time.  I mean some of the creature designs are interesting, but the human inhabitants all look rather bland and lifeless.  I mean some of the human characters feel like old school cartoon characters with beady black dots for eyes instead of any kind of realism.  All that was missing were black x’s over the eyes when you killed a person.  The island is also rather bland in its environments.  Nothing ever stands out as you travel through the distinct locales.  I am not asking for Crysis-like detail in my RPG, but I want to at least have surroundings that are somewhat interesting to travel through.  Many times I was lost in my journey, having to refer to my map due to the sameness of my surroundings.

Combat is solid, when you finally get your head wrapped around the control scheme.  RISIN is not a game where you can just constantly hit the attack button.  Counter and parry is the key to survival.  If you wish to hack and slash your way to success, you will find yourself reloading at a brisk pace.  As I learned to grasp the combat system, I relished each battle, dodging and parrying my way to supreme victory over and over again.  The combat rewards you for learning to block properly, making quick attacks and then defending your position, looking for the next opening.  That said the weapons of battle end up boring you to tears in the beginning, as again, you have to wait many hours before you start to get some quality instruments of killing.  Crafting is a necessity, not a causal affair.  If you do not take the time to make some weapons, prepare for a far longer journey.

Another issue that hampers RISEN on the Xbox 360 is its stability.  A handful of times on the console, I had the game completely lock up to the point of having to turn off the system.  I also felt that the controls dragged a bit on screen in comparison to my actions on the control pad.  This could be more of the slow pacing of combat, but I never felt that RISEN was snapping to my control pushes.  I think that several of my losses in combat were more due to control lag than my slow reactions.  The auto-saving seemed a bit inconsistent at times as well.  I never got a good sense of when auto-saving was occurring.   Sometimes, it happens during scene transitions, but other times it did not.  It seemed like it was based on a timer, which would not be so bad, but when a hardcore RPG title only gives you three save slots on top of the auto-save, it needs to happen more often.  Either that or you need a lot more save slots. 

RISEN is an enjoyable game if you are willing to be patient and put in a lot of time questing, cooking, foraging and crafting.  The payoff in your success in these items will reward you with a much more enjoyable experience.  However, I feel that most Xbox 360 owners will not want to take the time to learn the nuances of RISEN, and in return will never learn to enjoy the game.  While RISEN makes for a solid PC RPG experience, it never rises above mild curiosity on the console.  It is a solid effort by the team at Piranha Bytes and their porting team, but in the end, RISEN is an experience best suited in the comfort of your computer chair.  By no means is RISEN a bad game, but just a game that never learns to be comfortable in its console confines.  RISEN gets 3 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out RISEN and other Xbox 360 reviews at Test Freaks.