Risen 2: Dark Waters

Once upon a time, there was a game called Gothic II. Released for the PC in 2002, it featured a massive open world, an interesting story, tons of side quests and a very real sense of exploration and accomplishment, and despite a myriad of  flaws it is firmly settled as one of my all time favorite RPGs. In fact, despite outdated graphics, bad controls, simple combat, and awful voice-acting, I hold Gothic II as a close runner up to the original Fallout games in the “best old-school RPG” category.

For the last 10 years, I’ve watched developer Pirahna Bytes desperately try and fail to recapture the essence of the open-world RPG so beautifully realized in Gothic II. Gothic 3, the sequel I waited for with great anticipation, ended up a beautiful mess- the new graphics engine was so full of bugs and crashes and the gameplay was so repetitive and devoid of inspiration it was difficult to see it as anything but inferior to their previous title. Risen was essentially a reboot of the same game series and failed in similar ways.

Despite Gothic 3 and Risen, I was quivering with excitement when I picked up Risen 2. It’s not only Pirahna Bytes’ newest title but is a pirate-themed RPG as well, an as-of-yet unexplored region of the genre. I put on my nostalgia glasses and prepared to find out if  the third time’s a charm for one of my favorite developers of last decade.

The story goes something like this: there is a war raging on in the world of Risen. Humans have forsaken the ancient Gods and damned them into exile. Now, under siege by great beasts called Titans, humanity finds itself on the verge of extinction. Risen 2 continues the story of a nameless hero’s quest to destroy the Titans and save the world.

There’s more to it than that, but it’s a moot point in the end. This is not a return to form for Pirahna Bytes. It falls prey to all the flaws that ruined their previous titles. Risen 2 is nothing but a mess.

These are the screenshots that the developers don’t want you to see, depicting how the game actually looks versus the touched up image at the top of this review.

First thing I noticed is that the graphics are awful. Textures stretch awkwardly over the terrain; character models are passable at best. This becomes particularly awkward during dialogue as characters’ teeth tend to stand out like the graphics engine was designed in 2004. Landscapes are cluttered and densely packed with foliage that manages to all look the same.  The lighting doesn’t seem to affect the characters on screen half the time. NPCs bump into walls and the animations are the epitome of jerky and unnatural. The first time I saw my hero jump, I literally laughed out loud.

Admittedly some of the backgrounds and cutscenes are pretty enough, but I spent most of the game wondering how anyone could even pass these sub par graphics off as professional in 2012. I’ve seen Minecraft levels with better looks than Risen 2.

Every aspect of the game gets bogged down by being stuck in the middle of a stagnant, static world. Everything seems frozen in time and  there is little you do that noticeably affects the world. Titans are waging war on the mainland, but the mainland always looks exactly the same. Even the impressive backdrop of the port city Caldera, full of flames and molten rock, never changes from the start of the game. Animals, plants, and enemies all spawn in the exact same locations time and time again. No creature seems to move until they come into your line of sight. Sustaining any suspension of disbelief approaches impossible.

The world map I glimpsed at the start of the game looked suitably expansive, even if it was mostly water. “Sailing the seas! How novel an idea for an RPG,” I thought. I pictured guiding my ship along uncharted waters, discovering previously unknown lands, savage natives and treasure galore. Halfway through the game, I realized that there was no naval exploration to be found- the islands you see are the islands you get and the water is just there to fill space.

That could even be alright if the islands themselves weren’t all similar in appearance. (Spoiler: They’re all jungles.) Each island has a confusing mess of a map – paths, caves and ports with barely enough detail to provide assistance. Any real sense of discovery is tempered by the fact that every building and character is related to a quest in some way or another.

Even more frustrating, the vast majority of quests are mandatory for progressing in the game. Everywhere I went, someone whose assistance I needed to continue with the main storyline would tell me to “go help people until I trust you.” Acceptable once, sure, but when I found myself having to seek out and complete just about every side quest offered in order to move on with the game, it began to feel less like fun and more like a chore.

Character dialogue is generic and loaded with bad voice acting.

Mandatory side quests could be acceptable, but I encountered another common problem. When attempting to find NPCs again after gaining enough “trust,” characters sometimes inexplicably move from one location to another. Once they’re gone, they are nearly impossible to locate again. This is because of repetitive graphics and a lack of good direction on the game’s map system.

When an NPC does have the decency to tell you where to find them next, it’s usually in very vague terms- for example, “find me at the bluff of the hill that is nearby the docks,” which is misleading because often the docks on that particular map are completely surrounded by bluffs and hills. “I’ll be hiding out in a cave.” Really? Because last I checked there were seven different unmarked caves scattered across this island. Unfortunately, you’ll be lucky to even get that much guidance out of the people of Risen 2. It is possible to mark quest locations on the map, but many times there was no quest available for the person I was seeking.

Leveling up your character is done via “glory” points, a fancy name for experience. There are five different abilities to spend your points on: firearms, blades, toughness, cunning, and voodoo. Each of these affects a few different stats that cannot be modified directly except through training with other characters. Unfortunately, this training is not only crucial to your success and survival, but also very expensive. It is hard to keep track of who can provide specific skills as well, since the NPCs are prone to moving around unexpectedly.

As a pirate, you’re going to want to seek out your fortune while saving the world. However, there is shockingly little treasure be had in Risen 2. Aside from the rare X-marks-the-spot chest to be dug up, most of your wealth will be amassed via selling useless weapons and items and measly rewards for completing quests. Even then, most booty is just generic artifacts like “Jade Statue” or “Silver Goblet.”

Control is generally awful and unresponsive. Many times I’d have to mash buttons just to interact with an object in front of me or draw my weapon. Worst of all, while aiming a firearm and trying to back away from the enemy, I frequently found myself moving forward. This led to my untimely demise more than a few times.

The combat system is unpolished and borders on being unfair in its difficulty. The ability to dual-wield a bladed weapon and a pistol is a neat idea- one button press is all it takes to brandish your gun, fire a round, and return to your sword. Swordplay itself is a frustrating experience in button mashing and luck. When fighting other human opponents, parries and counters are critical to your success. You can learn to parry and counter via the expensive training described earlier. If you don’t learn those skills early on, you will be limited to mashing the strike button and hoping you can get in enough hits to fell your opponent before they do the same to you.

Combat versus animals and other creatures is even worse. You can’t block their attacks, meaning enemies will sometimes hit you so frequently that it’s impossible to get a swing in or even retreat. Larger, more agile creatures such as jaguars can pounce on top of you, forcing you to mash a button repeatedly to push them off. However, there were quite a few times when I found the controls unresponsive and I was mauled to death. If you’re anything like me, the only way to ensure the safety of the game disc from angry annihilation is to save often.

If there is a positive to be found in Risen 2′s combat system, it’s the ability to pick fights with friendly characters without the risk of dying. These duels can occur at any time and are often spectated by other nearby characters who will cheer you on. If you best your opponent, he will turn a blind eye to any crimes you are going to commit and forgive any you may have already.  I’m like this idea and I think it should be incorporated into more RPGs.

I’m saddened that there is little good to be said about Risen 2. Aside from the interesting setting and story, there’s not a whole lot of fun to be had here. If you do manage to get through the game, there’s really no reason to play through it again. The progression is very linear despite its open world. The exploration is limited and unsatisfying. The poor control makes a wreck of the combat mechanics. The only really redeeming values of Risen 2 are its setting and story. Even the nostalgia invoked in Gothic-series veterans (like myself) will wane quickly.

I think at this point it’s safe to say that developer Pirahna Bytes is no longer capable of what they used to be. Let’s take a moment of silence and mourn the loss.

I can’t really recommend this game to anyone at all. If you’re looking to re-live the glory of Gothic II, play Gothic II. If you’re looking for a decent pirate-themed RPG, I guess you’ll have to keep waiting. If you are in need of a good fantasy RPG that isn’t an Elder Scrolls game, pick up Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning instead. Let Risen 2 quietly slip into the bargain bin where it belongs.

Platform reviewed: PS3
Overall: Even purely as a vehicle for nostalgia, it will be hard to get past all of its problems. Risen 2: Dark Waters tries to be a swashbuckling good time, but in the end it is a wasted effort from developer Pirahna Bytes. Scores 2 out of 10.

Red Johnson’s Chronicles: One Against All – Impressions

Red Johnson is a man with a price on his head. After besting and (needlessly) executing the latest in a long string of bounty hunters sent his way, he decides it’s time to go into hiding and try to piece together why he is being hunted. Red is a private investigator, a man of many words and possibly questionable morality.  He explains his situation in this truly remarkable opening voice over:

“It’s been six months now that a price has been on my head. Twenty-three failed attempts and a few collateral victims. And despite it all, they’re not letting up. They’re sticking to their guns, waiting for my funeral. Not one has given up. No truce! No respite. The troops are motivated. The last ones who tried were real enthusiasts. Trigger happy homicide junkies. Holy men on a crusade of murderous revenge.”

I kid you not, that is an exact quote. Those bounty hunters must be lousy at their job.

Red’s words are remarkable to me because they display a total failure on behalf of the developer in the form of completely inept writing. To top it off, those lines are delivered with the grace and candor of a bored eleven-year-old doing his best private eye impression for a school play. Honestly, words don’t do it justice- I recommend hearing it for yourself.

The game’s graphics are passable but nothing special.

Red Johnson’s Chronicles: One Against All is played in the style of a traditional point-and-click adventure. You have no control over the movement of your character; instead, you move a cursor around to interact with characters and objects. While this approach works for some games, my problems began here. Clicking on items requires pixel-precise cursor movements and I found myself frustrated from the very start. While some adventure games (like The Walking Dead series) can pull it off, this type of interface is better suited to a mouse and keyboard than a controller.

You play as the title character who also narrates the game. As I touched on earlier, the voice acting is truly awful. Red’s dialogue makes Ben Stein’s dull inflection as Ferris Bueller’s history teacher seem genuinely rousing. His lines are delivered flat as cardboard, as if the actor was instructed to simply read the script out loud into the microphone. Other characters don’t fare much better. The worst offender is Red’s friend Saul, a caricature of a black man who speaks and dresses like a pimp from a 1970s blaxploitation film.

That being said, the writing is just as bad as the voice acting. The faux-noir dialogue is painful to behold. Attempts at humor fall flat on their face, like when Red mentions his two brothers named Brown and Black. There are lines scattered throughout the game that are equally as appalling. Phrases like “unwilling to admit the unadmittable,” “not the slightest hint of a smidgen of an ounce of anything,” and my personal favorite, “computers are an inexhaustible source of comprising material” pummeled my ears with their inanity.

No, that’s not a typo up there. Computers could indeed be an inexhaustible source of “compromising” material, but “comprising” material? Come on guys, it’s like you’re not even trying.

Developer Lexis Numerique is based in France so it is possible that these linguistic gaffes are the result of shoddy translation. Besides, script quality and voice acting can be overcome by good gameplay, so I brushed it off and moved forward. It’s an adventure game, after all, not a movie.

I spent no less than twenty minutes spinning this box around.

Sadly, the puzzles I encountered are as baffling and meaningless as the worst that the genre has to offer. Back in the 90s, developers and gamers alike thought that convoluted puzzles were “thought-provoking” and “artistic.” Series like Myst and Resident Evil took this to extremes: you search for arbitrary items like medallions to place into an arbitrary object like a statue in order to open a lock in a different area and so on. This sort of crap was seemingly mandatory in any adventure game, be it survival horror-themed or the more traditional point-and-click.

One Against All‘s puzzles harken back to the days when developers didn’t think puzzles needed even an iota of believability in the context of the game world. One involved unlocking a box given to Red as he sits in a bar drinking a beer. There was a padlock with four digits requiring an unknown combination. I manipulated that box for 20 minutes, rotating it in all directions. I purchased useless clues from my pimp friend. The location of the combo? On the back side of the box, there was a label with a scrawl across it that concealed the necessary digits. I found the exact angle I needed to look at it from to see the code by sheer luck . Even then, it was nearly impossible to make out what it said.

Another such puzzle involved a drawing on a desk that contained clues to the password I needed for a computer. Like a schizophrenic’s idea of a matching game, I had to place squares of paper on very specific places of the drawing. After that, I was staring at a series of digits that…told me absolutely nothing about the password. I even consulted the glorious cheat sheet that is the internet to no avail. I found a lot of people infuriated by the puzzle, but not one who had the solution.

WHAT…DOES…IT…MEAN?!

At this point, I gave up.

Primarily known for their educational titles on the PC, Lexis Numerique has been branching out into console games in recent times. Here’s my advice to their team: fire your staff. Replace them with competent people who have actually played video games from the last five years and for God’s sake, hire translators that aren’t bargain priced.  As far as this game goes, I think it’s best summed up with another quote from the protagonist:

“It’s a frickin’ s**t trap.”

Stay far away.

Platform reviewed: PS3
Impression: With laughably bad acting, cringe-worthy dialogue, and maddening puzzles, Red Johnson’s Chronicles: One Against All should be avoided at all costs. You’ve been warned.

Sleeping Dogs – Impressions

It seems like a typical day in the office for triad enforcer Wei Shen at the start of Sleeping Dogs. Meet up with your boss, get assigned to take care of a drug territory dispute, move out. Unfortunately, the police aren’t so appreciative of your talents. You’re arrested, interrogated and threatened with the worst the Hong Kong PD can throw at you before your real boss bursts in and tells the detective the truth: you’re not a triad enforcer. You’re an undercover officer from San Francisco assigned to infiltrate and bring down the Hong Kong gang Sun On Lee.

Granted, it’s a bit cliche, but stellar voice acting and great dialog elevates Sleeping Dogs above the standards of the genre. Sleeping Dogs holds a very dark, somber tone, leaving little room for camp. The tongue-in-cheek nature that Grand Theft Auto 3 brought to this type of game is nowhere to be found.

You can always grab a hostage in a tight spot.

It’s hard to say a lot about Sleeping Dogs because the demo only encompasses two short missions. That being said, I was thoroughly impressed. Thirty minutes of gameplay was long enough to show off all the things developers United Front Studios and Square Enix London got right. Every part of the game reeks of style and panache. The world of the demo is so polished that I wonder if they can keep it up throughout the full game.

The Hong Kong that I witnessed in Sleeping Dogs is a gritty, vibrant, colorful place. The environment has more of an Assassin’s Creed feeling than GTA – the camera is closer and more personal, the perspective and scale of the city is more proper. Movement is fluid and realistic. Free-running over obstructions in your path is seamlessly integrated. Bumping into people while walking elicits an appropriate response; run into someone and risk getting tripped up and losing your momentum.

FATALITY.

The combat mechanics are top-rate as well. Hand to hand combat utilizes an intricate system of strikes, counters, and grapples, reminiscent of Arkham City. Enemies can be grabbed and thrown into the environment for some exciting (and violent) take downs. Some of the kills I accomplished reminded me of Madworld or Mortal Kombat fatalities from back in the day- impaling foes on meat hooks, shredding their face with fan blades, and so on. Everywhere I looked there were more options for such feats. Weapons are available as well, and the knife fighting I engaged in was particularly brutal and satisfying.

Since the demo was so short, I don’t have much else to offer. I can’t comment on the driving aspects because they were omitted from the demo completely. I can only hope the rest of the game stacks up.

I’m certainly going to be picking up a copy myself.

Platform reviewed: PS3
Impression: Between the amazing combat, stylish world and gritty dialogue, Sleeping Dogs might just have it all. Here’s hoping the game lives up to the demo.

Papo & Yo – Impressions

Shifting walls, surreal urban landscapes, and glyphs that alter reality sounds like a pretty solid concept for a game. Papo & Yo was exciting to read about: a game about the dream world of a scared child with an abusive father. Not the master of subtlety, the game’s premise involves you, Quico the child, and his monster (a sweet, caring giant with a nasty addiction to alcoh- er, poisonous frogs) adventuring through the world. Once the monster gets ahold of a frog, he eats it and immediately changes into a fireball of rage directed straight at you.

This sounds good on paper, but when I played the demo I was blown away by all the wrong things. Technical issues are everywhere- the world looks good from afar, but the textures are grainy and low-res, and the fog filter looks like it came from Half-Life 2. Jumping and moving is an awkward and clumsy affair. I fell through the environment once. I got hung up on the terrain many times. It felt like I was playing a low-quality PS2 game, not a PS3 exclusive.

To be honest, I was so frustrated that I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the demo my first time through. I did finish it eventually, and guess what? The moment came when I saw the shadow of Monster and I prepared myself…only to have the demo end. Maybe that’s good marketing to some, but that’s not going to convince me to purchase what appears to be a mediocre game. I’m sure there is potential for a quality emotional experience here, but the technical aspects are not looking so good.

Platform reviewed: PS3
First Impression: Papo & Yo might overcome its technical problems, but left a poor impression.