Risen 3 - Titan Lords Reviews

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8/10

It`s a decent game. I dont get why people are going so harsh on it

Pirate theme is good. The game has good ideas but it is so clunky, combat is so clunky and stupid. Good ideas gets lost in the bad...a lot of bad mechanics etc etc.... get it on sale, nostalgic rpg. Had fun with this but towards the end, it was really frustrating...

Judging by the other reviews, I'd say that if you enjoyed Risen 2 you're likely to enjoy Risen 3 too, but that wasn't the case for me. Risen 2 was already a step back compared to Risen 1 imo, Risen 3 makes further steps back to the point I'd say it shares way too little with the first game and what made me love it. The pillars that made me really enjoy Risen 1 were: immersive settlements that feel alive and grounded, a very good progression system that always asks for more power and gold, and the excellent exploration that is built on the progression design and both the intrisic and extrinsic motivation to explore. First of all: Risen 3 lost those immersive settlements, which here are basically just hubs where to get quests. Then there's the impactless progression, as you never really feel like you need to go out of your way to get more power, you never hit those walls Risen 1 and Gothic 1-2 used to put you against, this takes that intrinsic motivation out of exploring and makes the already dull and simple combat even less rewarding. As said the lack of meaningful and impactful progression made exploring worse for me, but it's also because the level design is really not that interesting. Risen 3 islands, while a bit more diversified compared to Risen 2, felt dull compared to the compact and vertical level design of Faranga. You're also given similar spells to explore like transforming into a parrot to fly (R1 had levitation) or using a monkey to get through small areas (R1 had the nautilus), the issue here is that they want you to see these as "tools" when they are simply "keys" instead. The difference is pretty simple: a key only opens a door, while a tool can be used more creatively; the parrot allows you to fly, but only to locations the developers wanted you to reach, there's plenty invisible walls you'll find if you try to get creative. Story is very barebone, while story was never the core of the Risen 1 exeprience, in this case it feels almost absent and what is there isn't good: 80% of the game is simply "get stronger to defeat x", the rest 20% is "do fetch quests to defeat the villain", there's really no overarching narrative and the writing is never deeper than puddle. There's also some sort of cheap and impactless plot-twist that gets thrown at you without a proper set up, meant nothing to me. Lore wasn't one of Risen 1 pillars imo as it wasn't very deep or complex, but it helped giving the world some flavor and make it more grounded and believable, Risen 3 just doesn't seem to care about anything enstablished before it and does nothing to expand it. Also, it visually doesn't look good to me, there's something wrong, just look how worse Patty's model look compared to R2. Idk... I feel like even Risen 1 looks better despite having lower texture resolution and polygons, I don't know if the issue is the art direction, that something went wrong on the technical side (keep in mind that Dragon Age Inquisition released the same year), or both.

This game is clunky, it has bad story and the tutorials and dialogues makes me feel like a freshly spawned toddler. Worst of the trilogy in my opinion, play the first, then the second, then stop.