Risen - Review @ PC Gameplay

Story wise Piranha Bytes turned back to the formula of the first two Gothic-games. The game is made into four chapters, you're to interact with a wide range of well developed character and many decisions are to be made. The choice of faction has a huge amount of influence since every faction has specific quests which influences the story. Quests are varied and score higher than average on originality. They are offered by characters with depth and often give an insight in an interesting side-story, even if you only have to pick up and item. Even this last type of quest is interesting because the developers put a lot of traps in the many different temples where you have to utilize the various skill of your character. If you're standing in a dungeon in front of a locked gate you can use telekinesis to open the gate using the switch on the other side, you can levitate over the gate or transform into a nautilus and crawl through a hole in the wall.[...]
BYE BYE BUGS
Enough praise for now. We still want to find out if there are bugs, the most damaging to the Gothic-series and especially Gothic 3. A bugless game is nearly impossible for a non-linear RPG, but Gothic 3 seemed to be going for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. But people at Piranha Bytes seemed to have found a good bug spray, although the absence of JoWood, king of premature software, might also have been a factor. I did notice some minor bug. The main character knows things he shouldn't know and sometimes finds items belonging to a quests that hasn't began yet. None of these bugs cause big problems, crashes of other discomfort.
We have come to the conclusion that Risen became the game Gothic 3 should have been. These are no (big) bugs, the story is compelling, the combat tactical and thye quests are part of a fascinating world. Add a very intuitive interface and an audiovisual presentation which gives a great feel and you have a game you can spent several dozen of hours playing.[...]
87 out of 100

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But people at Piranha Bytes seemed to have found a good bug spray, although the absence of JoWood, king of premature software, might also have been a factor.

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Gorath said:

Let's not discuss this again. Nobody here can know what happened back then.

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