Yeah, they made Mara way too easy, but I suspect that might have been a kneejerk reaction from PB due to people complaining about the end boss in Risen 1.
Well, I certainly agree with this.
I just finished the game. All in all, a very fun and entertaining game. I am glad I went the Voodoo route as that made the game much more interesting. I think the world design is still PB's greatest strength as exploring felt useful. I did think many times that climbing from GI and GII were missing. Those huge cliffs looked like they would be great to climb to find hidden treasure, but now, the climbing was too scripted. See flat-climbing surface, climb, repeat. It felt too easy to find those places. I still remember trying to find alternatives way into Khorinis in GII
Combat for me was the weakest point with all the rolling around and if I didn't have companions I would probably have stopped playing. I didn't feel too much satisfaction with fighting other than being able to kill sand devils in two hits rather than 20 at the the end of the game.
I think some quests were really fun like taking over Mauregato and making him testify to his own treason
I still think that PB are trying to increase world size too much which decreases some of the content quality. I would have preferred seeing some people more and there was no need really to have so many different NPCs. For example, I think that Booze sounded like a fun character, but other than coming back for a rum delivery, there was very little interaction with an interesting character from the first real island.
Same with some people from the Inquisition.
One thing I certainly did notice as a great positive to me was that there were very few fetch quests. GIII was littered with them and Risen had a few too many for its size. Many quests were interesting and provided some kind of subplot. I did think that if they had chosen a slightly smaller gamesize, they could have made some quests even more interesting.
As I said above, it was a very fun game, although it had some things which could have been better (as always).
Certainly worth a try and I would say that it's even worth persevering if you dislike the combat mechanics.
A few issues to point out for any future players:
- Some treasure chests disappear sometimes after digging them up, so I recommend quicksaving before digging
- It seems the Ritual Knife does not always work as I could not gather some critical Voodoo trophies like Jaguar Hearts. I recommend simply inserting via console command a couple or buying from the merchants
- There is a recipe missing for the Leather Oil, you should be alright without it, so not really an issue, but not worth travelling all around trying to find it
Finally, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped on this thread.
