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Thanks to the wonders of Gamefly I get to try games I would never buy for full price every once in a while. My latest pick was Risen, a third person action/adventure that plays like the bastard brother of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Fable and Dragon Age. You explore the environment hacking and slashing, picking up items, learning magic spells, equipping new weapons and armor. All of this is wrapped up in a story that has just about every cliche you expect from this genre.
Now, before you go calling this a review just understand that I only spent thirty minutes with this game. Why? Well, because even though it is actually surprisingly fun it is also awful clunky and not exceedingly pretty.
Do you want a list of problems? Ok, I will give you one.
1. The camera controls are too fast and there is no option to set the speed.
2. The words are too small on the screen.
3. There is no lock-on feature.
4. Animations are stiff.
5. Dialog is also stiff, but is also so brief that it feels like it barely exists.
6. It feels like they barely even tried to add in a story.
7. The environment feels like someone tried to Frankenstein linear environments together with stitches.
Still, despite all of the mounting flaws I discovered during my brief time with the game, I felt like the game would be worth exploring more… if there weren't so many better games out at the moment. If they had priced this game at $20 like Deadly Premonition then I would say go for it, but even in that case I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone has much better choices of how to spend their time right now. This game seemed 100% minimally adequate.
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