Gameplay Monthly: Risen (PC) Review

Risen is the newest RPG by the German company Piranha Bytes. It shares many similarities with the company's previous titles, the Gothic series of games, especially Gothic 2, but it lacks some of their depth. Their last game, Gothic 3, was very ambitious and large in scope, featuring a huge world, open for exploration from the get go with a lot of cities and factions and tons of quests. It was however plagued by a lot of bugs, lousy performance even at high end computers and an awkward combat system. It seems like this time the company's main focus was to make a much more polished, smaller scope game. One could say that some things were simplified, compared to the Gothic games, to cater to more casual gamers as the game was released for XBOX360 as well. B/A+