Friday 5 September 2014

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: Risen 3: Titan Lords - Piranha Bytes and Deep Silver

Release Date:15/08/14
Publisher:  Deep Silver

SYNOPSIS:

Piranha Bytes, the creators of Gothic and Risen, return to their origins with a new, classic RPG. Risen 3: Titan Lords pulls the player in to a hand-crafted role-playing world full of rugged charm where every decision changes the course of the story. Risen 3: Titan Lords is set for release in August 2014 for the Xbox 360 games and entertainment system from Microsoft and for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system as well as Windows PC.

The key element of the cult Gothic series as well as Risen is the vivid world and the freedom to explore it. The world of Risen 3: Titan Lords will be diverse, authentic and full of life, providing the player with an authentic, classic RPG experience.

“Like a carpenter with a hand-crafted piece of furniture, we put together the story, the characters and the landscape until it all fits and the player has the possibility to discover things all around the place. You can try out and find things that others might not. Exploration is the key to our game”, says Bjoern Pankratz, Project Lead at Piranha Bytes.

The world of Risen 3 is abandoned by all gods and suffers from the Titan Wars when a new threat rises from the soil. A young warrior is attacked from the shadows and deprived of his soul. He sets off to reclaim what is lost amidst the darkness that is spreading throughout the world. The banned Mages could be powerful allies on his quest. To get their help, he needs to find the Mage sanctuary on Taranis, also known as the Island of Thunder. Protected by the Guardians, the Mages search the mines of Taranis for crystals loaded with magic energy. Will the player join the Guardians to get in contact with the Mages? Or will he choose one of the other guilds in Risen 3 to reach his goals?



REVIEW:

I played Risen 2 in 2010 and whilst there were some problems, I soon fell in love with advancing my character and getting better weaponry and gear so I could charge in and save the fantasy version of the caribean from its foes. Magic, guns and swords come to the fore with each statistic requiring the gamer to work heavily on increasing the skills in order to get further and to be able to handle tougher monsters.

So when I had the chance to rejoin the world in this latest outing, I couldn’t wait to see how the gameplay had advanced as well as how the characters within helped develop the story. As with Piranha Bytes other Risen, this tale works wonderfully well with a crackingly rich story, I loved the characters, I loved the voice acting, yet for me, a number of the issue’s that hit the second outing remained in this.

Firstly the camera, at times would leave the gamer without a view of what they were doing so it made it easier for the monsters/enemies to hit you. It’s easy to miss some of the items and sadly for me, when it came to one quest when I got to it, I’d already visited the area and cleaned it up so I was unable to complete the secondary quest.

In addition to this, the gamer is also at a disadvantage early on with them getting absolutely slaughtered until they up their combat skills, which at that time really makes the game a lot easier. There are skills that I would have liked to be added such as better riposting alongside parrying and I found that magic took a secondary roll to improving these key skills (alongside lockpicking) to any other being more of an after thought.

All round, whilst there are problems, I did have a lot of fun with this game, and whilst it has taken me a lot of time to write the review (due to logging a lot of game time) I always felt it was better to complete rather than write a review part way through like a fair few others which along with the fact that I stuck with it due to fascination as well as fun, should say that it’s worth your gaming time. Great stuff.

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