Riding on the success of Gothic - Piranha Bytes’ first title - the German developer has crafted a worthy new IP that provides an enormous amount of depth and scope that any RPG fan will duly appreciate. Unfortunately, Risen is plagued by a number of technical shortcomings that tarnish the overall experience however.

Lacking in polish and attention to detail, Risen still stands up as an absorbing and hugely playable RPG title. The PC version is inarguably superior to its console counterpart, this Xbox 360 iteration feeling somewhat unfinished and unrefined​

Despite those annoying bugs and some short comings, Risen is a pretty solid RPG that deserves at least a place on your shelf. You won’t be done with it any time soon and it’s a pretty big game in terms of things to do and quests, whilst the actual land isn’t massive really it’s still packed with content and should keep you occupied slaying monsters and rescuing dragons from damsels for quite a while.​

I must admit that, for the first few hours playing Risen, I fell into the same trap that the developer apparently did. It's easy to believe that a massive sandbox and a character's freedom of choice make for a fascinating and in-depth RPG. But a couple of hours listening to the dreadful voice acting and expositional dialogue and the cold realisation that maybe the expansive, sandbox-buried RPG has hit a next generation wall sets in.​

I received Risen on the 17th September. The review was embargoed until the 2nd of October which – coincidentally – is the European release date. Indeed, that was the first clue that all was not well.
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Further exploration finds more irregularities. You stumble across Jan next, a friendly local who suggests that for your own good, you should find a better weapon than the club you nabbed from the wreckage on the beach. He makes a good point, so when he moves two feet away from the door and sits down on a bench outside his house, you wander in and take all of his food, drink, herbs and gold. Oh, and a fine sword which you find by picking up his keys and unlocking the chest in his bedroom. He – of course – does nothing other than congratulate you on your find. Just like real life!​

Before describing some of the different avenues of play, I think it's worth noting just how much more user-friendly this game is compared to the studio's previous work. For one thing, you actually get a quest map in this game that marks precisely where your quest giver is and where you're supposed to go, making it much easier to keep track of things once you've taken on a significant amount of responsibility. While I can understand how some of the hardcore RPG gamers who despise direction might not like this kind of thing, you don't have to click over to the quest map if you don't want to. [...]
I'll keep playing for now, and a review will be up as soon as possible. Also, just in case it wasn't clear, this is the PC version of the game I'm playing.​

The thing that annoys me most about Risen is the brazen way it steals ideas from so many better sources and pretends that they are in some way original. After half an hour an experienced RPG-er will likely be suffering from severe gamer deja-vu: chests are hidden and opened exactly as they are in Fable, the item collection and filing is practically the same as in Monster Hunter, dialogue and character interactions are a very poor copy of the system used by Bethesda, the setting has been done a hundred times before and the whole thing ends up feeling like a collection of leftovers. With the performance issues, there is practically nothing to keep you playing beyond an urge to find out how much worse things can get.​