I think I just figured out Risen's swordfighting system (axe and staff fighting probably work along the same lines), after over 15 hours in the game. Some of you might know this already, but probably not everyone, as I saw a bunch of comments online before from people who seem baffled by the combat and/or use cheap exploits like our friend earlier in the thread with his power attack from distance bs.
Nothing like that, I believe I just completely understood how it's supposed to be used by the devs, and almost instantaneously went from a so-so fighter (50/50 or worse winning or getting ass kicked) to pretty much master at my level of NPCs. My issue was that I went into it with a Gothic mindset, using my experience from Gothic 1/2 to try to play melee combat the same way. In Gothics, you would try to parry the enemy humanoid with sharp timing and then quickly counterattack, before readying yourself for another parry/counterattack. The problem was, if you remember Gothics, NPCs sometimes attacked VERY FAST without a lot of tells, and were also fairly unpredictable sometimes, delaying their attack or attacking some number of times in a row. I think for most of us, the solution to that was to subconsciously cheat a little, and recognize each NPC's pattern to some degree after meeting them a few times, and knowing in advance how many times to parry in a row. It was still a cool combat system, but that was a bit of a flaw.
Anyways, so I went into Risen with the same mindset, and tried to parry with timing and then counter-attack after the other guy is helpless (from a proper parry). But in Risen, this was even more of a problem than in Gothics, because humanoids are really tricky with their attack timing. They will fake you out quite frequently, delaying attack when it seems like they will strike, or moving side to side to confuse you before unleashing a cobra-quick strike. So predicting when the attack comes to the degree that the parry requires is tricky business, and that's why I was a mediocre fighter, winning when I guessed right, but often losing when the NPC delayed to get my parry out of the way, and then struck me afterwards.
Today, as I was fighting in the Bandit Camp arena against the other fighters, I finally got it. The system is actually quite different from Gothic 1/2 in this regard. After getting level 2 in swordfighting, your parries, instead of being a static defensive move, become a minor circular attack, so even if you miss the parry, you can strike the enemy for a small amount of damage. But what's important, what I missed before, is that being circular moves, you can actually string parries together the same way as you do with attacks. So if you right mouse click to parry, and then click again very quickly, you will do a 2nd parry very fast that continues from your first parry, and then the third, and so on. On top of that, by doing these circular parries, you are actually building up body/weapon momentum, so the kind of attack you perform after successful parrying someone changes. If you attack after parrying once, you do the 1st regular attack, a simple slash. After doing 2 parries in a row and then attacking, you perform a more powerful sideways round-slash for much more damage. And if you string together 3 parries in a row, the attack will be a massively damaging overhead blow.
But so you don't think it's skill-less and you just spam parries, it doesn't work that way. If you try spamming parries, the NPCs will easily attack in between them (remember for a parry to be successful, it has to be timed exactly when the NPC attack comes), and do massive damage to you while you are doing minor damage to them with the parry offensive component. So the way the system is actually meant to work, you still try to anticipate when the NPC will attack, and throw out a parry. If they do indeed attack, you ve got yourself a counter-parry and can hit them while they are helpless. But, if they just tricked you, and aren't attacking, you now have a small window to perform a 2nd parry in the parry combo, and if it succeeds, do a more powerful counter-attack. If it fails again, you have the same small window to perform a 3rd parry and so on. So you still have to time things, and to anticipate the NPCs attacks, but it no longer has to be 100% exact, because if you messed up because the NPC is being tricky, you can follow up with subsequent parries for when they finally do strike.
Anyways, maybe this is way too much text for what might be obvious to most people, but I saw a lot of confusion about this online and thought I'd throw it out there.
And no, I don't mean the lizardmen, haven't gotten to that yet. But the combat system is not as good as I hoped, or in particular, it's not as good as Gothic 1/2. The reason being, one of the great things about combat in G1/2 is that by leveling up your weapon skill (one or two handed), you not only did more damage, but also improved your attack/parry speed and animations. So when you started out, you swung the sword like an oaf and couldn't effectively parry anyone, but once you got high levels of weapon skill, the way you held the sword changed, and the way you swung became much smoother and quicker. 
) in a bundle recently and just finished it (played a melee bandit).
