The review contains light spoilers.
Let’s start with the conclusion, the game is good but it’s also bad.
The fans will say that the game is a gem, that has the same feeling as the old Gothic games. Not really, the game suffers from the same disease as Gothic 3. It’s too big and too open-world.
By the time you explore all the islands and kill every mob, you will get bored to start the main quest. Another problem is the actual main quest.
The main quest consists in investigating what is going on with the undead invasion and making allies, that is getting ships for your fleet.
Now compare this with the main quest from Gothic 1 where you know from the beginning what to do. You want to take down the barrier and become free.
Not the case in Risen 3. The undead minions are just placed like in a sandbox. You just explore the map, encounter the area where are placed, fight them, kill them, and that’s all. By the time you join a faction, there won’t be any undead left on the sandbox maps.
Other things that are destroying the feeling: the gnomes that are now everywhere and the voodoo tribe. The Isle of Thieves is a joke.
It destroys the feeling of playing anything serious.
Game Map
The factions. I wasn’t sure what you can join. I’ve noticed at least a few factions. The mages, the demon hunters and either the pirates or the inquisition.
However, these factions are really unconvincing. Why would you want to join them? They don’t give any feeling of progression.
Also, they don’t seem to do anything at all, besides mages who seem to gather some ore like in Gothic, and they are probably working on some big experiment.
The pirates are just staying on the beach, doing nothing. The inquisition the same. And the demon hunters.. they are lead by a druid and a few soldiers that seem that they can’t kill even a chicken.
As the story goes, I managed to join the mages and become a guardian in rank. From there, no mage or npc would give me any “main” quest. With all the quests solved in Taranis, there’s nothing to do. And it gets hilarious. At that point, when traveling from an island to another, trying to find the main quest, there are some naval fights against some sea monsters. These fights are a total joke and you can’t even skip them.
Not much to say. The game is fun, we have the same old dialogues, camps, quests. But a total sandbox world with almost no feeling. Too big and too superficial.
The game is an upgrade to Risen 2 but it brings other issues. While Risen 2 was decent, Piranha Bytes has complicated the things too much and they quite made another fail game as Gothic 3 was.
Even with all the issues, Risen 3 is a great game. We can’t talk bad about the only real RPG released this year.
Final conclusion. Play the game, it’s great, until you get bored.
To give it a score, I give it an overall 7/10.