Risen 2: Dark Waters Review - IGN (2024)

Known for crafting vast, detailed virtual worlds, developer Piranha Bytes has been making single-player open-world role-playing games for over a decade. Its Gothic series presented colossal explorable spaces and offered hardly any direction, challenging you to define your own journey through the world. You didn't find things because a designer placed a bunch of signposts all over the environment that read "This Way to Hidden Cave of Magic," you found them by accident, on your way to complete some other objective, or simply because you decided to wander. Such an unscripted experience led to moments of extreme frustration, but also made achievements feel meaningful and personalized, instead of inevitable events along a rigidly defined path.
Following the overly ambitious and buggy mess that was Gothic 3 in 2006, Piranha Bytes and the Gothic franchise split ways. For its next project under publisher Deep Silver, Piranha Bytes created a new fiction in Risen, retaining many of the elements that made Gothic great: open-world freedom, rewarding exploration and a gritty, believable world. Though flawed, Risen represented a distilled version of the Gothic formula – a smaller chunk of explorable terrain with more focused objectives and slightly less punishing combat. Piranha Bytes continues the trend of making its signature style of role-playing more digestible in Risen 2: Dark Waters, though in the process thins out too much of the series' fascinating density.

Perhaps as a way to more easily distinguish the series from its fantasy role-playing peers, Dark Waters swaps out Risen's high fantasy for pirate fiction. Bows are replaced by muskets, elemental magic by voodoo dolls and skull-capped sceptres, and heavy armor by high collared coats and ascots. The story still follows the nameless protagonist from the first game, though feels like more a fresh start for the franchise than a continuation. A deep knowledge of the events that transpired on the island of Faranga is not required to appreciate Risen 2's story.

This time you're on a quest to defeat an inadvertently awakened water creature, which, naturally, means various artifacts hidden around the game world must be retrieved and assembled. Though the quest structure for the main story is genre-standard, Piranha Bytes does a good job ensuring your tasks and adventures mesh with the pirate theme. You'll unearth buried treasure, track down ghost ships, drink heavily and shout at NPCs until they wilt and comply with your often unreasonable requests. Talk between NPCs is often obscene, full of profanity, fierce selfishness, and unapologetic racism and sexism. There are no idealistic heroes in the world of Risen 2, only the ignorant, crude and the lazy. The stories told blend well with the setting and tone, but the tasks and quest structures are mostly simple and forgettable.

While no character's story arc is particularly gripping, and the ultimate end boss is actually one of the most boring characters in the entire game (and a bore to fight), there are several standout personalities. You'll run into peculiar characters like a raving mad doctor with a soul split between worlds and a gnome who learned to speak by listening to pirates and incessantly swears, assuming it to be perfectly socially acceptable. Conversations, even with completely non-essential characters, are often tinged with humor, usually in the form of direct, merciless insults. This approach feels appropriate and fits with the fiction, though the humor is occasionally unintentional thanks to exaggerated, overused animations and rare instances of awful voice acting.

Risen 2: Dark Waters Review - IGN (1)

Piranha Bytes has always been especially good at crafting spaces that feel realistic despite the presence of fantastical elements, and that continues in Risen 2. You'll have to deal with the pedestrian complaints of disgruntled laborers and the constraints of petty politics, which roots the game world with a sense of plausibility even as you battle magical creatures later on. The sense of convincing realism is reinforced through gorgeously detailed forested islands filled with uneven, rocky terrain, ancient tombs of pitted stone and stretches of lush wilderness with shafts of sunlight piercing the shifting wind-blown fronds of towering palms. It's too bad, then, that the environment types are reused so often. Piranha Bytes chose to create multiple, separate islands for Risen 2, as opposed to a larger, single space. With the exception of the fiery cliffs of Caldera and darkened gloom of the Isle of the Dead, the islands don't look distinct, so while trekking through the woods in search of hidden treasures, it's often tough to tell at a glance whether the cave, beach or jungle you're exploring is in Maracai or Tacarigua, lessening the thrill of exploration.

Risen 2 may not foster the same sense of adventure as Piranha Bytes' past work, but it still provides plenty of rewards. If there's a cave, there's most definitely a treasure chest sitting at the far end, guarded by one or more monstrous creatures. Legendary items are hidden all over the world as well, which when collected confer permanent statistical increases. Considering the high cost in both gold and glory (experience points) to pump up attributes and learn new skills, the discovery of legendary items feels very much worthwhile, and helps to incentivize what little open world exploration there is in Risen 2. Unfortunately the same sense of reward does not accompany the acquisition of armor sets, which are unceremoniously purchased from vendors in Risen 2, a huge departure from the protracted cycles of anticipation and reward normally associated with gear in Piranha Bytes games, where armor sets are major achievements that symbolize progress, status and faction alignment.

The smaller scale of the explorable areas also means it's harder to feel lost and isolated. It's a strange decision considering a big component of Piranha Bytes' past work has been creating spaces that let you wander far off quest paths. The upside, at least for players who prefer when designers hold their hand, is a more focused experience. Risen 2 is by far Piranha Bytes' most user-friendly product. Fast-traveling between points of interest, the locations of quest goals and skill trainers, and progression from beginning to end has never been clearer and more straightforward than in Dark Waters. Casting aside the prohibitive density of past games certainly has its upsides – frustration is rarely due to the game's lack of direction – but in the process it seems as though many of Piranha Bytes staple elements were removed, or left untouched when they too should have been updated.

Risen 2: Dark Waters Review - IGN (2)

Risen 2's skill system, for instance, could use refinement. It's still entirely functional, it's just odd that with the apparent emphasis on user-friendliness such a convoluted system made it into the final game, where the requirements for increasing statistics and unlocking new abilities requires an unnecessarily complex procedure of menu study and where the effects of upgrades are often difficult to notice. Not all progression paths are equal, either, which ties into the unevenness of the combat.

You begin without a set class, and by fighting monsters and completing quests you earn glory that can be directly spent on increasing basic attributes. It's a freeform system of character development, where there's no up-front limitation of how to power up your pirate. As tends to be the case in Piranha Bytes games, you're incredibly weak at the start, so expect to be humbled by some of the starting area creatures until you get the hang of how the combat works and learn a few abilities.

The sword fighting is dull at the beginning, but gains quite a bit of depth after you've learned to kick, use powerful attacks, parry and riposte. When dueling other humans or slashing at sword-carrying sea creatures the system shines, resulting in satisfying timing-based gameplay where you block, deflect and counter-attack incoming slashes. Against monsters, however, the sword combat system is far less appealing. Creatures sometimes charge, sometimes stupidly wander about in circles while absorbing damage, and in many cases launch into irritating, uninterruptible attack sequences that make toe-to-toe fighting a mess. Wild swings in difficulty between enemy types mean you'll just as often have to rely on chipping away at health, retreating, saving, then repeating, and often reloading when combat encounters routinely break down because of factors beyond your control.

Alternatively, you could learn muskets, which allow you to attack from a distance and have a chance at inflicting huge critical damage. Musket fire is capable of utterly destroying enemies without much thought, making it effective, though monotonous, as it requires no finesse. Simply point, shoot and win. Pistols are at least slightly more fun because they're an added bonus, an attack that can be periodically mixed into the rhythm of combat to stagger and damage foes, and perfect for dealing the final hit after knocking an enemy backwards with a swift boot to the stomach.

Risen 2: Dark Waters Review - IGN (3)

If you'd rather ditch the physical weapons and rely on something magical, then Risen 2 will disappoint. The voodoo system in Dark Waters is more about debuffing and mind control than dealing direct damage, and while its inclusion is novel for the series, the effects of its paltry few abilities barely change from the first time they're learned to the game's end. You'll be able to immobilize targets with fear, summon a ghost, weaken enemies with curses or set two enemies against each other. It only feels useful because it allows you to bypass the sloppy mechanics of up-close sword battles with non-humanoid creatures by causing them to attack each other, or by hanging back while your summoned ghost runs in first to draw their attention. There was plenty of opportunity to do something interesting by altering the series' magic system, but by implementing so few abilities with so little in the way of progression, Risen 2's version is a letdown.

Outside of combat, some of the skill upgrades factor into conversation, letting you intimidate or flirt your way past the need to fork over large sums of money for information and items. While the results can occasionally be funny, there's not much to the system. Conversation is generally straightforward, though you'll see some variation on quest goals depending on your skill set. With voodoo skills, for instance, you'll have the option to mind control friendly NPCs and wander around in their bodies, allowing you to either issue orders or access information that would have otherwise been locked out. Occurrences like this are all very much predetermined, though, with predictable results. Had Piranha Bytes dug deeper into developing systems like this, perhaps the results could have been more surprising and, ultimately, more fun to use.

Other NPCs can be recruited to your cause, some with unique powers in battle like healing or strength buffs. They're always worth bringing around, mostly because they can serve as a damage sponge against some of the more annoying enemies, opening a window of opportunity for you to land some free sword strikes or gun shots. Their usefulness as alternate targets highlights some of the combat system's weaknesses, especially while fighting multiple beasts at once and trying to avoid getting unfairly stun-locked by a fast-attacking panther or firebird.

Verdict

With Risen 2 Piranha Bytes continues to demonstrate skill at crafting big, believable worlds. Dark Waters is at times beautiful, offering a finely detailed set of islands to explore on your quest to become a notorious pirate captain and vanquish an ancient evil. It's Piranha Bytes' most accessible game yet, and though its style and boorish, humorous dialogue fit well with the pirate motif, it's a role-playing experience that uses convention as a crutch and marginalizes or strips away a lot of elements that made the studio's past games stand out. Disappointing character development options, sloppy combat and run-of-the-mill questing structures often make Dark Waters more of a chore to play than it should be, and exploration isn't nearly exciting enough to make up for its many flaws. If you desperately to role-play as a pirate, you certainly can in Risen 2, but you'll also find little that's memorable, and a multitude of poorly implemented ideas and missed opportunities.

Risen 2: Dark Waters Review - IGN (2024)
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