Risen 3 - Titan Lords

In an unexpected turn of events, you don't continue playing as the same nameless hero in Risen 3 - Titan Lords. Instead your previous character has been demoted to a cameo role while the spotlight is taken by Captain Steelbeard's son -- who suddenly exists, I guess. He's also left nameless, which I think is dumb. It doesn't add to immersion in any way. The most jarring thing is his (English) voice however: he kind of looks like Chris Pratt and I definitely wasn't expecting to hear a voice that tries immensely hard to sound like the baddest motherfucker there is. I never grew to like it and started truly missing the previous protagonist.

An iterative finisher for the Risen trilogy

Despite the new hero, Risen 3 feels equally as much of a sequel as the previous one did: about the whole previous cast of NPCs and factions make a reappearance. That includes Patty but she looks drastically different than she used to. Patty also has a new voice actress, further making her seem like another character. The change felt unnecessary to me.

Oddly enough, the game's subtitle is inaccurate. Or at least that's how it seems to me. It's not titan but shadow lords you are fighting. All manner of undead are pouring through crystal portals and factions of the world -- or what's left of it -- have to unite against them. Somehow it falls to you to get the job done.

Risen 3 is, like the previous game, very much pirate themed and this time you even get few battles on and with your ship. They're simple and the on-foot battles static, still far from the freedom of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but a welcome surprise for sure.

The game brings back arcane magic from the first game and thus in addition to voodoo pirates, your choice of faction this time again includes mages. A whole new faction is demon hunters, led by Eldric the druid, another familiar face. Despite the expanded options, Risen 3 remains pretty small scale in your array of abilities. One action bar is almost enough to hold all your important stuff. I liked that when playing on keyboard, you hit a key to instantly cast the spell or use the item in that slot. You don't need to first select it like in more controller-oriented interface solutions (like in The Elder Scrolls games).

I didn't like the touched up HUD otherwise though. It's unnecessarily large compared to Risen 2 and moving the interact prompt to the upper left corner made it harder to notice when there was something to pick up. Items don't pop up from the environment as clearly as they used to, I guess due to increased graphical detail. Air warping from fire and similar effects looked very nice in this game though.

An attempt at better combat

In the tutorial I thought a miracle had happened and Piranha Bytes had actually made melee combat good. The way attacks flowed felt smooth. You don't queue actions but rather have to the attack within a (fairly lenient) window to keep a chain going. Dodge can be bound to be used from a separate button instead of having to double tap a movement key. There are also sync kills against humanoid enemies. They can get silly since different weapon types use the same animations: stabbing through an enemy or slicing the throat (of a skeleton) with a hammer doesn't make much sense. But I did enjoy the sync kills. They feel satisfying and add variation to the combat.

After the tutorial, things no longer felt as great. While the things mentioned were still there, enemies turned out to be as aggressive as in the first game and preferring to initially go after you instead of your companion. Your damage output is low and getting staggered and interrupted is a constant annoyance. Things do get better with character advancement, at least in terms of enemies dying faster.

As I was going for a 100% achievement run, I skipped on spending any glory until I had enough to max out one attribute (and thus the rest with reloads for their respective achievements). That was a mistake. When you explore and clear everything there is, you will end up with enough glory (especially with an early +10% glory item from Fog Island DLC) and attribute potions to max out all your stats by the end of the game. Thus there's no need to have the struggle I had. You should be free to increase each attribute up to 60 or 65 and do the rest with potions. That way you are more effective in combat and can learn some medium tier skills earlier. Being able to pick a level 100 (or was it 110?) lock early can provide a huge boost to your melee because there's a high damage sword in a chest next to the innkeeper on Antigua.

I think Risen 3 -- and Risen 2 as well -- could've used an increased feel of escalation of difficulty. Each of the faction islands pretty much has all the game's enemy types scattered about. You fight everything there is already at the first place you visit and then it just repeats elsewhere. The final island doesn't introduce anything new either. At least the game every now and then surprises you with a boss fight that differs from the normal gameplay.

Now that I'm done with the Risen franchise, I doubt I will be touching anything from Piranha Bytes any time soon. I might play ELEX at some point but I'm no way in a hurry. I just got 3 months of game pass and also bought a few games; I should be good for the summer and probably a good way into the fall too.