My Rants: Risen

You know, before all the reviews, before all the ratings, before I saw gameplay of this series, before I played the demo's I thought this game would be good or at least interesting. Especially on the fact it claims to be a "Pirate RPG". Yeah, how cool does that sound? The fact that you could possibly customize or upgrade your ship to a living breathing Man O War styled ship or handling your crew and setting them up with skills and ranks like an actual functioning guild unlike any other RPG that does that such as the Elder Scrolls where you become the Guild Leader all you get is a place to live in, a few followers, and some gear. You dont have that special ability other guild leaders have where you could look at your guild mates stats and see if they are ready for an advancement and help them grow into their status. Fighting off rival pirates and naval soldiers while hunting for vast treasures and discovering lost secrets of the islands scattered across the map. If it was done right, then it would possibly be a more advanced RPG styled version of Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag where in Ubisoft's case they did the whole pirate theme right! In this game series, they literally fucked up everything!

I aint even going to talk about the first game because let me tell you the only thing rememberable in that game is smoking fucking weed while being butt raped by annoying monster bastards while spinning around like a damned ballerina as you sweep the floor like the NCP's bitch. No, instead I'm gonna focus on the game that most people remembers and it's sequel Risen 2 Dark Waters and Risen 3 Rise of the Titans. And before you tell me "Oh but Mr. Blacklight you probably played the inferior port for the 360 and not on the glorious holy grounds that is the PC." Well guess what jackass I did played them on the PC, yeah and you know what they all still suck more than a vacuum cleaner hooker on the side of the street. Is the whole point of playing a video game on the PC, especially an RPG video game no less supposed to be better than its other ports control, graphic, and content wise? The answer to that is hell to the no.

The weirdest thing about Risen 2 Dark Waters however is that at its time there were two Pirate RPG's that were coming out at the same time. The first was Risen 2 Dark Waters and the other was Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned which to me and looking at the trailer looked pretty interesting as you could play as either a legendary pirate or an undead scourge of the seven seas all to which to "save your soul" if you will. However, for some odd reason Disney cancelled the release of the video game thus Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned never saw the light of day ever again and instead we were greeted by the piece of crap game for the Tron Evolution movie. That game was so bad that Disney had to cancel the Downloadable content for it due to its bad rep. But I'm not talking about Tron here, instead I'm focusing on Risen here so lets get back on track.

After Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned was cancelled, the people hoped that Risen 2 Dark Waters would be just like its lost brethren, but there was one issue I had with its creator; Deep Silver. Deep Silver in good aspects was involved in the creation of the Saints Row series, the Dead Islands series, and the two Metro games which I found it good because of their success. However in the bad aspects Deep Silver was also involved in the creation of Ride To Hell Retribution to which not only was it a terrible game but it was labeled to being the worst video game ever made so that in mind I held some form of positive outlook for the series in hopes that they would get their heads out of their asses and decide to stay true to their content and make a good pirate themed RPG. What we got was the fact that they shoved their heads further up their asses and made a piece of shit to which real gamers like us wouldn't look at it as paid critics would praise it like it's a fucking god.

It felt like a dumbed down average game with pirates slapped on it with glue and glitter, I mean sure there are people saying that it's better than the first Risen game but that's not saying much now is it? In the beginning of the game you play as a soldier of some sort but when you pause and look at your stats you see that you aren't worth a single shit nugget. Seriously, it as though you woke up from a thousand year sleep, dressed up as a soldier and claim yourself as one even though you have little to no experience as a soldier what so ever. That's like saying I can go to Hollywood, dress up as a character to a movie that is in production, head into the stage and play the part with no teachings of acting or anything what so ever. The progression system is god awful for not only do you need the ridiculous required experience or "glory" if you will but also the ridiculous requirement of gold as well just to learn one simple thing. And it gets even more ridiculous over the fact that in the beginning gold is as hard as trying to find a seven leaf clover in Saints Patrick's Day in Ireland while drunk as all hell. You cant lock pick any doors to get inside and take any content that's within, you can hardly sneak around and look like a squatting retard trying to take a dump, you cant even steal from people for crying out loud! I'm sorry but is the main point of being in an RPG is the fact that depending on your class or race or whatever you have some sort of improvement to your stats? You're an Inquisitor Spy who is sent off to face against god like Titans and you dont know jack shit about jack diddly squat. That's like throwing a small kitten into a shark infested bin in hopes that the kitten will kill all the sharks for you!

The animations for the game looks like as if a ten year old decided to take a course in school for game development, got a C- as a final grade and went out to make his own game. Seriously, some if not most of them seem awkward at best. Even the combat is awkward to all hell, for not only does it look bad but it feels bad as well for all you have to do in combat is just press a single button or button mashing if you will for the whole fight until you win. At least in Kingdom of Amalur Reckoning you have a variety of combos and attack styles but in this game you just swing your sword as your enemies have attacks that are unblockable! This combat system sorts of remind me of another game, oh yes fucking Fable only these people did it worse, how can you have a worse combat system than Fable!? Well by removing the magic system from the previous game of course. That draws the fucking line for me right there, how in all forms of hell can one remove the magic system from an RPG!? If you remove the magic system from the RPG not only does it limits the capability of combat and experience of the game but in my opinion cannot be considered an RPG but instead an Action Adventure game with little RPG elements mixed in! This offends me more so because usually in RPG's I usually play as the mage character or at least a battlemage character of sorts.

It even gets worse upon ranged combat because most of the entire game you will be missing alot. One time while playing this game with my friend after shooting and missing my enemy for the fiftieth time he told me that I couldnt hit the broadside of a barn only for me to reply saying it's because I was too busy hitting the broadside of your mom because that's how it literally feels! Even more so is that if you get hit while trying to shoot you have to restart the fucking animation all over again so what is the fucking point of using a damned gun if you not only have to restart all over again if you get hit in a middle of shooting but miss about half of the time throughout the entire game! And dont get me started on the graphics because it to also sucks. Flickering lighting in the background, terrible lip syncing, foliage growing as though they've taken steroids, the list goes on! I guess the only form of magic system I was able to find throughout this game was that of Voodoo but even still it's not much of a magic system and the loot throughout the game even for Voodoo seem pretty damned poor like I was a homeless person looking through garbage and is forced to wear shit covered overalls throughout the entire game because if you choose to have the ability of voodoo all you can do is make dolls of certain characters and control them for a certain amount of time.

There's even a form of pet system in the game where you get to control either a monkey that just runs around and easily get itself killed or a parrot who just flies around your enemies to which they cost a freaking fortune to get not to mention have a certain level requirement to get them and have it take in one of your weapon slots which freaking sucks ass! Not that you need an extra weapon slot because most of the battles are just downright lazy such as the Earth Titan where all you have to do is take a spear and shoot it at its chest when it opens as in the end you have to do what I believe is to be the lost laziest of all quick time events. Just one click of a button in the quick time event and its dead. As for the pirate theme itself, what the hell is the point of it? Your crew is nothing special, the NCP's are just clones of themselves, you don't sail your own damned ship only see yourself sail your ship to the small islands in five second cutscenes, you feel more like a land dweller than a sailor of the seas and once you beaten the game you still feel like a damned land dweller but with a pair of sea legs even though you cant swim for jack fucking crap even though you are a fucking pirate!

But you're all thinking, what about Risen 3, well from hows it's going down and the gameplay and shit I wouldn't touch it with a fifty mile long pole! Just starting the game looks like you're playing the so called tutorial to Ride to Hell which again was claimed the worse video game ever made! I hardly see any improvements to the game, not even the graphics look improved, the combat system is the same, the enemies are fucking ridiculous, and from the looks of things Deep Silver even tries to rip you off extra ten dollars by removing two of the islands of the game for five dollars each as the game itself is fifty dollars at best. Ten dollars for two of the seven islands, are you fucking insane!? Plus two dollars for an Adventures Garb, so fifty dollars plus twelve dollars is sixty two dollars right down the fucking drain! I actually feel sorry for the poor bastards who actually preordered this game and I highly doubt this but if Deep Silver decides to actually make a Risen 4 in the future to which I highly doubt then they best get their fucking heads out of their asses right now or else they'll implode themselves into nothing!