Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview

The latest preview for Piranha Bytes’ action-RPG Risen 2: Dark Waters comes from The Gamer’s Hub, who had a chance to check both the Xbox 360 and PC version at last week’s GamesCom and reports:

When it turns to combat Risen seems to flow well on both PC and Xbox 360, you can parry, counter and throw objects with what seems like relative ease, magic skills also make an appearance alongside enchanted weaponry. This means that by mixing it all up you could create some fun and interesting combat situations. Situations that really mimic the style of some of the best swashbuckling Hollywood adventures, throwing coconuts and parrying blows. To add to the crazy mix of combat you can also Of course combat isn’t always necessary to solve every situation, as there are multiple ways to go about doing simple as well as complex quests. One instance was finding shoes and a shirt, we could either go loot a shirt or gain money to buy one, and even then you could exchange the shirt for information that would then circumvent your original need for the shirt and thus open up alternative quest paths. Sidequests are also an integral part of Risen, just like with many RPGs, and so there is plenty to do alongside the main story; one large addition is searching for weapon blueprints scattered across the entire world meaning you can get some really powerful and interesting weapons too.

Of course what was most promising was to see how Piranha Bytes has focused on rectifying the problems that seemed to dog the prequel. After receiving universally bad reviews for the 360 version of the game, which was really unfortunate as the PC version received excellent reviews, Risen 2 has focused on developing it simultaneously instead of porting it across. The build we got to view was a few months behind in development in comparison to the PC version, so frame rate was slow, however the game worked and ran perfectly and looked like, when it caught up with PC development, it would be a perfect fit for the console.