Risen (Xbox 360) review "There’s moments in Risen that can quite take you by surprise. Moments where you find yourself regarding the virtual world as a living, breathing entity. That alone is worth some measure of admiration."

Life in Risen starts out a lot harsher than you may hope. Stowed away upon a boat, the first thing our nameless protagonist sees is a strange robed warlock doing battle with a huge aquatic behemoth that keeps phasing in and out of reality. Things don’t end well; the ship is wrecked, the mage vanishes in a puff of magical smoke and a lot of people drown. You just about cling on to life, and find yourself washed ashore on a strange beach littered with the debris of your former ship, a lot of dead bodies and flocks of angry, flesh-eating flamingos. The game asks you to check for survivors, but your first real goal is obvious: loot the dead.

Amongst such useful items as bottles of rum and the odd gold piece, you need to comb the beach in your initial search for fellow survivors, but you’ll also need to arm yourself as best you can against the island’s less than hospitable wildlife. Nearby sea vultures lift themselves off the ground just enough to make clumsy dive-bomb attacks while skin-on-bone wolves desperate for a decent meal circle you warily, looking for the chance to dart in and steal a mouthful of meat from your frame. The initial exploration of the island is hazardous to your health; your weapon is probably little more than a study-looking branch, your only protection the sea-drenched rags you washed up in. Landing blows rewards little damage, and getting hit by anything hurts -- not a great happenstance to be in when, dare to explore the hive of caves peppered into a nearby cliff, and a small colony of scaly gnomes make embarrassingly short work of you. Even the bite-sized section of the island initially available to you feels huge, and when big birds and wolves aren’t trying to eat you, strange rats with knee-high quills are trying to gut you and giant moths jealously guarding graves stab you with distressingly pointy legs. Just surviving long enough to drag your weary body off the beach is a trial.

It’s unfortunate that the opening stages of Risen do so little to impress. The fighting feels clumsy and often unfair. Decent explorers might find a small shield with the defensive properties of a biscuit tin lid, which helps in the stumbling battles against wildlife that, dying from hunger or no, always seems to be one step up on the food chain from you. However, what the opening does right is distill within you the feeling that you’ve been dropped into a tiny world you know nothing about. You feel like a tiny speck, bewildered by unfamiliar surroundings, ganged up on by any number of beasties and with very little idea of what the hell to do or where to go.

Your fellow survivor presents the game’s one and only attempt of handholding, guiding you away from areas that would chance you with the survival rate of a chronically depressed lemming and towards a well-cut path lined with flickering touches. But she dumps you the second a dilapidated house is stumbled upon and, from here on out, you're on your own. Every footstep you take could lead you towards certain death, and Risen reserves the right to be largely smug about this.

The brave may stop off at the world’s smallest dungeon first but everyone eventually arrives at the second house. This location is unique in that it provides the game’s only limb of mercy, a hiccup of Dues Ex Machina; there’s a guard stationed here. He’s friendly enough, happy to point you in the direction of the game’s main two starting hubs and offers you a quest to explore his razed home to find a weapon far superior to the one he carries. I know this because I bludgeoned him unconscious and stole everything he had directly after we exchanged friendly greetings. He wasn’t so keen to help me out after that.

Explore further and find the island itself has undergone quite the transformation. Ancient ruins have sprung up from the ground overnight, bringing with them not only countless riches to be excavated from their depths, but a myriad of vicious monsters that swarm from newly opened doors. From the mainland, it brings in a religious order headed up by the Inquisitor, a group obsessed by the ruins and a drive for the island’s occupants to share their worldly views as keenly as they. Your guide (pre head kicking, should you take the same route as I) explains how they've taken over the island’s main town and forbidden anyone from leaving its walls. He urges you to keep away, listing the invader’s crimes against his people, boasting of his group’s enlightened struggle for freedom and suggests you delve into the swamp where the islanders who oppose the cult have chosen to hide out. He makes a great case but he, like every other person in Risen is a biased information source only interested in his or her side of the picture. Every person, event, landmark and corner of the island is steeped in charcoal grey in an amazing display of sidestepping the usual cardboard silhouettes of black and white.

The swamp is filled with dangers that keep the holy forces from pestering the outlaws, but it’s also filled with contradictions. It’s true that there are plenty of good men slumming in a reeking bog filled with predators just to keep the flickering light of freedom alive, but there are also self-serving jerks using the dire situation to try and fuel their own gains. The leader of the group's fighters uses his clout and oafish size to rule the camp with a merciless iron fist. The simple people working the swamp do so without his band of fighters to protect them and, as such, they die. The hunters who procure the camp’s food are sent on meaningless tasks, like preparing his firewood, and morale is at an all time low. The self-appointed leader, the Don, sits in his well-guarded ruined temple before a mountain of pilfered gold, forcing you to curry favour with his numerous lieutenants before he’ll even give you the time of day.

Likewise, venture into town, and you'll indeed find it filled with religious zealots reminiscent of Jehovah Witnesses with soul-soliciting quotas to fill and limitless pepper spray. Should they discover you outside the city gates, they’ll pummel you unconscious without so much as a hello and drag your battered body off to the monastery. Congratulations: whether you like it or not, you’ve just joined the ever-swelling ranks of their army.

But between the die-hards are those who genuinely try to help the under sword populace. A high ranking official ignores the converted guardhouse his colleagues transform into a base camp and instead lives in the slums with the downtrodden, dishing out free meals and magical aid whenever he can. Those that aid the order by choice display a new found appreciation of life, an obvious inner peace and a sense of being a part of something better. No faction is obviously corrupt or charitable: they’re larger than that. They’re gatherings of individuals, each with their own opinions and ideals who magnify the standing of either group, shying away from the standard fare of typecast good and evil. It makes picking a side harder and, equally, of more revelance. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from playing the self-serving arsehole yourself and bouncing the two forces off each other.

It’s as you explore the world that the flaws the opening wallowed in evaporate in the depth presented. With a little bit of training and better equipment, fighting stops being ineffective and clumsy and settles just for clumsy. With exploration and the acquisition of maps, the island stops being paralysingly daunting and becomes slightly more manageable with each step you take. There’s a main plot to carry you through, one that explains the hive of ruins exhuming themselves from the bowels of the earth and how the leaders of both clans fit in.

But progressing the main plot isn’t the highlights I’ll take away from the experience. I remember sneaking through a cave in the middle of the night, stepping over the dead bodies of those who foolishly attempted to explore before me, and finding my fate sealed with a gaggle of midnight-black ghouls who tore through my meagre defences with mana-fuelled swipes of their talons, then tore ragged chunks of flesh from my corpse to feast upon. And I remember the smug satisfaction when I travelled back later and slew each and every one of them. I remember the irritating farmhand who made me tend his field for what turned out to be a useless scrap of information and how he died screaming after I angered a swarm of nearby Talon Moths and led them right to him. I remember killing the prize cow of an arrogant trader and leaving its bloody head in his bed because, more than anything else, I could.

But I also remember sneaking through a secured warehouse, avoiding the guards and trying to ignore the way drawing too close to the walls led to unsightly clipping and unmentionably bad camera angles. I remember quests being completed before they’d even been offered, leading to the acquisition of incompletable missions in some cases and odd notes of random kudos and showering of experience for others. I remember teleporting up a ridge I didn’t want to travel and falling off a cliff that wasn’t there. Much like the Gothic games that came before Risen, the title's ambition is often much maligned by a series of glitches and bugs. This didn’t fill me full of confidence when I stumbled across my first wild boar -- but, thankfully, one flaw Piranha Bite's new title didn’t inherent from their last is being stunlocked and slowly gored to death by angry pigs. That’s not to say, though, that there aren’t times when a collection of issues that shouldn't exist will string together and make you wonder why you’re spending so much time with a game that feels so incomplete and lacking in polish. You’ll notice that the grimy atmosphere of the town coats everything in grime rather than the desired locations, thanks to a lazily-applied texture tile layered over the screen. You’ll notice that people who hate and distrust you will go directly to their beds and fall sleep within seconds so long as you remain out of their line of sight for the briefest of moments.

But then something else will come along.

While exploring an old dirt road that led to the rear entrance of town, I noticed a beach that I’d neglected to explore on my last pass through. The sandy shores were infested with monsters, who I peppered from atop a rocky overhang with my bow before slicing up those that made the roundabout journey to my location with cultured sword swings. There was a nearby island and, with a little bit of careful testing, I found a corridor of shallow water that allowed me to safely travel across the usually wild sea ravaged by mysterious magical storms. The island was small, but signs of clear significance were obvious. Atop the small hilltop traversable by a winding footpath, a giant scorpion guarded the remains of what seemed to be holy ground; a split font lay forgotten, covered in moss whilst broken statues corroded by the harsh ocean air lay in piles all around. An unmarked grave hinted at the location of a hidden cave situated at the base of the hill, one that showcased the entire island as a hollowed-out building. Waist high in water, I followed the hidden path deeper into the heart of the structure, the water glowing and flashing with discharged bursts of magic that cracked across the ceiling. At last, I reached a large domed hall; dilapidated pillars held up what was left of the roof; once grand floor tiles now soggy and contaminated with seaweed and crustaceans. Spears of sunlight glinted off the rusted armour of the undead soldiers left to guard a secret that will forever go untold. We fought in the cavern, our stray sword slices kicking up disturbed waves of seawater, until there was nothing left but to loot anything of worth and wonder what used to be here.

There are moments in Risen that can quite take you by surprise. Moments where you find yourself regarding the virtual world as a living, breathing entity. That alone is worth some measure of admiration.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (October 06, 2009) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.