Risen was great up to the temple, then it fell it apart from bad pacing and got tired of killing hordes of lizards. Never bothered to finish it and probably never will. Was very disappointing.
Not sure if Gothic 1/2 or Risen 1 had better combat, sure Risen 1 had much tighter controls compared to the clunky Gothic 1/2, but i feel that Risen didn't have the same sense of thrill that Gothic 1/2 from defeating an enemy, the fear of the mob critting you for half your life or taking said crit, surviving with around 4 hit points and standing victorious over your enemy. So satisfying.
If you thought R1 lizard temples were boring, I've got bad news for you - G1 sleeper's temple is MUCH worse in this regard.
At least the lizard temples had the virtue of being short and to the point. G1 sleeper's temple just drags on and on, with ridiculous amount of pointless backtracking.
Regarding combat in G1 vs R1 - since I'm currently replaying G1 right after finishing my replay of R1, I will now finally grudgingly admit that R1's combat IS noticeably batter than G1's combat. It's way less clunky and more fluid, plus with a couple of new tricks. It does miss the wonderful sense of progression of G1+2 that is connected to mastery of skills (in R1 you are already half-decent with weapons from the get-go) and it also lacks the old "time your swings or fuck up your combo and get rekt" mechanic, but it's still better overall.
And it actually retains that wonderful feeling of overpowering a stronger opponent.
There were no pirates in Risen. Being on tropical island =/= pirate theme. GNotR on the other hand had very forced ''yaaarrrr, i be pirate'' component with one of the central second tier characters being walking stereotype of hollywood pirates and you could even dug treasure in places marked by huge read cross. I don't see a problem with that, but get your facts straight.
There were pirates in Risen. Specifically:
Patty, who wants to find her daddy, the infamous pirate. She's a very temporary companion in a mandatory story quest that involves a bit of treasure-digging. Why? Well, just because you need to find the 5x
focus stones err, I meant crystal disks, and one of the chests in question contains it.
Some other pirtate ship captain whom you may or may not encounter befire said story quest.
This pirate captain's crew of five, two of whom you will encounter in the harbour town and will probably not realise to be pirates until you meet them much leater, and they tell you themselves.
None of these people look or behave particularly piratey, and they don't bore you with piratey info-dumps either. In fact, you could replace "pirate" with "bandit" in their dialogues and you wouldn't notice a bit of difference.
All their involvement in the game is basically you seeing them at some areas where they comment on your progress with the abovementioned story quest. And then at the end of it you'll probably murder the lot of them, because, you know, treasure.
