It's funny to compare it to Risen, and I kind of get people who liked Risen but hate Risen 2. Risen was very unspectacular, very careful and kind of bland. It didn't do anything new or ambitious and by doing so avoided failing at anything, too. Risen 2 tries much more, and thus fails much more. So yeah, it's a lot like going from Gothic 2 to 3. Good ideas, overly ambitious. That makes it easier to criticize than Risen 1 was, sure, but I don't agree it's a significantly worse game (other than some needless dumbing down/QTE shit etc). Is intense mediocrity really that much better than trying and failing to do something more? Hmmm.
Risen 1 was not intensely mediocre, quite the contrary. It was a very good game that did bring some new stuff, or at least improvements, to the general Gothic formula, without sacrificing anything or massively screwing anything up. Yes, a safe and sound approach is much better than putting out something as failed, half-arsed and unpolished.
I wouldn't even say that Risen 2 is 'trying', no. They certainly might have had some neat ideas, but they never
tried to bring them to life. Instead they've gone through the path of least resistance, making sure that just about each and every feature is simply 'done' without any additional thinking about it, which becomes apparent when you start thinking how all of that stuff could have been easily fixed, but wasn't. Trying and failing, producing a rough diamond, is certainly commendable. Failing without trying, however, is the worst thing you can do.
Good review. I'm a little surprised to see you pick Maracai Bay as one of the worst examples of exploration, when it is the location with the single-most spots to climb up on the mountainsides and discover hidden caches. Pretty minor stuff, I know, especially if you consider the climbing a chore, but I liked the location.
Maracai Bay is horrible because there is no exploration. A hidden cache is not hidden if there's a fuckhueg neon sign saying 'HERE BE CHESTS' (those godawful rock shelves). Furthermore, it hardly can be called exploration when all the exploring you do is hop hop hop three times, open a chest, hop hop hop down. And even if the climbing wasn't as horrible, it still wouldn't excuse Maracai's general corridor construction.
I didn't find combat that annoying. But then again, I finished the game with gunplay. Gunplay combat is simple and fast, but not frustrating. It's a shame to miss the voodoo gameplay for it, but it does make the game better. "Shortening combat makes it better" is not much of a compliment.
I also finished the game with guns.
I also find it interesting that you didn't find that many alternate solutions. There's like four ways to get into the pirate camp to reach Steelbeard, and quite a few quests have specific "voodoo" solutions (not a ton, and not all with voodoo mind control. It was underused, yes, but sadly, it's expensive due to voice acting. Oh boy, voice acting cost strikes again). Stealing isn't used so much, but silver tongue is actually used very frequently. Not that there weren't a lot of fetch/kill quests too, but that's kind of a PB staple. Compared to Risen's weird predilection to fall back on combat as a solution for almost every quest, the dependency on voodoo, monkeys, and dialog skills was kind of a breath of relief.
From what I've noticed, silver tongue was mostly an alternative in terms of "pay 1000 gold / use silver tongue - choices and consequences".
Perhaps there was a ton of alternate solutions that I somehow didn't manage to find. But if so, it stems from another problem - for the most part, there's seriously little different approaches, and once you go through 20 fetch quests with nothing else to do but going from A to B, you just stop expecting the game to throw alternate solutions at you, and you stop actively seeking them. At least, I know it happened to me. I completely didn't think about using the monkey to steal the pistol from the gunsmith in Antigua.
As for the Maracai quest...it actually makes some sense how it works, narratively. It doesn't make much sense in a meta-gaming way but I find it odd to see you complain here that it becomes too challenging.
"Narratively makes sense" is a weak excuse, especially when it doesn't. The Protectors should have sent a dispatch with you, that would be the best outcome.
And challenging? No, it's not challenging. There's a pretty big line separating "challenging" from "unfair". If the mechanics themselves make the game challenging, each fight, even 1v1 on equal footing, is challenging. In a scenario like that, 1v2 is still challenging, 1v3 is hard, but also can be manageable.
But when the mechanics are unfair towards you, or the devs suddenly think that dropping a manbomb on you is a good idea, it's simply bad design. This is the same kind of "challenging" that makes Arcania challenging on maximum difficulty - all enemies become gigantic hp sponges that take all day to kill, instagib you with 1-2 hits and move so fast it's like they've been dropped into a red bull cauldron at youth. But lololololo sir it's challenging u gotta liek be careful and hit stuff a lot to not die!
I liked the challenge, though I didn't do it the way you did: you can attack them from outside the village and lure them out to avoid having to fight everyone at once. Yay, thinking on your feet! The game recognizes them as enemies and they get killed rather than knocked out. Yay, multiple solutions!
See, this is another instance of those "multiple solutions" that I've talked about before. The whole game all npcs are immortal. How the HELL am I supposed to expect that suddenly they'll lose their IDDQD?
