Fallen 3…
The world has been abandoned by its deities and is scarred from the attack of the Titans. Humanity struggles to regain strength and marshal its forces. You have more immediate concerns: your own life has been shattered and you must set off to reclaim what is lost in the darkness that is spreading throughout the world.
Risen 3 Titan Lords is an action RPG with a clichéd story that just serves enough to carry the game, but it’s still tedious and the game itself is an almost unplayable mess on the PS3. It suffers framerate issues throughout, it has visuals that almost make it look like a PS3 launch title and even then, it’d be one of the bad ones. The game’s controls fine for the most part and there are some good ideas floating around, but for the most part it’s obvious that the budget for the console versions wasn’t that much.
Blocky textures, screen-tearing and an uneven framerate make it difficult to even play without tearing your hair out, it also crashed several times during my playthrough. The AI is also pretty unbalanced, attacking at a much faster rate than you can and the animation for the combat is dire. The characters are also a clichéd mess with one-liners, corny dialogue and bad quality voices to boot.
Customization is always a big part of an RPG and Risen 3 does this well, but other RPGs have done it far better. Risen 3’s is average at best and yet, it’s probably the only thing worth recommending as the locations and combat are painful to get through. It’s a shame that Piranha Bytes hasn’t learned its lesson from the past games when brought to consoles…I haven’t played it on PC but I would hope that that version looks and handles a lot better.
The Verdict
It’s hard to find anything that can redeem Risen 3, sadly. It’s an RPG that is flawed from the beginning with its almost unplayable framerate and visual problems, technical problems including crashing and glitches with animation. It’s a shame as they are some good ideas underneath, but it’s getting to it that proves the most frustrating.
