When Risen 3: Titan Lords first released onto PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and PC last year, it wasn’treviewed all that highly. The RPG had a clunky combat system, frame-rate issues, and poor graphics, making it not quite worth your money. However, while Risen 3: Titan Lords – Enhanced Edition on PS4 still deals with many of the same issues, it actually manages to look gorgeous on the current-gen system.

Things Are Moving Fast

Risen 3 follows the story of a nameless hero who is the son of the famous Captain Steelbeard, a pirate leader. Soon after the game begins, the hero dies, but is brought back to life a few weeks later. It’s revealed that he needs to find his soul, as it has been trapped in the Underworld. This leads the player on a quest to get the hero’s soul back by obtaining help from a variety of different magic users on a number of different islands. It’s a not bad story, but the pacing seems a bit too fast, almost as if the developer wanted to skip past certain, and important, parts of the story to get right into the gameplay. 

Unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t all that much better. The world of Risen 3 is massive, allowing players to spend hours upon hours exploring a variety of different landscapes and fighting a myriad of different creatures and enemies. Since it is an open-world game, Risen 3 gives players the freedom to explore the game world at their leisure, working on a large number of side-quests and looking for treasure as they do so. It sounds pretty good, and it would be, too, if it wasn’t for the horrible animations and the clunky combat.

Actually, the animations are so bad, that they seem like they could have been taken straight out of a 10-year old PC game, or maybe something even older. The main characters seems to have no weight when he walks, and it looks like he glides across the ground instead of actually placing his feet down. This is only made more clear when attempting to “climb” a vertical wall. I found that by simply walking straight into the faces of cliffs or the trunks of trees, my character would sort of float up them, instead of staying on the ground like he should have done. This makes any sort of movement in the game both look and feel unnatural.