First half is great! The second one... not so much.
Now, onto the game itself. It's rather an open-world RPG though you are mostly confined to small paths, but you can go anywhere you want. The graphics are pretty good, the environment is lovely and the sound effects are fine. The music wasn't anything special but I didn't hate it either. Character models look rather gritty which I liked, but the animations are poor. The role-playing options in terms of dialogue is also weak, and your character is always cynic and sounds like a drunk Ewan MacGregor. There are no customisation options for appearance either, so if you don't like him, well too bad!
The game does offer a lot of good stuff, such as having to cook your own food, crafting items and such, which is all handled in a believable manner (for instance, you need a pan and a fire to grill meat). There are a lot of fun quests to do, some of which are rather lengthy and engaging and ties in nicely with the main story.
The levelling up system isn't the best though. When you gain a level you automatically gain some extra HP and so-called "learning points" that you can use to learn new skills. At first I liked this because that means someone actually has to teach you lock-picking as opposed to just learning it by killed X number of boars as in most RPG's. However, you also have to find said trainer which is easier said than done, and on top of that, you need to pay them to do so! While it might be semi-realistic, why couldn't they always teach you skills as long as you had the money for it? In Risen, you can only learn new skills if you have enough learning points, which is rather ridiculous.
"I'm sorry, you are not ready to learn lock picking yet. Go kill some more boars first"
I mean, come on.
As for the combat system, I did like the aspect of it requiring a bit of skill and timing to win at first as opposed to just hack'n'slash, but by the 3rd act, it got very tedious (block, attack, parry, block...) when you where facing tons of enemies that where practically cheating with perfect block timing every time. Best way to beat them is actually to PUNCH them to death with your fists. No really, they can't block those attacks!
When facing multiple foes though, the combat system is frigging terrible. It uses auto-lock on your foes which works when fighting them one by one, but when facing several foes the auto-lock switches targets all the time, meaning you will start a combo of attacks at what is probably an innocent tree instead of hitting your enemies. Not fun.
The selection of weapons and armour is also pitifully small. There are swords, axes, staffs, bows, crossbows... and bigger swords. Oh, and sticks! Gotta love the sticks...
Armour is worse still, you start with a shirt, then you get a basic armour after around 10 hours or so, then you get a better (albeit almost identical) armour at around 20 hours. Then you get the super-armour in the end game and that's it. You can find 2-3 kinds of clothes to wear as well in the beginning (if you look around a lot), but that's all in all very pitiful.
Still, for the first half of the game, you get to trek around the island you are on, explore and do quests. And kill boars. And wolves. And vultures. And about another dozen types of foes that make up the game's poor selection of enemies.
Well, that was the game's good part (what!? That was almost only bad stuff!). Yup, sad but true, there are a lot to complain about in Risen even though the game does a lot of things right.
However, in the 3rd and 4th acts (which hopefully won't take up half your total game time depending on how much exploring and side quests you did in the first acts) the game goes downhill faster than Charlie Sheen's career.
At this point, all you will do is go through a boring dungeon for 3 hours, kill about a hundred identical lizardmen and then... you are forced to find pieces of an armour which is hidden in an additional five f***ing dungeons filled with lizardmen and hidden traps. Then you get a crappy boss fight which plays out like an awful mini game รก la "Memory" where your choice of class (warrior, ranger or mage) has no effect what so ever. You are then credited with an absolutely terrible ending that explains nothing and leaves you completely empty thinking "what the f*ck was the point of that?"
Despite all the negativity, I did enjoy Risen a lot the first 20 hours. It's a damn shame the last 5-10 hours are so terrible.