I played the beta of this game not long ago. I am a little conflicted; as someone who loved Risen1 (PC) I was really looking forward to this sequel, unfortunately, after playing the beta, I feel some of the changes Pirhana Bytes made are not for the better and once again some of these changes had to be made due to console limitations.
First of all, while the developer claims that the playable landmass is much bigger than Risen1, the world has been chopped up into little islands most likely due to the limited memory of consoles. The explorable area in the beta was very small, here is hope that the other islands are much bigger. The beta area generally seemed less dense and emptier than the world in Risen 1, whether this is due to it being the starting area or some other reason (console limitations?) is anyone's guess. The verticality of the world has been majorly scaled down which is very disappoiting to me. In Risen1, just like Gothic1 and 2, you can climb any reachable ledge, this was great for exploration. In Risen 2, only specially designated areas are climbable.
The UI has been redesigned to be controller friendly, but again, many aspects were streamlined in a not-so-good way for PC players; all types of food is shown as one item in the inventory called "Provisions" which restores a little health when eaten for example. The entire UI has been chopped up into tabs and lists with limited information in each, this is once again presumably to make it more manageable with a controller but it's pretty bad with the mouse. Luckily, you can switch tabs and scroll the lists with the movement keys, so after a while one can get used to it.
The combat in Risen2 has been drastically changed from Risen1. IMO, the combat is now much less interesting. First off, there is no dodging, so versus non-humanoid creatures, the combat tends to either devolve to a clickfest where you'e just spamming the fast attack just like in Gothic 3 (although you don't get stunlocked) or you try to awkwardly jump out of the way which looks very silly. My other issue is that versus humans, the animations are all mocapped and tend to be very long, so the controls become quite unresponsive because you have to wait for an animation to finish before the character triggers the next action.
All that being said, I did enjoy the beta and did feel some of what made Risen1 great; mainly the wonder of exploring the unknown. Keep in mind that these are the impressions of the beginning of the game only, the islands may get bigger, the combat might become more strategic when you learn more skills.
