Somewhere near 20% of men in this country are afraid of house spiders. Little harmless house spiders; creatures that freeze instantly anytime a shadow is cast upon them, that curl into tiny frightened balls if you flick them, that feed upon nothing more terrifying or formidable than bluebottles. Almost 1 in 20 men - big, strong, fully-grown men - are petrified of our eight-legged friends. Which begs the question, really, of how in the hell anyone born in a fantasy world gets any work done at all.

Take Faranga, for example, the possibly-tropical, possibly-Mediterranean island setting of Piranha Bytes' Risen. Not only is it home to gruff, foul-mouthed bandits, Gestapo-like warrior-priests and rhetoric-spouting mages, it's also inhabited by enormous moths, giant crickets, ferocious wolves, psychotic gnomes, oversized vultures, skeletons, demons and so many other horrifying creepy-crawling nasties that it makes the Australian outback look like the Norfolk Broads. How anyone survives even a brief jaunt between neighbouring towns is genuinely puzzling. But it's upon the dark shores of this wind-swept hellhole that our nameless protagonist finds himself after the ship he's stowed away on is destroyed by a storm - and all he's got to defend himself is a tree-branch club and the heaving bosom of the storm's other survivor, Sarah.

He and Sarah's bosom discover in due course that Faranga is an island steeped in magical history, where recently strange events have seen ancient ruins rising from the earth, bringing with them all kinds of sinister powers and dark beasties. By way of a kind of dark-age quarantine, the human inhabitants of the island have created the Inquisition, a group of powerful mages and warriors who stop anyone and anything from leaving the island and attempt to keep order in and around the mysterious ruins. Of course, when the game begins, all that the protagonist knows is that he's lost. Well and truly lost. So he reluctantly leaves Sarah's bosom behind at a rather sinister-looking abandoned shack and goes off in search of answers and, quite possibly, a replacement pair of breasts to stare at.

Taking the form of an action-RPG, Risen uses the ship-wreck as a great exploration mechanic, forcing you to look around to get your bearings and making it nothing short of crystal clear that you've not washed up in a friendly place. It instantly draws comparisons, flattering or not, with Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, apparently giving you a massive open world to explore as you see fit - although it doesn't take very long for the game to start shepherding you down a path towards one of three class choices. This is not to say that the game is restrictive; in fact, it's anything but, granting you a great deal of freedom and choice in the things you do and the places you visit - but it certainly dictates what you do first and how you meet the characters in the game and which of whom will become your enemies or allies, and how you'll shape your own character. There's no class selection as such; instead you'll be given the choice of visiting one of three hubs: a bandit camp headed by Don Esteban (voiced by John Rhys Davis at his hammy best) where the focus is on strength, defence and physical combat; the Monastery of the Order, where you can learn staff-fighting techniques as well as a mix of magical abilities; or Harbour Town, where the Inquisition can teach you the fundamentals of becoming a powerful, all-conquering mage. Where you go makes a big difference, with each area offering different skills, mission structures, equipment and quest-lines to follow.

Piranha Bytes have worked hard to make this choice more than merely an aesthetic one. Although you start the game as a piss-weak, over-confident bob-a-job man, giving you such a clear cut decision to make - whilst not strictly forcing you into a particular role - allows you to mould a character that suits your play style. As already stated, the protagonist isn't immediately customisable, but Risen offers you many ways to shape his destiny in the form of learnable crafts. Prospecting and goldsmithing, metal-working and thievery, alchemy, trophy-taking and treasure-hunting are all there to be learned from trainers dotted around the island. Though, truth be told, despite the ingenuity of the craft system it does sometimes feel a little bit superfluous. In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, such gather-and-craft exercises are extremely useful for encouraging networking, socialising and perpetuating the economy of the game world, whereas in a single-player offline game you're really only crafting things for yourself, and so the one-upmanship of showing off a particularly difficult-to-craft item is almost entirely absent. Still, that's not say it isn't a welcome distraction at times.

As per usual, experience is gained by killing monsters and completing quests, and experience increases your character level and hit points. In order to go deeper than that, though, you'll need to spend a lot of gold - as well as the Learning Points accrued each level - to increase your skills. Simply farming monsters isn't enough in Risen; you need to harvest trophies, pick herbs, loot corpses and raid abandoned buildings (and, should you choose, not-so-abandoned buildings) in order to keep the gold coming in to afford skill upgrades. It's not a particularly original system, granted, but it does keep the pace of the game ticking along nicely even outside the main quest line. Of course, various alchemical ingredients, potions, books and scrolls will also increase attributes and abilities should you be lucky or sneaky enough to stumble upon them.

The quests themselves, while padded out by the standard go-here-and-retrieve-this fare, are quite diverse. One particularly controversial side-quest helped the game earn itself a big fat ban in Australia because it requires you to sell "weed" to Monastery novices in order to flush out a killer; while another asks that you poke your unwelcome nose in as many places as you can to uncover the conspirators trying to overthrow Don Esteban. It makes a nice change from the constant kill-to-advance dynamic seen in a lot of western RPGs, and keeps things interesting as the storyline leads you and Sarah along a twisty-turny path towards destiny and the inevitable confrontation with the sinister, Andy Serkis-voiced Inquisitor. It should be said, though, that the map is pretty rubbish. Not particularly detailed, proceedings aren't helped by the fact that you can't make an individual quest "active" or mark it on the map. Instead, you have to open the quest menu by pressing left on the D-pad, then select the mission you want and tap RT on the map menu until you reach the quest map. You have to do this every time you want to check your geographical progress towards an objective, and it becomes very annoying very quickly - and quite often you'll find that the only thing highlighted for a particular quest is the actual quest-giver, meaning it's no help at all and the only way to proceed is to go door-to-door with every NPC you can find like a grinning fool to decipher your next port of call.

If adventure-wise at least it all sounds a little bit Oblivion-lite, that's because it is. Although obviously Piranha Bytes have carried over a lot of ideas - particularly in terms of visual design - from their own Gothic series, the influence of Bethesda's masterpiece can be felt throughout, from the animation and herb-picking to the overall atmosphere. Believe me, though, this is a compliment, because where it makes a departure from such emulation is where it begins to fall down. For example, Risen's combat is just not that good. Suffering from the same ice-rink physics as Oblivion and Fallout 3, it sometimes feels like your character is gliding rather than running. There's also no lock-on unless you're blocking, which is all well and good until you release B to either attack with A, dodge with X or counter with Y and you lose focus on the enemy - who will usually choose this moment to dart behind you with uncanny, ninja-like speed and precision. It's annoying, and could have been solved so easily just by including a simple targeting system. None of it is helped by sudden slowdown or occasional frame-rate issues that can cause you to judder like a Harryhausen skeleton halfway through a sword-stroke. Also, drinking potions during combat is almost impossible, since as soon as you activate the potion quick-button you put away your weapon and stand there like a complete idiot taking a swig. And putting distance between you and an enemy is incredibly difficult since the opponent AI is set to "Charge!" at all times. Ranged combat and magic is also thus-hampered, at least until you become proficient and powerful with either. Oh, and you have to remember to sheathe your weapon before you loot an NPC or you'll lethally stab them in the face, thus destroying any quest line involving them and usually encouraging any of their friends or allies to jump in and beat you to the ground. Interestingly, most NPCs won't kill you if they defeat you in a fight, but will instead floor you and then rob you of money or possessions. It's a good incentive to stay on the right side of people.

Graphically, Risen does nothing ground-breaking. The animation is a little bit clunky at times, and the individual NPCs are quite often recognisable as the same ten people with different hair and beards, but that's entirely forgivable in a large, open-world game. The lighting and weather effects are nice and help to add layers of ambience to almost all the game areas, though the draw-distance is not particularly impressive and quite often bushes and trees will appear almost out of nowhere. Atmosphere is also helped by the inclusion of a few notable actors in the voice cast, such as the aforementioned John-Rhys Davis and Andy Serkis. Although it sounds like a bit of a Lord of the Rings reunion, it's certainly not, since most of the rest of the cast are soap actors or TV also-rans and, let's be honest, John Rhys Davis was part of In the Name of the King… The script isn't bad, either, but the game does occasionally become unnecessarily sweary, which may be a poorly-executed stab at grittiness on Piranha Bytes' part that feels almost utterly out-of-place.

Thankfully shipping without some kind of half-arsed multiplayer, Risen is the kind of game that will probably get played by fans of the genre but overlooked by everyone else, which is a bloody shame really, as there is a decent game behind the niggles - and one that impresses more often than it disappoints. Though outclassed by Bethesda, outdone by Lionhead and outgunned by Bioware, Piranha Bytes still have enough originality and flare to be counted amongst the better Western RPG developers working today, and if they could just learn to take all the great elements of their back catalogue and ditch the irritating little problems they could possibly follow up Risen with something quite special in the future. For now, though, if you're looking for an involving and absorbing, albeit flawed, hack-n-slash RPG - or even just a little sun, sand, sea and sorcery - Risen's Faranga might just be the destination for you.

Reviewed by Mick Fraser for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).