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Review: Ryse: Son of Rome

Ryse: Son of Rome is not the quicktime simulator you all seem to think it will be.

It’s not your fault; after seeing it at Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference earlier in the year and then playing it shortly afterward, I thought it was nothing but an early Telltale game on steroids. Thankfully, it’s not.

Ryse follows the exploits of Marius Titus, a brave (yet ugly mug) who works his way up from simple Legionnaire to Centurion. Maruis’ family was cruely slain, and you control him as he fights to avenge them as much as he fights for Rome itself. Whilst you’re probably better going into the game with a little Roman history behind your belt, the game eventually does fill in the blanks as you go on.

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Combat is less quicktime-based and closer to something resembling the Batman: Arkham series, just at a very dumbed-down level. You’re essentially given all the tools to fight in the first level of the game, and while you may have to use different combinations of strike, parry, and open alongside pilums (aka Roman spears) as you progress, your evolution ends there. Once you’ve beaten up someone enough, you can choose to hit the right trigger to begin an execution.

With executions, your enemy will flash a colour that corresponds to one of the Xbox One controller’s face buttons. Yes, that’s kind of quicktimey, but not overly so. If you don’t hit the right prompts, the execution goes on as normal, but you don’t pick up an execution perk. Perks will give you greater XP, health regain, focus meter or a damage boost. If you’re horribly against the idea of the quicktime event, just keep on slashing at enemies; they’ll eventually fall.

XP is used to unlock different executions and bigger boosts that they’ll deliver. If for some reason you need to level up straight away, you can buy Gold from the Xbox Store to pad yourself. Microtransactions are here to stay, apparently, but it doesn’t mean we need to like them.

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Focus is something akin to sword-based bullet time, though admittedly I only used the function once. Playing through the campaign at Centurion, its second highest difficulty level, I found the game to be ridiculously easy. Essentially, back an enemy into a corner, hit “Y” to open him up, then “X”, “X” for two hits, and then “Y” to open again. Rinse, repeat. The only reason I didn’t play Ryse’s hardest difficulty is because it’s locked until “New Game Plus”. Eww.

Throughout the campaign, you’ll be given combat choices; selecting one option might mean less bad guys are on the screen to fight at the cost of catapults launching projectiles at you. If you’d rather take out the projectiles, that usually means you’ll have more baddies to slash through. It’s not much, but it’s a nice break from normal combat. On the flipside, going into formation mode with your Legion to block arrows and then throw pilums? Boring as hell.

Developer Crytek and their CryEngine are known for impressive visuals, and Ryse is no exception. The game is gorgeous. Characters look very realistic, only occasionally heading into uncanny valley territory; without ruining too much, I laughed at a scene that meant to be traumatising near the start of the game, simply because a character screaming out in grief looked super weird. To counter that though, Marius delivers an eye roll a bit over halfway through the game that had me drop my jaw in disbelief. I didn’t think a video game could simulate such an expression and have it look so believable.

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Crytek have really tried to embrace new Xbox One features, and have pre-programmed game clips record themselves through the campaign when you hit certain conditions. It’s kind of nice to have an epic battle recorded, but it’s awkward when the clip records and you die a second later. That’s not really a glorious battle I want to remember. More often than not, you’ll get a recording notification and just think, “that’s okay. I don’t really need to have that for later.” That’s really because Ryse has really awesome, fun moments (a tower defense section comes to mind) mixed with some pretty average ones.

Sadly, we really didn’t get a chance to play around much with multiplayer, but it’s there. We’ll have to revisit the functionality post-launch and report back with our findings.

Overall, Ryse is a very polished, extremely beautiful game that really does show off what the Xbox One can deliver. Combat isn’t stellar, but it’s good enough to get you through the campaign without feeling ripped off. I’ve a feeling that we won’t see a sequel for Ryse anytime soon, and that’s a real shame, because the franchise actually has some potential.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.