Developer: Crytek
Publisher: Crytek,
Microsoft Studios
RRP: £11.99 (Steam) £14.99 (Humblebundle) £44.99 (Microsoft Store)
Released: 10th October 2014
Available on: Steam, Humblebundle and Microsoft Store
Played Using: An Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 6 Hours
A song once asked the question ‘War. What is it good for?’ Sadly I’m afraid that the answer that was provided in the song isn’t entirely accurate. War is actually very good for quite a number of things, not least of which is revenge.
At risk of putting people off reading the rest of the review I am going to place my final thoughts here. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. It’s an unoptimised, buggy and worse still, boring mess!
Oh, you’re still here? I’m surprised part of me doesn’t want to write any of this because I’d rather just erase the whole experience from my mind. But… even bad experiences can be worthwhile, I suppose. If I’m totally honest, I didn’t finish the game. It angered me too much when a bug occurred fairly late into the game made it impossible for me to continue. I even tried restarting the level to see if I could avoid it which I couldn’t.
So what is the hot mess that is Ryse: Son of Rome? Well, its an third person ARPG set during the Roman Empire (in case the title somehow didn’t give that away). You take the role of Marius, a Roman who has joined the army. He was due a quiet posting when right on cue tragedy strikes! Barbarians have somehow invaded Rome. Barbarians from what will become England…. Does anyone else see the lack of logic here? How in hell did barbarians get from England all the way to Rome and not just Rome but the center of Rome no less, without anyone seeing them?
Nonetheless, the barbarians do indeed get into Rome and proceed to do what barbarians do best, fuck shit up. In the process of this they kill Marius’s entire family and now he wants revenge.
It’s a pretty short game lasting around about six hours for the whole story campaign. Unfortunately I’m pretty certain that a lot of the six hour play time is cutscene related. This game seems to love to wrest control from the player to make them watch cutscene after cutscene. Sure, they’re beautiful but there are so many other ways to tell your story, especially within the medium of video games.
This game is quite the looker even now, however the counterpoint to this is that even on the lowest settings this game suffers from some severe lagging. I would say that’s the fault of my system but this is yet another time when I know my that should be able to handle it, even on a fairly high graphics setting as it has with other games that are more graphically advanced. The only conclusion I can come to is that the title wasn’t optimised very well as I have read other reports of people with similar issues.
Ryse: Son of Rome has the unique distinction of being the 9281st gane that uses an Arkham style combat system. The key difference being (besides the executions which well cover next) that it just isn’t engaging at all. It’s repetitive and dull, if you’ve played any of the Assassin’s Creed games or Batman games you’ll know this system very well.
Every game has a feature it tries to push, some even have a few. In Ryse: Son of Rome these features were the graphical fidelity and the executions, Executions are moves that can be performed on a weakened enemy that will have one of four affects; regenerating health, regenerating Focus, increasing the damage you cause or increasing the Xp you earn. You select the execution affect and once the enemy is weak enough follow the colour prompts to get the reward. The quicker you are with giving the correct inputs the more of an effect the execution has.
Executions aren’t the only move that Marius has in his arsenal, he can also perform a Focus move. When Focus is used it allows you to briefly slow down time and stun your opponents giving you more time to attack without fear of reprisal.
As I mentioned before though, the combat is pretty dull with the executions being the best part and even those get tiresome and tedious quite quickly.
As you perform actions you gain Xp. This Xp is converted into Valor which is used to buy skill upgrades and increase the effectiveness of executions. Gold can also be used in this way although that can only be earned in multiplayer or bought as a micro-transaction (because of course it can be).
In a wondrous piece of bad design the place that you spend these Valor points(or gold) is separated into two sections in the pause menu. You can either concentrate on upgrading your skills, which will make you more effective generally or you can spend them on upgrading the executions themselves which only come into play when performing said execution. Why couldn’t they be placed on the same screen? Would that be so hard? Yes, yes it would be because if you look at the menu screen you should notice that this game was built from the top down with the Xbox One in mind. Even its menu screen looks like the Xbox One (and Xbox 360 come to think of it) dashboard.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Assassin’s Creed (any of them)
Remember Me
