Ryse: Son of Rome

Ryse’s story is delivered out of chronological order. Rome is crumbling under a barbarian assault, and Marius, a proud and decorated Centurion, is escorting Emperor Nero through his palace. One moment later, Marius is a fresh-faced greenhorn of the Roman army. As I progressed, I enjoyed learning more about how the circumstances became so dire. And despite the abnormal structure, the story was never difficult to follow even when it took a few unanticipated turns.

Loading

If you want to show off the capabilities of your shiny new Xbox One to your friends, Ryse is more than capable of lending a hand. Environments don’t just look terrific technically; they have great variety. There’s plenty of Roman architecture, but Ryse also takes you to beaches dotted with shipwrecks, trap-filled swamps, and Crytek’s signature lush forests. Characters’ animations look fluid and natural, even during hectic fights with dozens of fighters going at it. It sounds great as well, with special mention going to the excellent voice acting. Strangely enough, Emperor Nero’s sons sound a lot like Bane and the Joker from Nolan’s Batman films. If it’s supposed to be an homage, those voice actors nailed their roles.

Ryse, Rynse, and Rypeat

Ryse’s biggest issue is that not even halfway through its modest six-hour campaign, you’ll have seen and experienced a vast majority of your offensive options. Combat consists of basic hits, bashes, blocks, and heavy attacks. In most battles, you can chain these actions together in nearly any order and still be successful, which remains fun until the flashy animations start to lose their luster. There is a system in place to land perfect attacks, but those too are easy to execute once you understand them.

Loading

Stuck in the Past

What’s there isn’t at all bad, it just feels like a foundation for something far greater and more nuanced that never comes. Enemy variety does a bit of work to liven things up. Some foes are unblockable, some charge you, and some assault you with a flurry of dual-sword attacks. Dealing with them requires you to care about your blocks, attacks, and movements, which is fun until you figure out their repetitive patterns.

Many games of this style rely on upgrades in the form of unlockable combos and items to add mechanical depth. But most of Ryse’s are boring passive bonuses that don’t change the way you fight. Your health bar can be extended, as can your slow motion power-up. Executions, which are gory displays of dismemberment that Ryse revels in, are the other thing you’ll spend experience points on, but they’re focused more on the showy outcome than the work it took to make them happen.

Loading

When an enemy is weakened, you can initiate a brutal execution with one button tap. From there, you simply match your button presses to they color the enemy glows – either blue or yellow. You’re given ample time to hit the buttons, and even if you miss the execution still goes through. Hitting the prompt in time just earns you a higher rating for the kill and rewards you with more health, experience, or whatever else you have selected as an execution reward. Upgraded executions give you larger bonuses for completing them, but the input hardly changes. So what’s the point? This one mechanical decision managed to extract most of the danger from a game about burly, cruel men who savagely kill each other.

The standard hack-and-slash combat is occasionally broken up by special gameplay sections that, at the very least, give you a break from the norm. Sometimes it’s as simple as manning a crossbow turret with unlimited ammo and mowing down barbarians. Other times you arrange your warriors into a phalanx and march them forward into fortified territory, blocking arrows and chucking spears. Like your normal actions, none of the activities ask much of you. They’re about the spectacle, which, to be fair, is pretty impressive.

New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Boss battles aren’t common, but when they do rear their heads, they can be frustrating. On one hand, bosses often attack faster or have heavy attacks that can’t be blocked, which is a nice change from the rhythm of combat you’ll have grown accustomed to by then. On the other, Ryse likes to lean on the old regenerating-boss-health trick to extend the fights, but doesn’t bother to change up their behavior when their bar refills. You don’t fight the same boss in a markedly different way now that he’s really mad – you just fight him again.

Loading

The co-op multiplayer modes let you dismember enemies with one friend in the famed Roman Colosseum. Before each fight, you pick a god to serve, each with different bonuses. One player might allow both to recover health with executions, while the other might allow both to earn focus. Having to defend another guy, and thus preserve your own bonuses, is an extra layer of strategy that isn’t present in the single-player mode, and it’s badly needed. However, aside from ensuring the right player lands an execution at the proper time, the combat remains held back by the same passiveness of the campaign. The environment does shift constantly, with new blades, towers, and pits springing up every few minutes as the objectives change. It’s a cool way to keep the combat dynamic within one round.

PC Version -- October 9, 2014

Ryse: Son of Rome for PC makes this already great-looking game look even better, with support for high-resolution monitors and settings for shadows, shaders, and even the quality of animations. Our GeForce GTX 780-equipped PC ran Ryse without a hiccup, but mid-tier GPUs might have to settle for medium settings - which still look excellent.

The visual spectacle is the best thing about Ryse, which means the PC is the best place to play it. But as you’d expect for a port, this new version does nothing to correct any of the issues I had with Ryse’s repetitive combat when I played it on Xbox One. In fact, its new multiplayer mode, Survival, actually amplifies them a bit.

The premise is that you’re bleeding out, and you must constantly kill to keep refilling your health bar. (Because you’re a vampire, I guess?) I’d hoped for exciting pacing, but in practice you’re forced to do the repetitive tasks of combat over and over again even more quickly than normal. At least the multiplayer DLC maps are included in the PC package, which gives it some improved variety in scenery.