Review: Ryse: Son of Rome

Microsoft and Crytek want to take gamers back to Rome at launch on Xbox One in Ryse: Son of Rome, a revenge story that only the Romans can tell. While much can be said about the game’s performance on Xbox One, where it misses original targets like 1080p native resolution and 60 frames per second, there isn’t much to say about the game itself. Aspiring warriors will mash buttons and upgrade their warrior throughout a bloody, hyper violent campaign, but in the end you might want to hit snooze when it comes to Ryse.

Microsoft and Crytek want to prove many of Xbox One’s next-generation console features out the gate, but in attempting to do too much Ryse: Son of Rome falls flat. Crytek’s action game might have a place in the Xbox One launch lineup, but it’s not reason enough to be an early adopter.

Despite its status as another non-1080p non-60 FPS Xbox One game, Ryse remains far from a graphical failure even judged on the opening level alone. There are lots of nice textures throughout the adventure; explosions, flames, smoke, and other effects look great, and characters move and react believably. Visually speaking, Ryse is undoubtedly a next-generation game, but it plays like many last-gen games. Despite its good looks, you might get bored on your path to vengeance.

The B button rolls your character out of enemy attack range, the Y button breaks their defensive positions, the A button counters their attacks, and the X button deals the most efficient damage. You can build up a lengthy combo counter to increase the experience points you reap from combat, but Crytek haven’t really added enough to keep the grind of battle from becoming just that… a grind. Some sequences will give you javelins to throw at incoming enemies or a giant crossbow to fire at environmental traps and infantry alike. These don’t prevent the game from feeling like a button masher.

In short bursts, this gameplay will be more than entertaining enough for anyone just excited to experience a new game on an Xbox One on their big screen TV. The spectacle never really lets up in Ryse: Son of Rome. Cutscenes frequently direct you to new objectives and more combat, almost to a fault where the line between showing too much action and allowing you to do awesome things yourself gets toed. Sometimes what I assume would have been an awesome sequence was shown instead of played, or skipped over in a cinematic transition.

In the end you’ll get what you make out of the combat experience. Ryse could be great fun when you hit a zone where you parry an enemy’s attack, dodge another’s, slash a third foe’s chest, and then return to the first for a finishing blow. These quick time events, where you pull the right trigger and then tap either the X or Y button depending on the color weakened enemies display, happen constantly throughout Ryse to a point of extreme redundancy.

Further layers of combat like Rage of the Gods, which slows down time and lets you mash your way out of trouble, don’t alleviate the repetitive QTEs throughout the game. If you’ve been playing video games for a while, the finisher system won’t bother you. QTEs aren’t new and have appeared in countless games, so you know what to expect in Ryse. I prefer the Batman Arkham franchise’s approach to combat where new tools and modifiers get added as you progress through the game, but I also like third-person action games as much as I like first-person shooters. Moderate gamers will pace themselves and enjoy Ryse despite the game’s combat lacking in inspiration.

The overuse of QTEs shine a light on just how quickly Ryse’s campaign was thrown together after graphics were finalized, but the half-hearted attempt at making you feel like a soldier in command of a larger outfit is the real disappointment. Scripted events allow you to order your squad of Centurions around the battlefield, but these don’t make you feel like a grand leader. They just serve to give you different buttons to push every once in a while. Upgrades to your character also feel needless.

As you gain Valor experience points, you can spend them on greater damage or health or a bigger special meter, but if you never bothered to explore this menu it’s not like you couldn’t finish the game. Your character, Marius Titus, doesn’t inspire any feelings of ownership and thus upgrades don’t feel like they really matter either. It just feels like an exercise in the more mundane aspects of modern game design. Thankfully, cooperative gameplay keeps Ryse: Son of Rome from being a complete waste of your launch software budget.

Two players can join up and fight to hold certain points, assassinate specific enemies, and beat down as many barbarians as possible. If you and a friend have taken the plunge on Xbox One ahead of everyone else, you can still find a lot of entertainment in Ryse co-op. Objectives rotate around the arena, enemy types take turns, and generally a second player keeps the combat feeling more acrobatic and coordinated. You’re not wearing every enemy down, quick-time eventing each barbarian to death as you do in single-player. You’re dodging one enemy, rolling past your partner as he or she engages in the QTE finisher, all while pushing back a third attacker.

The whole cooperative experience feels more inspired than the campaign with a roaring crowd, excited emperor, and rotating scenery. If the entire campaign could have accommodated a second player, it could have made the difference between a boring solo outing and an entertaining romp through Rome.

Ryse: Son of Rome might not be the best use of your limited cash in an already limited software launch lineup, but it’ll provide great respite from Forza or Dead Rising for your second month of ownership, if the cooperative community holds together. Ryse lands far short of the splendor the Roman empire came to define, but the capital certainly hasn’t fallen yet.