Ryse: Son of Rome is a game that has been in the making for several years finally launching alongside its new platform, the Xbox One. Ryse is the story of a Roman Solider named Maximu… er sorry Marius Titus, who’s story from being a grunt in the Roman legions takes him on a familiar tale of avenging his families deaths and becoming an all together badass and general bringer of doom. And it’s fun for the most part.
As a console gamer, it’s a rare treat for a game to be set in Roman Times and not something many developers have tapped into in the past. This third person action game is set in the era of Emperor Nero and despite leaning heavily towards historical fiction rather than fact, the setting from the grandeur of Rome to the wilds of Britannia have been brilliantly recreated. At this point it would also be worth mentioning Ryse is a gore fest, from start to finish there is no let up in bloody carnage, be-headings, executions and some visceral on screen depictions of massacre and torture. It doesn’t relent, even in the multiplayer.
Ryse is a brawler, but a more refined one. The combat feels both fluid and entertaining, especially when you start to rack up big combos against a virtual army of barbarians on screen. The combat itself doesn’t feel dissimilar to the Batman Arkham series with both fluidity and sense of action. The way in which combos work is the more you score hits, and fend off enemy attacks, adds to a combo count up in the top left corner of your HUD. A combo ends when you get struck by an enemy attack much like other games in this genre. The more points you score the more experience you gain to spend on a skill tree system that allows you to increase you overall health and various focus abilities that can be used to help you gain an advantage in combat when the odds are against you. When an opponent is beat, a skull appears over their head which means you can perform an ‘execution’. Executions are activated by a simple press of the right trigger, which then takes you into a slow motion event where you are prompted to press specific buttons to chop off various parts of your opponent’s body. While executions are satisfying and make a nice break in the usual fast paced combat, there is no way to fail them and that sort of defeats the purpose of playing a game to me. If you miss all the prompts you still execute them in the same way but receive less experience. Someone once referred to this part of the game as, ‘as fun as hitting numbers on your phone’. Now I don’t agree with that totally, but I get the point he was trying to make. The campaign is around 10 hours long dependant on difficulty so if you have a good amount of time to game it can feel over and done by quite quickly.
What makes Ryse stand out from the other launch titles is the graphics. Whilst not running at the supposed benchmark resolution of ‘1080p’ Ryse looks stunning and performs just as well. Despite many on screen opponents, and times frantic game sequences, I haven’t witnessed a single stutter in the game play or the FMV portions. Roman armour glints in the sun, the water ripples almost hypnotically and the Barbarians filthy rags and faces are there for all to see. Ryse’s perspective of the player on the screen is close, almost dragging you into the TV. It’s as if Crytek did this to force you to see how beautiful the environments are, and you know what they were right to do so. Ryse is a beautiful game no doubt about it. So beautiful in fact I found myself at times just walking around some levels taking in the vistas, but alas the liner path in which the developers want you to take is as far as you can explore, still it’s quite something. Ryse will definitely set an early benchmark for other Xbox One games to hit on a visual scale and it may take them some time to do so.
Ryse also incorporates a multiplayer mode in which you and a fellow combatant team up in the Coliseum for a bit of co-op horde mode fighting, over a number of different themes and objectives. The Coliseum changes its floor to reveal different settings in which you and a buddy fight off a few waves of bad guys until you can vanquish the boss at the end. Whilst this is fun with a friend on Xbox Live and the best way to play it, you can oddly play it solo as well. The aim is to rank up and gain gold by finishing each multiplayer campaign to equip your nameless hero with better weapons and abilities to take into the next match. There is also the feature of picking a god to fight for before each round. The god you choose determines your focus power whether it be health regeneration or more combat focus against your enemies. The more you fight for one god you will eventually unlock a gift which is a weapon or shield that will help you in your fight against the amassed hordes of enemies in the Coliseum. Like I say it’s fun for the most part, but levelling up is slow at first, and the achievement to get to level 100 is a slog and a bit of a grind to be honest. I am also a big advocate for eradicating micro transactions which feature heavily in Ryse multiplayer, to attain more gold straight away. Play the game to get better don’t buy your way, as in the long run its far more rewarding. Still Ryse multiplayer is good on the whole and I just hope future DLC changes up the game modes and feel fresher, as I can see how the multiplayer can become stale and repetitive if they release more of the same.
All in all Ryse is solid. It combines pretty visuals with a setting that”s fairly unique. Very few developers have attempted a Roman environment and I think here Ryse succeeds. Sure the action is sometimes excessively over the top, and yes there is more than a hint of Hollywood influence but all together the story is well written and the Characters are gorgeously represented. The twists in the tale are enough to keep the gamer entertained and engaged , pairing this with various difficulty settings, Ryse becomes a game you could happily play through more than once, and to be honest you probably will have to play through at least twice to attain all the achievements as collectables are easily missed. I like the gore and the violence, because this stage in history was an incredibly violent time to live in. I’m happy for the development team to take me down that path. Where the game fails however is repetitiveness. One battle feels like the next and the Execution system should have had a consequence if you failed to hit the prompts. I think Crytek have set the franchise up for a sequel nicely, but I just hope they can take it that next step further to make this a truly next gen experience. Overall, a fun game with a few flaws that spoil an otherwise entertaining title. Like all our review’s if you don’t agree, hit the link for the Community poll and tell us why and give it a score while your there.
Liam contributed 6 articles to ICXM between 2014–2015, covering game reviews, and Xbox news with a focus on hands-on impressions and verified-source reporting. Their bylines on the site span the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming. They post on X as @xboxmaduk.