Ryse: Son of Rome is hack and slash story of a chosen hero from 3rd person view.
Story 3.5/5
Our character tells a story of his past. The story is interesting, however I had minor issue about our hero, but it all makes sense at the end. The characters are well done, some moments are predictable. It is a story of good vs evil, so it wasn't much surprising but pleasant nevertheless. The war we will be part of, is between Rome and Britons.
Gameplay 4/5
We are mostly fighting with sword and shield, on occasions with scorpion and javelins. There are few times we will command our units and lead them in formation. The slow time events are very important feature and are required to be mastered till the end game, however they're slowing down time so they're easy. Execution kills reward us with health or focus and are valuing our performance which doesn't seem to have huge impact.
We can unlock various stats and execution animations by gaining experience. I haven't been able to unlock all but most. They make our character stronger.
I wasn't initially very happy about boss fights but there are few, and the last ones are more challenging. The difficulty feels a bit off on Centurion, if not for bosses I'd say it's pretty easy, hence the time I spent playing it.
I haven't touched multiplayer, but worth mentioning it exists. Smart and custom matches, customize your gladiator.
Replay value 3/5
The game is linear and can't approach even the main objectives differently. It has some collectibles. Chronicles are comics. There are total 39 and our showing some of stories related to characters in game.
Scrolls are something like personal notes and there are 27. Vistas are nice pictures of places we visited. There is also music in collectibles unlocked.
The highest difficulty (Legendary) unlocks after finishing game on Centurion (Hard). Game saves on checkpoints and we can replay by chapters as well.
Graphics 4/5
Beautiful characters and great animations, cinematics all over the game. Some characters look a bit worse than main ones and enemies are same people, which makes it easy to differentiate their types and how to fight them.
I must mention that movement made me feel uneasy, and even after disabling the blur motion effect, I had issues, probably caused by simplistic control of character. Console port screams out loud here. Also some colored features trying to hold our hand.
Camera sometimes does not show close up executions from right angle, so we can not time them right by seeing them but sound helps despite that.
Hardware requirements?
Mid and High gaming.
Apart from some chapters, game ran well, and when it lagged it was only short a not interrupting.
How many hours?
5.
What games are similar?
Gameplay: Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Graphics: Dead Rising 4.
Verdict
7/10
It is fast burning fun. No much thinking and a lot of action moments with nice cinematics, decent story, and easy overall difficulty. I liked they added some extra touches to collectibles.
Combat gets a bit repetitive but it serves us some new features here and there, linear levels don't give this game much replay value and there's not really much to prove since game's pretty easy. Especially after we figure out how to beat bosses and time attacks.