Review: Ryse: Son of Rome

To say this is a pretty game is quite an understatement

I got this just out of morbid curiosity more than anything else after hearing not great things about the XBox One version saying that it was just all quick time events.  But after recent big award winner disappointments like Destiny and Shadow of Mordor, I thought I’d give an underdog a chance and I’ve always been a fan of the developer, Crytek.  Turned out I had a lot more fun with this than either of those combined.  First off, the most obvious point that smacks you across the chops immediately is that Ryse looks gorgeous.  Like, properly gorgeous.  So much so you may well find yourself stopping regularly just to gawk at the beautiful scenery.  Likewise, all the actors in the story are amazingly well represented and the voice acting is actually surprisingly good too.  The plot-line follows a re-telling of the well-known Roman legend of Damocles who is wronged by his commanders but returns from the dead to seek revenge on them.

“‘the Sword of Damocles’, an allusion to imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power.”

Although not the most original of stories, it also plays out nicely and at a good pace with build up to major plot points being tense and atmospheric.  And so, we come to the part that most complaints are centred around:  the game-play.  Yes, it can get quite repetitive.  Yes, there are only a handful of basic enemy types and skins and you will see them repeated very frequently.  Yes, a large part of it is quick time events.  But despite all this, I still had a lot of fun with it.  It is quite satisfying to cut and bash and chop your enemies apart in increasingly gruesome manners.  You gain experience and build this up to unlock more numerous and hideous executions as well as better gain abilities.  The gain abilities are used to recover health, gain extra EXP, focus or combat bonus after performing a successful execution.  Executions can be performed after softening a target up sufficiently and then triggering a time slow down followed by a series of button colour coded quick time events which perform fantastic limb chops, shield smashes and all kinds of other unpleasant things.

It is also a very messy and brutal game

That is the core elements of the combat.  There are other moves available such as dodges, blocks, taunts and such to help deal with the massive hordes of enemies you will face as well as your focus ability.  Once you have chained sufficient combos and filled your focus bar (with blood) you can slow down time again and become an almost unstoppable killing machine rapidly chopping and slashing through most defences instantly.  This becomes especially handy in later levels when the tougher enemies become much more numerous.  I think the PC version of this game became available to me at a good time after being frustrated and disappointed by numerous big release season games that tried to over-complicate what should have been simple things.  Ryse on the other hand, is very simple but what it does, it does very well.

“A modern take on a classic 2D brawler”

The best way I can describe it is that it’s a modern day version of an old school brawler like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe dressed up in super super HD visuals.  Yes, they were simple and could get repetitive, but they were also immense fun to play and were usually short enough that the repetitiveness never had time to become a huge issue.  The same can be said of Ryse with it taking me little over 5 hours to complete, but this felt like a good duration for this type of game to me.  Any longer and the repetitiveness may have become a bigger problem.  I think that the problem it faced at the time of the XBox One’s launch was that due to its gorgeous visuals, people were expecting an immensely deep game underneath that wasn’t there.  But to me, that doesn’t seem like Crytek’s thing usually.  Their way of doing things seems to be to make an immensely pretty game that is simple to play, but a lot of fun.  Much like the Crysis games.

And when I say brutal, I mean brutal.

Summary

It’s probably not going to win any game of the year awards and it’s no thinking man’s game, but Ryse is a short and guilty pleasure that provides a lot of bloody fun while it lasts.  However, if you’re someone who always craves depth and huge epics even in a combat game, you may be better looking to something along the lines of the Batman Arkham games.

Final Score: 3.5/5

Check out my Let’s Play footage below for a complete play-through

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh2oETQSyOwQqCDvIAxc8XBAtIEJbJIbX

Review: Middle Earth - Shdaow of Mordor

Many reviewers are touting this as a potential game of the year candidate.  Sadly, I was not quite as impressed with it as they were.  Read on to find out why.

Shadow of Mordor is an extremely impressive game in the visual department also needing 6GB of VRAM for maxed out settings on PC.

The combat is excellent being quite similar to the Batman Arkham games combo, counter, dodge, take-down system.  It’s a good system but you are quite unequipped for larger and prolonged battles in that you are not able to take much damage before going down.  High priority targets such as Warchiefs also often come surrounded by dozens of lower and middle tier enemies making actually getting to them quite tricky and trying to combat them specifically in a huge crowd even trickier.

“You know how to fight six men. I can teach you how to engage six hundred.”

There are not a lot of main missions but quite annoyingly, they are regularly padded out by other objectives which at first seem optional but then later become mandatory for you to complete before you can move on to the next main mission.  There are also a huge number of systems to get used to such as at multiple different ways to unlock abilities, upgrades, equippable weapon skills, focus (bullet time), context sensitive actions, etc.  These are all introduced at a blindingly fast pace with little explanation or time to get used to using them so many may go unnoticed making your life harder.

“One does not simply walk into Mordor”

The much lauded Nemesis system where the power hierarchy of the Orcs is interesting, but  doesn’t really add a lot to the game unless you want to get heavily invested in it which I didn’t want to really.  The Orc Warchief, Bodyguards and Captains can be killed off making some more vulnerable or allowing some to be usurped but they can never all be killed permanently as they just endlessly replace each other.  Kill one and another takes his place.  It also breaks the flow of combat every time you get meet a noteworthy foe in combat for him to say his piece and tell you his name.  While novel the first few times, this gets old quick as it even does it in the middle of combat totally breaking the flow.  Also should you die and go back to fight the same Orc again, you are reintroduced in the same manner each and every time which can get very very tiresome.

The Nemesis system is a novel idea but in reality adds little to the game-play unless you go very far out of your way to get mileage out of it.

It feels like this game is trying to aspire to be a true next-gen open-world game by adding in so many extra systems and concepts and optional side-quests.  But all these optional events turn out to not be optional at all and if you try to do the main missions without buffing yourself up through “optional” side-quests first, you’re going to have a bad time.  And seeing as the whole point of an open-world game is that it should allow you to play it your own way, I think it has failed quite badly in this aspect because it forces you down one path and to play it “the proper way” or else face an insurmountable difficulty wall.

 “Mandatory side-quests”

I didn’t end up finishing Shadow of Mordor because about 9 hours in, quite close to the end when I was reaching the end of the SECOND optional-but-not-optional Warchief culling, it ate my save and put me back to the start.  I decided to call it there and never touch it again as it had already irritated me quite enough.

Interrupting an intense battle to introduce an Orc with some smarmy lines. Cool the first few times. Tiresome after the twentieth.

Summary

Shadow of Mordor provides some excellent combat, stealth and free-running mechanics which work very well when they do.  But sadly, they are buried behind myriads of side quests that you are forced to do to be equipped to survive through the main campaign.  This is a major let down for me as I just wanted to play through the story of the campaign and not 100% all side-quests.  If you are the type of player who loves doing absolutely every last thing in a game, this will probably work better for you.   But if you prefer just to do main missions, you will have a hard time.  Due to me falling into the latter camp, I cannot personally recommend this one.

Overall Score: 2/5