Life On The Grid

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.

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.

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