{"id":12156,"date":"2013-12-08T00:19:01","date_gmt":"2013-12-07T14:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=12156"},"modified":"2014-05-03T18:28:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-03T08:28:07","slug":"ryse-son-of-rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=12156","title":{"rendered":"Ryse: Son of Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rysesonofrome\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Xbox One<\/em>
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/strong>Crytek<\/em>
\nPublisher:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong> Microsoft Studios
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

What makes a good launch game?\u00a0 It goes without saying that it should be fun to play but over and above that, you want to feel vindicated in the purchase of your shiny new (expensive) hardware.\u00a0 The best launch games effectively showcase the features of the new system and give you an idea of whats to come.\u00a0 Super Mario World, Tekken, Mario 64, Halo, Oblivion, Wii Sports<\/em>.\u00a0 These are some of the great games that helped launch a system.<\/p>\n

Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome<\/em> originally started out as a showcase game for the Kinect on Xbox 360.\u00a0 It has since been delayed and rebuilt from the ground up as a gory Roman hack n’ slash lauch title for the Xbox One.\u00a0 Players take the role of Marius, a promising and accomplished legionnaire who returns to Rome after fighting a campaign abroad, only to witness the brutal murder of his family at the start of a Barbarian invasion on the capital.<\/p>\n

Maruis swears revenge on those responsible for his family’s death and he embarks on a cross-country campaign as a relentless killing machine, impaling and severing the flesh of hundreds of hapless insurgents as he seeks answers.\u00a0 Eventually, he uncovers a conspiracy that seems to run all the way to the highest authority in the Roman empire.<\/p>\n

Ryse<\/em> did not get particularly charitable treatment from the enthusiast press in the lead up to the Xbox One release.\u00a0 It was flagged as the poorest of the launch titles and identified as having repetitive and shallow gameplay.\u00a0 Having played the game through to its completion and dabbled a bit in the multiplayer arena modes, I feel as though this game has been dealt a needlessly harsh hand.<\/p>\n

\"ryse2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Combat is the heart and soul of Ryse<\/em>.\u00a0 This is a game with very little trimmings.\u00a0 There is no exploration of the Roman capital, no strategizing with fellow centurions before the battlefield and no delicate conversations navigating treacherous Roman politics.\u00a0 Marius is made for fighting and thats just about all he does.\u00a0 Occasionally, he will be called upon to lead a squadron of fellow soliders but most of this game is about how you stick the pointy end of your sword into the eyesocket of the guy standing across from you.<\/p>\n

The mechanics of the combat are similar to the Batman Arkham<\/em> series where there is an emphasis placed on timing your strikes so that you can chain them together to fill a combo meter.\u00a0 Although you will almost always face multiple enemies, they come from the Steven Segal Bad Guy school of fighting where they very kindly stand around in a circle and take turns to attack you one at a time.<\/p>\n

Once you get the hang of things, you will be ‘rewarded’ for your finesse in combat with increasingly brutal executions.\u00a0 Fill your combo meter to capacity and you unlock a bullet time mode where you run around and punt people with a giant boot to the mush that Gerard Butler would be proud of.\u00a0 For a game that is largely grounded in realistic looking combat, this Bullet Time Boot comically sends the enemy flying backwards about ten or twenty metres.\u00a0 It is comedy gold.<\/p>\n

Booting people in the face and mutilating barbarian hordes is good, simple fun.\u00a0 It works because the graphics are absolutely gorgeous and the game is so short it doesn’t get a chance to overstay its welcome.\u00a0 Even a button masher such as myself clocked the game in roughly eight hours.\u00a0 It has to be said, the setting really helps the game shine.\u00a0 Everyone loves a good Roman epic and the video game industry has been surprisingly conservative in tapping that market.<\/p>\n

This game really captured my imagination and made me want to see a fully realized Roman action adventure game with more development time and broader scope in the design brief.\u00a0 Although Ryse<\/em> looks incredibly polished, it shoots the whole experience from close up so we never get to soak in a full scale war or lose ourselves in the streets of Rome.\u00a0 It’s the same sort of way HBO covers big cities and wars in Game of Thrones<\/em>.\u00a0 I understand in the case of Ryse<\/em>, its because its a launch game that has to meet a deadline but all its succeeded in doing is whet my appetite for more.<\/p>\n

Who knows?\u00a0 Maybe Crytek themselves are up for it?\u00a0 I believe a sequel to Ryse<\/em> is all but confirmed.\u00a0 It’s my hope that that game is less God of War<\/em> and more open world GTA with swords and sandals.\u00a0 Just imagine.<\/p>\n

That’s enough talk about the game that I want Ryse <\/em>to be.\u00a0 The game that we did get is still entertaining, popcorn fun and is a perfect showcase to curious friends and onlookers as to what your shiny new hardware can do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What we do in life, echoes in Xbox<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1710,1709,1718,1643],"class_list":["post-12156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-crytek","tag-ryse","tag-ryse-son-of-rome","tag-xbox-one"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12156"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14173,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156\/revisions\/14173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}