So I finished up Ryse: Son of Rome...
Most of my thoughts on the game match up with @king3pj 's that he posted a while back. However, I would also like to add a few of my own observations.
First off, this game is incredibly easy. Outside of the last 2 chapters I never died in the game, and the times I did were due to not recognizing a pattern of some type. This is especially true with the final bosses, where it literally just comes down to getting the set battle timing down and blocking when appropriate. Most of what makes this game so easy is that you can get your health back by committing executions, and these are also incredibly easy. Basically, if you find yourself in a situation where your health is low in a battle, you pick out the weakest/easiest enemy, spam attack him a bit, and then pull off the execution and you'll get at least 18% of your health back. And blocking and rolling is so easy that it wouldn't take much practice to go untouched in the game.
And if you do end up dying, then you get to play "Load Time Roulette!" I've never seen a game with such inconsistent loading times. As with most unoptomized games, this game has to reload itself whenever you die. However, how long it takes to do this can vary GREATLY. Sometimes it can be "short" like 10 seconds, but most of the time it's long, like Duke Nukem Forever long. One time it took so long I honestly thought the game had crashed. I suppose the reason this didn't come up in more reviews is, like for me, dying is so rare that it's hard to complain about something you don't often have to deal with.
This game also has the worst implementation of microtransactions I have ever seen. When I say that, I don't mean it's like Star Trek: Trexels or other "Free to Wait" games. Rather, it's the opposite, to where it makes absolutely NO SENSE to use real money to advance your character because you get in game currency (in the form of XP) in great abundance. I know they removed this system in the PC release, and I'm not sure if they nerfed it or something for the One but I can't imagine this was put in with a great deal of thought, at least not from a money making standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I'm not COMPLAINING about this, but I just felt I had to comment on it.
Another thing I feel I need to comment on is that the ending of the game (and the last chapter really) sucks. The final "boss" is easy once you know the attack patterns (of which there are maybe 3) and then you're put in a sequence where ALL YOU DO is just execute people, then you win, and then the game tries to pull off an ending like was done in the movie Gladiator, but does it even worse than the movie did it.
Oh yeah, and this game is unfriendly to those that don't use/have the Kinect. There's certain parts of the game where you're supposed to yell commands to your troops, but if you don't/can't, instead you can hold down the LB button. However, the amount of time you have to hold it down is unreasonable at best. I shouldn't have to wait 5 seconds for my command to be executed simply because I don't have a Kinect. I know this came out when the Kinect was a mandatory accessory, but an update to lower the time would have been nice. And before you all say, "Oh come on, it's only 5 seconds!" keep in mind this is in the heat of battle, and having to hold down the LB button while you're still holding and pushing other buttons while playing the actual game is, if nothing else, uncomfortable, which isn't a physical feeling I should have while playing a game.
At the end of the day Ryse: Son of Rome was created to fulfill the role of "Launch Title Eye Candy," and in that regard it did the job well. It looks beautiful and the voice acting and cutscenes are done very well. However, at the end of the day it's a 5 hour game with very monotonous combat where you're literally fighting the same 12 or so enemies throughout the entire ordeal. It's hard to recommend a game like this because while it's not BAD and certainly can generate some fun, it's so generic and by the numbers are bare bones from a gameplay standpoint that you could easily do so much better. A game like this is a good candidate for a rental or if you can find it insanely cheap, like for $10. Something tells me that this will be the first "full" game that will end up on Games for Gold for the One, and if it does I can recommend it. You can load it up, plow through it in a weekend, then delete it and move on to something else. It's like the Micheal Bay production of video games.
Hopefully Sunset Overdrive will arrive soon, but in the meantime I've still been playing Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and Stick of Truth. I also have the last 2 levels of Shovel Knight left. I tried it a little while back and holy cow, those levels do NOT f*ck around..
Most of my thoughts on the game match up with @king3pj 's that he posted a while back. However, I would also like to add a few of my own observations.
First off, this game is incredibly easy. Outside of the last 2 chapters I never died in the game, and the times I did were due to not recognizing a pattern of some type. This is especially true with the final bosses, where it literally just comes down to getting the set battle timing down and blocking when appropriate. Most of what makes this game so easy is that you can get your health back by committing executions, and these are also incredibly easy. Basically, if you find yourself in a situation where your health is low in a battle, you pick out the weakest/easiest enemy, spam attack him a bit, and then pull off the execution and you'll get at least 18% of your health back. And blocking and rolling is so easy that it wouldn't take much practice to go untouched in the game.
And if you do end up dying, then you get to play "Load Time Roulette!" I've never seen a game with such inconsistent loading times. As with most unoptomized games, this game has to reload itself whenever you die. However, how long it takes to do this can vary GREATLY. Sometimes it can be "short" like 10 seconds, but most of the time it's long, like Duke Nukem Forever long. One time it took so long I honestly thought the game had crashed. I suppose the reason this didn't come up in more reviews is, like for me, dying is so rare that it's hard to complain about something you don't often have to deal with.
This game also has the worst implementation of microtransactions I have ever seen. When I say that, I don't mean it's like Star Trek: Trexels or other "Free to Wait" games. Rather, it's the opposite, to where it makes absolutely NO SENSE to use real money to advance your character because you get in game currency (in the form of XP) in great abundance. I know they removed this system in the PC release, and I'm not sure if they nerfed it or something for the One but I can't imagine this was put in with a great deal of thought, at least not from a money making standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I'm not COMPLAINING about this, but I just felt I had to comment on it.
Another thing I feel I need to comment on is that the ending of the game (and the last chapter really) sucks. The final "boss" is easy once you know the attack patterns (of which there are maybe 3) and then you're put in a sequence where ALL YOU DO is just execute people, then you win, and then the game tries to pull off an ending like was done in the movie Gladiator, but does it even worse than the movie did it.
Oh yeah, and this game is unfriendly to those that don't use/have the Kinect. There's certain parts of the game where you're supposed to yell commands to your troops, but if you don't/can't, instead you can hold down the LB button. However, the amount of time you have to hold it down is unreasonable at best. I shouldn't have to wait 5 seconds for my command to be executed simply because I don't have a Kinect. I know this came out when the Kinect was a mandatory accessory, but an update to lower the time would have been nice. And before you all say, "Oh come on, it's only 5 seconds!" keep in mind this is in the heat of battle, and having to hold down the LB button while you're still holding and pushing other buttons while playing the actual game is, if nothing else, uncomfortable, which isn't a physical feeling I should have while playing a game.
At the end of the day Ryse: Son of Rome was created to fulfill the role of "Launch Title Eye Candy," and in that regard it did the job well. It looks beautiful and the voice acting and cutscenes are done very well. However, at the end of the day it's a 5 hour game with very monotonous combat where you're literally fighting the same 12 or so enemies throughout the entire ordeal. It's hard to recommend a game like this because while it's not BAD and certainly can generate some fun, it's so generic and by the numbers are bare bones from a gameplay standpoint that you could easily do so much better. A game like this is a good candidate for a rental or if you can find it insanely cheap, like for $10. Something tells me that this will be the first "full" game that will end up on Games for Gold for the One, and if it does I can recommend it. You can load it up, plow through it in a weekend, then delete it and move on to something else. It's like the Micheal Bay production of video games.
Hopefully Sunset Overdrive will arrive soon, but in the meantime I've still been playing Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and Stick of Truth. I also have the last 2 levels of Shovel Knight left. I tried it a little while back and holy cow, those levels do NOT f*ck around..
