Ryse: Son of Rome Reviews
If you can disengage your brain and just plough through the endless array of same-faced enemies, you'll enjoy the glorious visuals and well designed audio – but this is a game destined to be forgotten fairly quickly, even if it does help prove the Xbox One has more power than we first thought.
Ryse: Son of Rome is a magnificent demonstration of the Xbox One, but if we want to take it as a finished product, it loses by far, relegating it to the sea of titles that are played inversely proportional to how good they look.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
...a pretty game with a heap of promise that wound up as little more than an exercise in monotony.
At its core, Ryse is beautiful, flawed, but still enjoyable. Xbox One owners should definitely give Ryse a chance. Eventually. Maybe just not now, nor at its current price tag.
Sure, Ryse: Son of Rome is a gorgeous game, possibly the best looking Xbox One launch game despite its sub-1080p resolution. But really, it's more than that. It's slower paced, tactical combat is fun, even though it never evolves throughout the game.
If we will see more Ryse in the future, time will tell, but the base we currently have is very solid and only providing the game with a deeper combat system and more variety of situations, we would be facing a much rounder game,the failures of Ryse are intuited within a few hours, but these failures do not make the adventure and the story that it proposes to us totally satisfactory.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Ryse: Son of Rome might be the best looking game released on either the PS4 or Xbox One. Unfortunately, it's lacking in the gameplay department. You can tell that there's potential here, but it has yet to be reached.
There's no denying that it looks absolutely stunning, but sometimes a pretty face isn't everything and due to some extremely bland combat, Ryse: Son of Rome fails to be the killer app that many had hoped it would be. Still, for a launch title, you could do worse.
Ryse leans too heavily on its merely decent combat, but at least it looks really, really nice doing so.
Ryse definitely looks the part, but the gameplay simply isn't up to scratch. It feels unfinished, or like a hardcore title whose mechanics have been dramatically simplified for the Xbox One TV crowd. Thumb down.
In the five hours it took to complete Ryse, I experienced a whirlwind of excitement and disgust. I loved the sights, sounds, and basic combat, and loathed the finishers and gameplay deviations
At the end of the day, even though I had a good time playing Ryse: Son of Rome, it just didn't have too much to offer. Sure, it has online multiplayer and a gladiator mode, but these regurgitations of the single-player combat engine still feel repetitive and over-used. The story is shallow but well executed, with next-gen visuals and high-end sound production that make the experience worth having, if only once. I saw a lot of potential in Ryse: Son of Rome. With a little love, I could see a sequel to this game with several playable characters, combat styles, and a more diverse command structure that could seriously take this game to the next level. But for now, it is just a "pretty good game."
Ryse: Son of Rome rises above its rote hack-and-slash design with a handful of inventive ideas and a killer story.
RYSE's stunning visuals, solid story and a nearly unmatched cinematic flair, are unfortunately offset by simple and repetitive combat, and gameplay that offers little challenge.
Gladiator may have won Oscars, but Ryse is much more like the movie 300 – nice to look at, mindless and silly at times, and the kind of experience you'll probably forget as soon as the credits roll.
As good a showcase for the new console's graphics capabilities as Forza 5 – if only the gameplay was as beautiful
Ryse: Son of Rome is a gorgeous game that gives us a great sense of what the Xbox One can accomplish in terms of graphics. Sadly, the shallow combat doesn't shoot it passed your average 3rd person action game.
Ryse: Son of Rome isn't terrible. It has its gorgeous visuals, forceful combat system and relatively tight storytelling to recommend it. It's also short, unvaried, hampered by an obsession with QTE events and far shy of a complete game experience. As a game, it won't hold its own next to some of the third-party stars of this holiday season. It has neither the addictive, consuming multiplayer of Call of Duty nor the imaginative scope of God of War, but still holds promise for its next iteration, if that comes.
Still, beautiful visuals can only do so much to redeem a game, and as beautiful as Ryse is to look at, it's still more than a bit underwhelming to play. Which is sad, because, with a bit more thought put into the game design side of things, this could have been the Xbox One's standout launch title.