E3 2013: ‘Ryse: Son of Rome’ Hands-On – Pretty, but Dumb

Again, this looks really cool, but there’s no sense of strategy at all. The game is not trying to be a button masher (the better timed your moves, the faster you take down your enemies), but Ryse seems content to let you play that way if you want. Even so, the death blow for me is the constant quick time events. After a very short while, the game feels less about what’s happening on screen and more about remembering which button is where on the game pad. It’s like the whole game’s combat system is an extended game tutorial that never goes away.

You can ignore the button prompts and Marius will still kill the enemy, he just won’t do it all “fancy” like. There are also other combat options. You can order arrows to be fired on a group of enemies. And at one point Marius and his men formed a turtle formation and threw lances at archers on the wall. I’m not sure where the lances came from – Rob figured they stored them in their loincloths.

I made a point of asking the reps about the Kinect, which was placed conspicuously on top of each demo Xbox One console in the Ryse booth, but the demo was not Kinect-enabled. My understanding is that in the final game you will be able to use the Kinect to issue voice commands and point your troops in certain directions, but you can also just push the appropriate button to do the same thing.

Microsoft is really pushing Ryse as an example of what the Xbox One will be able to do. And yes, it’s really pretty. But it also lacks depth, at least as far as the combat goes. Maybe you’ll take Ryse out as a rental to have a little fun, but it’s probably not a game you’ll want to bring home to meet your mother.