Ryse son of Rome

Well bought this one from the steam sale. It is mostly a quicktime event game masked as an action game. I sort of enjoy reading books and watching films about ancient rome, so I knew this interactive novel would be right on my alley. 5 € is basicly like renting a film, so I was not expecting high replay value.

However a word of warning to pc owners. This game stinks of a poor console port. There are 3 possible control setups, but none of them can be modified. So you can't even remap your basic controls. How difficult it would be to code something like that? Fucking lazy developers, I say. And this is a game where controls matter as the game is basicly one big quicktime event.

Anyhow, it seems like I have to once again rely on 3:rd party methods to customize my controls and I do not like it one bit. This is likely one of the most retarded things a dev team can do to a player. First they create a decent product, but don't bother coding such a simple feature. Something like this just pisses me off.

It's a damn shame they go for this approach...Shadow of Mordor, Arkham and this one would make for some damn combat systems, if they didn't take so much control away from the player.
As it is they're more enjoyable to watch than play.

It is indeed.

Thankfully Autohotkey seems to work decently with this game, so I managed to remap controls to my liking. Now I can actually enjoy this ancient rome romp.

However it is simply unacceptable that I can't do this via in game options.

Could be worse. Could be like Dead or Alive 5 where they couldn't even be bothered to learn how to use modern controller interfaces. You have to use an Xbox 360 controller for it to work or hack around to try and get your controller to work. Worse yet, if it even THINKS you have a controller hooked up somewhere then you MUST use it - keyboard only works when no controller of any kind is detected!

So is there actually anything to Ryse other than simply fighting stuff all the time?

Now, I hate quick-time events, but I don't see Ryse as a game which as them. What I hate is QTE done in a way like Max Payne 3 or Tomb Raider where your camera is completely changed and its more like interacting with a cutscene. I think Ryse's chaining of combos and executions is just engaging melee combat. It gets old after a while, but that's just the lack of RPG style progression. I'm sure with more maps and better loot, new movesets for weapons like Dark Souls...... Anyway, just my 2c

So Ryse is just another DarkSouls clone?
Thanks for the warning, I almost picked it before the sale ends.

joxer said:

So Ryse is just another DarkSouls clone?
Thanks for the warning, I almost picked it before the sale ends.

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Dark souls? Lol. It's nothing like dark souls. Closer to batman.

ryse is a crap qte fest, never finished it, got bored; now even the graphics arent impressive

Zloth said:

Could be worse. Could be like Dead or Alive 5 where they couldn't even be bothered to learn how to use modern controller interfaces. You have to use an Xbox 360 controller for it to work or hack around to try and get your controller to work. Worse yet, if it even THINKS you have a controller hooked up somewhere then you MUST use it - keyboard only works when no controller of any kind is detected!

So is there actually anything to Ryse other than simply fighting stuff all the time?

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Yeah it could be worse. I still think its weird how these corporations spend millions making & marketing these kind of games, but don't bother spending few extra hours to make basic controls rebindable.

As for your second question. There isn't really anything else. Its a hack 'n' slash game. The main story is however quite enjoyable and well writen. It is a very straightforward revenge tale, but it works. Just don't expect Ryse to be historically accurate at all. Its like they watched every known ancient rome blockbuster film and then made a power fantasy action game based on that. So If you enjoyed things like Spartacus, Gladiator,you'll find this quite entertaining thematically.

Visually Ryse is a beautifull game. Although the level design is very linear, locations are quite gorgeous and some of those scenes are quite breathtaking. In addition each level scenario feels quite unique, so it doesn't become too repetative. Although if you absolutely hate qtes, I must emphasize that this game is not for you.

Ryse is a relatively short game as I already finished it during the weekend on centurion difficulty, but I actually think this was a perfect lenght for this kind of game. Maybe one or two chapters more would have been cool, but I'm actually quite satisfied. I wasn't expecting a long game.

Dez said:

Yeah it could be worse. I still think its weird how these corporations spend millions making & marketing these kind of games, but don't bother spending few extra hours to make basic controls rebindable.

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What baffles me even more are games that allow you to rebind some controls, but not all. Here they've actually spent time & resources to implement control rebinding, yet they won't let you rebind every key.

Square did this with FF XIII, you can rebind certain controls, but if you're using keyboard controls, you always have to have backspace & the numpad as part of your control setup, which results in a lot of awkward hand movement between the numpad & backspace. It gets even worse in FF XIII-2 where they decided that having quicktime events.
And the ports of the two games are also so bad that having a controller plugged in is quite likely to make menus unresponsive, so unless you're lucky you have to use keyboard controls (actually, FF XIII-2 is so bad at this that anything other than a keyboard plugged into a USB port can make the game unresponsive, that includes your mouse or if you've plugged in your cellphone for charging).
I'm really glad I did not buy those games on their own, but got them in those square enix mystery bundle things, which at least made them really cheap...