Andi Hamilton's Videogame Newsletter - Issue #48 [Ryse - Son Of Rome]

The first newsletter of 2023 and I'm already back on my 7/10 bullshit. Countless games sit in my backlog list, supposed all-timers and titles that are obvious gaps in my overall knowledge and here I am plucking some average title out and ending up enjoying it quite a lot!For what it is worth, for the handful of you reading this who have a Steam Deck - all of the gifs in this newsletter were captured by me using direct capture from the device, so you can see how well this game runs and how impressive it looks on Valve's remarkable handheld. Expect to hear that a fair bit this coming year.

RYSE From Your Grave.

So, as some of you may know, I treated myself to a Steam Deck for Christmas and I've spent a lot of time pissing about with it instead of playing games on the thing over the past week or so (and is absolutely something that I will be talking about in a future newsletter). Like all new consoles, there's a brilliant honeymoon period where you just want to see what it can DO - what fancy visuals it can pull off, being the main thing - but obviously things are a bit different when its a handheld device that doesn't claim to be the thing that can shift next-gen graphics.A thing that has changed recently is THE game to showcase a new machine. With the PS5, there's the lovely Astro's Playroom, which hits you with some powerful Playstation nostalgia and shows off the features of the new Dualsense controller and the Steam Deck has its own - the Portal flavoured Aperture Desk Lab - which shows off some of the hardware's capabilities, but neither of these hit the spot like a Super Mario 64 - a game which, at the time, looked like no other and offered an experience so far beyond other 3D titles of the period. F-Zero was on every SNES in Currys at launch, with the display TVs playing its attract mode, its then bleeding edge Mode 7 racing looking a cut above everything else around it. If it wasn't F-Zero, it was Street Fighter II, which was the first time you felt like you had an arcade cabinet in your bedroom.Speaking of arcades, I also remember the first time I saw the Playstation. A friend said he had one and another friend and I were sort of taking the piss a bit. "The PLAYstation? By SONY? The Hi-Fi people??" we said. Needless to say, once we'd seen Ridge Racer and Tekken running on the thing, we quickly changed our tune. The future had arrived. All of these are pretty good games but in the case of these showcase titles, sometimes they don't even have to be particularly good. Look to the PS4 and Killzone: Shadow Fall. I'm a fan of the series but Shadow Fall is a fairly weak entry but it looks absolutely stunning and, on day one of me owning my PS4, was enough to satiate my appetite for that glimpse at what the new generation of consoles was set to offer.

Enter, Ryse: Son Of Rome. An Xbox One launch title that scored 6-7 out of 10 which was lauded for its amazing visuals but rightly marked down for its simplistic combat, fairly limited mechanics and very linear progression. I imagine, upon its initial release, it probably did do a decent job of convincing new Xbox One owners that they'd made a good decision, but as time has gone on, I've heard a lot of people say it was no good and in my mind, it ended up filling the same space as The Order: 1886, which is another stunning looking but painfully linear and limited game. I've had it on my Steam account for an eternity and just never got round to playing it. I mean, why would I? There's a million other, better games out there.After spending a day or so installing things just to see how they ran, something made me think that Ryse would be a decent little benchmark test for my brand new toy, so I downloaded it and fired it up and honestly didn't intend to play much of it after I'd seen what it looked like in the first few levels. Once I'd had a little tinker with the settings, I got it running near maximum settings at a locked 30fps and started on the opening level - a barbarian raid on Rome, you take control midway through the battle and all hell has already broken loose. It's a spectacular start, as you'd expect from a game designed to be a system showcase piece. Straight into a big fight, the combat is fairly straightfoward - X is your attack, Y is a sort-of guard breaking shield strike, A is your parry/guard and B is a dodge roll, used to get out of the way of unblockable attacks. When an enemy is weakened, you can perform a finishing move on them - a cinematic kill that slows down before each hit, allowing you to press the corresponding face button to get a few extra XP points. You can't fail these little QTEs, so hitting the right button is literally just to eke out those extra points.Thing is, I found it all so immediately SATISFYING. Every strike feels big and impactful, with the close-in camera only adding to the brutality of every hit and slash. The parry window is extremely generous, so you only really get hit if you're over-extending yourself, which means you can make Marius - the protagonist - look every inch the badass Centurion, taking on hordes of maurading barbarians single-handedly. Those finishing moves are a bloody cherry on the violence cake, all look really rad and have a proper sense of power to them. It's a really meaty, chunky feeling game. And it feels GOOD. I was having a very good time with it, so I stuck with it. I've been pleasantly surprised by the whole thing.

It quickly becomes clear that every level is a completely linear corridor that you move through, getting into scraps with enemies and being funnelled through some quite spectacular set-pieces and past some still very visually impressive vistas. The story, although a fairly by-the-numbers tale of betrayal and revenge, is a decent enough setup for all the violent killing but there's some surprisingly good performances by the voice talent that makes it a bit more compelling than it has any right to be. Levels are fairly varied, so you've always got a new, great looking backdrops to look at between all the fighting and there's a cute aspect to the combat, where you can set whether you wish to get health, XP or other resources back from each finishing move you perform, that you can change on the fly. Again, very simple, but its enough to keep you on the hook while you wonder what the next visual spectacle will be.Just when the simplistic combat starts to get a little tiresome, the linear levels start to get a bit boring and the structure of fight, set-piece, fight, repeat starts to feel like its going to get old, Ryse pulls off its best trick - the whole thing is about six hours long. It doesn't outstay its welcome. It shows up, offers you a graphical treat for the eyes with some very breezy but solid combat mechanics, tells you a little tale about some Roman bullshit and then fucks off before any of it starts to piss you off. I'm not going to tell you that the issues people point at when talking about this game don't matter but I can't say that I didn't have a lot of fun regardless of them. I really enjoyed it. It's absolutely a 3/5 but when you're in the middle of a battle on a beach, a sequence designed to be some sort of Roman Empire equivalent of the D-Day Normandy landings, with flaming arrows flying overhead, lads dying left right and centre and some cool, tight angle camera work bringing you really close to all the brutal action, you can absolutely convince yourself that maybe its worth an extra mark on the score.My mind was made up when, in the middle of a scrap on a later level, an off-screen enemy fired an arrow at me. There's an indicator that shows when you can parry an incoming arrow and I hit A at the correct moment, deflecting the arrow using Marius' shield and it pinged off into the head of the enemy I was already fighting, killing him instantly. It was COOL as FUCK. An achievement notification popped up. The devs knew it was cool as fuck too.

Although likely to not be everyone's first choice game to fire up on their new Steam Deck, I can recommend it whole-heartedly if you're looking for something to really blow your arse off with what visuals your new handheld can shift and its a decent little game to boot. I didn't have an Xbox One at launch, but Ryse: Son Of Rome has ended up having an unlikely second chance at being THE game to show off my brand new console.

THANKS FOR READING.Please consider chucking a couple of dollars at my Patreon page if you like this or any of the other things I do.patreon.com/andihero