The Quill

Have you ever had the urge to pick up a blade and slice through hordes of people through and through ?

Gracefully freestyling your way from beheadings to amputations to neck stabs in cinematic slow-mo like a butterfly dancing in the flower fields ??

If so, you need to go see a shrink soon. Seriously, get that head checked by a doc.

But til then, to avoid being littered by bullets in the street by the cops or getting mass raped on your welcoming party to the asylum you can play RYSE Son of Rome to tame your blood lust.

So, whats this game all about you ask. Well, this game is many things actually.

For starters its a blood fest as you can imagine from my introduction.

Next, its freaking gorgeous. The lighting, texturing, modeling, animation, facial rigs, scene setup, acting, blood spats and stabbings are all top notch polished stuff and ran quite well in high detail on my humble old quad core pc rig so kudos!

Which brings us to the next thing this game is. Its feels like a tech demo for CryEngine3 too, the famous tech powering the Crysis series. You honestly get a feel that this game was made just to say that CryEngine can actually be used to make other AAA game titles.

Its also there just so that Cevat Yerli, the co-founder of Crytek, can put his name on the lead credit roll of another game as well it seems.

Now Microsoft and Deep Silver were also involved in this game. Though i dont know in which role exactly i do find their involvement welcome or else RYSE would have probably featured a roman soldier in some nanosuit if the Crytek devs had their full say in it.

So is the game any good? That’s what i hear you ask.

Well, kinda ya honestly.

Overall its fun. The gameplay is repetitive though honestly, even mechanical at times so this ain’t no God of War enjoyable slash fest. But its not a total fuck up either. You get used to it a bit.

But the reason you might keep playing it is for the epic visuals, well done sound and developing storyline. The story and characters are presented well i felt. And this isn’t your typical super hero quasi immortal antagonist, he’s your average Joe who rises to the occasion and i very much liked that.

So i wanted to know and ‘see’ what will happen next and i loved how the roman mythos was fused into the events of the story very gently without resorting to some blatant magical story backdrop bullshit.  You got the good guys you’ll like, the bad guys you want to hurt, and the half naked warrior princess you will be confused whether you want to bone and/or fight.

The campaign itself is spread over 7 chapters and takes you to a plethora of beautiful locales, from Rome itself, to cool rainy beach landings, to dense gorgeous forests, to a weird majestic Colosseum and back to Rome again butchering barbarians and gladiators and romans throughout to the background of sweet beautiful scenery.

The gameplay elements were very basic like i said. Kill, recharge focus, enter slow-mo, kill more and unlock more gruesome finishing moves as you go. I really wished it was different and more fun. Also the story had some obscure points as well where it becomes disjoint.

But i forgave it for its misses in the end for i am a nice guy and this game was generous to me serving me countless amputations within HD scenery.

You might not share this sentiment though, i believe this game will have a divided crowd over it.

So i wont directly recommend it, i’ll just say i myself enjoyed it overall.

It was a nice little unique adventure trip and the game wasn’t too long in single player mode to overstay its welcome.

So to Crytek and Deep Silver bravo !!

(tho i still cant believe i found no nanosuits or at least some frozen cephs ingame)