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A solid short game. In a world where every new game is trying to be big open world experiences, Ryse stands out as a nice classic linear action game
Ryse is not perfect but it has a lot of fun worth experiencing especially at the low price point that it is. To finish the main campaign takes about 5 hours and that is without finding every collectible. To do that probably would pump up the experience to substantially more hours. Especially if you replay it at higher difficulties
Beyond the campaign there is also a gladiator arena where you can go solo or with a buddy (it does have matchmaking but there doesn't appear to be anyone playing it still so I was unable to find any random allies to play the arena with). The arena is quite fun and it is nice to enjoy the experience as a co-op experience with even co-op executions
In terms of the story, Ryse actually has an intriguing mythological story with multiple layers to it and I really loved all the main characters in the game they are very well designed, well voice acted and their stories are well written. It basically feels like a mythological version of the 2000 Gladiator film
Gameplay is solid, it isn't super deep but it is enough to be very enjoyable. You do have to like quick time events though as the game has a lot of QTE. The amount of QTE you do is up to you though in the combat. Basically you can initiate QTE executions on low HP or stunned enemies including some environmental kills but you do not have to do this you can also just kill the enemies with normal attacks and only use executions for the damage buff, XP buff or HP/focus regen it provides
Outside of the QTE executions your combat uses left click for a light attack, right click for a stun attack and you can also hold either buttons for heavy attacks so a heavy sword attack or heavy stun attack
While the combat is very enjoyable it does have some issues. At times it can be very hard to get environmental kills even if I lined them up it just refused to let me trigger it and instead would do a normal execution
Speaking of issues the game has some weird FPS issue not sure if this is unique to modern PC's or if this issue already existed at launch. I was able to fix it by changing the global overrides in the Nvidia control panel. For those with issues on Nvidia go to the Nvidia App/Control panel and on the global 3D settings set low latency mode to boost, set an FPS cap (I set mine to 142 but any FPS be it 60 to 142 works fine) and set power management to maximum performance and I turned vsync off in-game and I added below two lines to the system.cfg file in the game directory
r_FullscreenWindow=1
sys_highrestimer=1
Visually the game looks quite good especially considering it is a 2014 game
Overall a fun albeit short action adventure game. But one you will likely enjoy a lot especially if you don't mind or even enjoy QTE gameplay