Ryse; Son of Rome is a special game that seems to be more of a glorified demo than a proper game, the story is quite simple, full of cliches, filled with predictable scenes and with even more historical errors and inconsistencies (come on, basically Nero has a secret underground door in the imperial palace, this is not Assassin's Creed) that you can count.

Marius, the main character is your everyday good guy, not very interesting and awfully plain. The other characters seem they are made from the same mold, but there is another problem, they look, sound and fell more like archetypes than proper characters, and that makes them annoyingly bad.

On another note, sometimes, the scenes are not well connected, as if gameplay was cut between scene and scene, w
When you combine that with the not so original story, you get a mediocre mixture of badly connected scenes that try to look like are having a deeper meaning than it shows. It has good moments, don't get me wrong, the story is now always boring, but in every corner there is something that did not fit.

The gameplay at first may be fun, but you grow tired of it really quick (after chapter 2 you have seen everything) because you'll be pressing the combination of X, Y and the right trigger, maybe occasionally you'll have to use the remaining buttons, so battles become a more tedious hack&slash with a constant executions in slow-motion (pressing X and Y, obviously). You can improve your skills by using the XP that you get by having QTEs all the time, but there is nothing to be unlocked; you will have the same attacks at the tutorial and the endgame, so there isn't any progression whatsoever.

The obligatory multiplayer is plain and simple, using exactly the same combination of pressing X and Y. It has no replayability and you'll stop caring about collectibles after chapter 4.

Graphically, in 2018 Ryse does not impress; it was released in 2013, using the CryEngine and by that time it was beautiful, but now it's just seems like a regular game. Every enemy looks and acts the same, so you'll be killing the same game over and over for 5-6 hours, the entire duration of Ryse; Son of Rome.

Even in sale, I don't know if I can recommend this game. I would really love a game that cared deeply about roman history, culture and I fear this game has stopped studios from making games inspired in roman history.