This usability/user experience review is for the single-player campaign of Ryse: Son of Rome on PC (played with a controller). For what it’s worth, I paid the equivalent of the number of hours it took to complete the campaign ($6, Steam sale FTW).
Perk system
What stood out to me as an excellent usability feature is the perk system assigned to the d-pad. This mechanic allows you to choose between perks, which include gaining health, xp, focus, or damage bonuses from performing executions; each one is assigned to one of the directions on the d-pad. As you progress through the early stages of the story, you unlock each of these perks. Not being an overly-difficult game, I felt no need to experiment with the perks until I had them all at my disposal. Each time you switch between perks, a directional pad highlighting the perk you’ve chosen briefly flashes in the middle of the screen and is simultaneously reiterated with text under the health/focus bar in the top left corner of the screen. This was a welcomed addition because I hardly had the directions for each one memorized once I attained them all and it was very helpful when changing perks on the fly in between executions.
Tutorial blunders
Other aspects of Ryse: Son of Rome were not as functionally appealing. Notably, there are multiple scenarios throughout the game where there is a text-box pop up that pauses gameplay to give you relevant information or directions. This is inherently fine if it is a new situation and you wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do next; however, these text boxes do not offer a button-press prompt to continue. Instead, any button pressed dismisses the text. Countless times, while exploring for collectibles in the environment and simply changing the direction of main character Marius’ movement, I found myself accidentally dismissing the text without having the chance to read it. This issue could easily be rectified with the addition of a simple “Press A to continue,” which is a system used in almost every game ever!
Where is the advertised variability in the executions?
A famous quote by Julius Caesar is “which death is preferably to every other? ‘The unexpected.'” It is quite the contrary in Ryse: Son of Rome; the expected becomes quite boring. The game allows you to spend valor or gold (unlocked via single-player and multiplayer, respectively) to level up skills, such as health and focus, and unlock new executions. By the end of the campaign, I had almost every single and double execution unlocked. From the menu, it seemed that unlocking these would allow Marius to perform many different variations of executions, potentially based on different button combinations or enemy encounters, but that did not appear to be the case. While there were many unlockable double executions, I only recall performing around three throughout the entire campaign, so not only is the lack of variation an issue, but also the number of times double executions were actually completed during a combat scenario. There was no clear way to perform them even though there were countless scenarios where Marius was surrounded by enemies. Why was I bothering to spend valor on unlocking all of these in the first place?
Focus mode change blindness
During focus mode, where Marius can slow down time and perform flurries of attacks on completely vulnerable enemies, the screen would turn a shade of yellow. Being that the whole execution system is predicated on quick-time events where you must be able to react to colored cues (i.e., blue yellow, green) on your enemy, I’m assuming you can guess where this is going. This makes it incredibly difficult to determine when your enemy is lit yellow prompting you to continue with your execution resulting in many poorly-timed, or completely missed, executions. A simple fix to this would be changing the color of focus mode since the colors for the execution logically correspond to buttons on the controller. Similar issues with the camera occurred a handful of times, where it would get stuck behind something in the environment, such as a pillar, during an execution resulting in enemies becoming hidden from view, ultimately resulting in pressing the wrong button or poor timing for the ensuing execution.
Immersion killers
The remaining points are more user experience issues rather than usability issues. Ryse: Son of Rome is a pretty game to feast your eyes on and, in such a game, I want to be immersed with visually-stunning sights. As with many games so visually-appealing, it is also a linear game where it is rarely a head-scratcher to figure out where to go next. Throughout, the visual cue/indicator for where to proceed are items such as blue blankets and flags. For me, personally, when a game utilizes a cue that is unnatural to the world it is trying to build, it is quite the immersion killer; it was just plain odd to be climbing up two random blue blankets on a ledge in the forest.
Lastly, during sequences where you’re against enemy archers, an arrowhead in a circle appears in the middle of the screen indicating when you could either evade or deflect incoming arrows. This was fine by design; however, there was one scene, following a battle, where the indicator remained on the screen even though I was all alone wandering down a dark path. Again, not a usability issue, but certainly an immersion killer.
Conclusion
Execution – lather, rinse, repeat. Ryse: Son of Rome is quick visually-appealing romp through Rome with a surprisingly entertaining story and, albeit repetitive, combat (very much a watered-down version of the Batman Arkham series). While it does some things nicely in terms of usability, it is not without its issues.