Should You Play Ryse - Son of Rome (PC)

**Should You Play "Rise: Son of Rome" on PC?**

**Visuals: A Feast for the Eyes**

The PC port of "Rise: Son of Rome" leverages the CryEngine to deliver stunning visuals. The game boasts highly detailed character models and environments that shimmer with clarity, especially at 4K resolution. This makes it an appealing choice for gamers prioritizing visual fidelity, offering a near-perfect depiction of ancient Rome.

**Gameplay: A Mixed Bag**

While visually impressive, the gameplay mechanics receive mixed reviews. Combat is repetitive, relying heavily on button prompts without the depth or variety seen in titles like "Shadow of Mordor." The lack of a stealth system further limits strategic options, making combat feel formulaic and less engaging.

**Controls and Usability**

The game's control scheme is rigid, with limited customization beyond preset profiles. This can be frustrating for players preferring keyboard/mouse input. Additionally, the Xbox One button prompts aren't adapted for older controllers, despite being an easily fixable issue.

**Performance and Features**

"Rise" runs smoothly on PC, with minimal bugs once system issues were resolved. The inclusion of all DLC adds value, though the campaign's 5-7 hour runtime may feel short for some players seeking longer content.

**Value Proposition**

At £35, "Rise" is pricey unless you're solely interested in showcasing your PC's graphical capabilities. It offers good value if purchased during a sale or used, but may not justify full price for those expecting a deep narrative experience.

**Conclusion: A Decision Based on Priorities**

If breathtaking visuals and exploring Rome's grandeur are your primary interests, "Rise" is worth considering, especially with the right hardware. However, those seeking a rich, engaging gameplay experience might find better value elsewhere. For now, it's best suited as a supplementary purchase for graphics enthusiasts or a completionist addition to existing console owners.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello what is up guys and welcome to should you play Rise Son Of Rome this is of course the PC port or maybe you can't use that word PC version of the Xbox One game well the XBox One exclusive rise Sun of Rome it's developed by K Tech and because of that reason it's using the cry engine and it's not going to really ruin the surprise to say this is just an absolutely gorgeous game we get on that more a bit later it's worth noting that I have played this game on the Xbox One and of course it does run out a lower resolution on the Xbox one but the game play is the same it's the same game the options menu provides many things you can see we've got some pretty standard game settings uh you can change the controls if you want you can okay control SK I think you can't actually rebind the keys though I think you can only change between presets which is quite annoying but for a game like this I much prefer to use the controller anyway in the graphics menu we have this which is my new favorite thing new favorite PC setting which is rendering resolution how does that differ from window resolution well if you're running a 4k monitor and say you only have one GTX 970 or you have a 770 or something like that which realistically isn't powerful enough for 4K but you know so you have this 4K screen you want to get the most out of it if you set your rendering resolution to about 80% and then you set your window resolution to to the full 4K then you're going to get the 4K overlay uh everything's going to be nice and sharp it will upscale the rest but you're actually going to save yourself the frames per second while getting similar image quality which is great you can go the other way and use super sampling as well so you can see I can either run it at one and a half times or two times which is essentially just going to improve the image quality through reducing jaggy lines so very similar to antialising graphicss Quality I've got here on custom but you've got low normal and high take your resolution I don't think you can change that's automatically set as far as I can tell depending on how much uh well Ram you have in your uh texture vram I should say make that very clear native upscaling so that is um linked to that so upscale if you turn that off the window thing will go away full screen pretty obvious vsync and lock frames a second lock frames a second will cap it at 30 so if you got a lesser power powered rig and you're running the thing at 60 frames a second 60 HZ I should say but you only 1 30 frames a second for a smooth experience then you're going to want to use this we go to Advanced we every all of these only go up to high so we got shading object Shadows particle animation motion blur I like to leave off but if you want to leave that on you know if you're a fan of motion blur then sure by all means and then temporal antialising which does a good job and anistropic filtering it's worth noting that if you set it everything to high then that goes to eight times rather than 16 times for some reason so you have to change that you get all the DLC so if you want the DLC you've got it um how much You'll Play of the multiplayer I'm not sure that is just essentially a theater esque mode I'll show you that yeah I might show you that in a minute but the campaign is obviously what this game is all about so I'm about 5 minutes into a level and you can see that this game is just beautiful I'm not quite sure how whether it's as good as crisis I mean it is using the same engine so it certainly should be but everything on the screen looks good gous there are very few things that look out of place like these leaves you know I'm being particularly picky but literally look at it it is very beautiful character models are incredibly detailed and even running at 4K I only managed to get about 20 frames a second off a single GTX 980 at Max settings but it looked absolutely beautiful so if you have the hardware and it's definitely worth doing the game play however does not get quite as much praise from me um essentially what you have is this wheel thing that she says do you want extra do you want to gain Health do you want to gain uh this boost thing do you want to gain attack damage or XP so you select one of those so you you kind of have to semi micromanage that but not really there's no stealth system you just have to kind of go up there and attack people and let's be very clear I've just gone from playing Shadow of Mordor on the PC uh to playing this game and that does not help rise out at all because simply put the gam playay just isn't as good all you really seem to do is try and hack people down you can block you block using a light attack using uh X and then you use these button prompts to do an execution and they look pretty good don't get me wrong they look pretty nice uh you can do this boost thing as well bang I'll show you a second one I'll get some I'm not that great it but it just the whole thing just doesn't feel quite as smooth as something like the man system you could maybe say that that's because it's trying to be more realistic but then again it's not very realistic is it oh I'm going to I'm going to die in a minute need to take this guy out so it's all right once you actually get used to the actual combat but this is really all the game is sometimes you got to like do some arrows but you see if I deliberately all right I was going to say if I deliberately Miss I'll show you here if I deliberately miss one and press X I just get this recruit here so it doesn't really make any difference at all it just means you get less points and then you use these points to actually upgrade your abilities so I'll show you that now you go into skill upgrades and then you have these things you can upgrade Health focus and then your actual XP and boost gain there we go but I kind of just just do it really I don't really think about what I'm doing it's not like some of the other systems when I spend about five minutes actually uh in the menus choosing what's going to be best it's kind of you know it doesn't really seem to make that much difference if you ask me so it is a bit of a shame but I think actually there weren't that many people that were really looking forward to getting this game on PC to actually um experience the games it was all about the graphics and on that front it's a big success it runs very well it hasn't had any um really major bugs or anything there's been a couple of times uh that it crashed due to low Ram but I believe that was because I was uploading 200 photos at the same time so we let that off and it hasn't done it since there you go I died the other thing as well that's a bit weird is you oh ouch the other thing that is a little bit weird I'm playing with the Xbox 360 controller and it uses the Xbox One Button prompts not a major difference but I have no idea why they couldn't change them or at least add a you know clause in the code the way it works now is that there's like a Loop that always searches for a controller I don't get why they couldn't have one you know two different if statements one for if it's a Xbox One controller and one for if it's a 360 controller it just seems like it would have taken someone an hour to put that in but you know I'm not a gamees design I'm not sure so that's a little bit weird but I'm sure you can you know get over that but I don't get why they didn't change that just seems a bit weird to me I mean not many people use an Xbox One controller yeah so if you like Buton prompts great but if you actually want some rich solid gameplay I'm afraid there's not that much to be seen here there's plenty of different environments the game itself is going to take you between five 6 7 hours maybe and there are more Collectibles but I personally can't really see many people doing that it's just a tiny bit too repetitive if you ask me so even something like Batman the combat can get a bit repetitive after a while but obviously you've got plenty of story and stuff to do while there as well and exploration but this is just 100% linear game using this game play and I can't really recommend that anyone buys it at full price if they want a really nice big solid game if you do want a game to show off your new graphics card then actually this isn't going to be a bad shell whether you want to do that at full price though is another matter there is no Benchmark which I think is a big opportunity missed a lot of people will be getting hold of this game because they want to see how good it can look and push their rigs to the max especially with um the 4K uh scaling that it's got cuz it does look very good at 4K or the textures pop and it looks pretty fantastic so why there wasn't a benchmark in it I think that is a bit silly really you got to do heavy attack there we go heavy attack so outside a few cool looking executions I can't say there's much here for you and if you it's one of those gam if you picked it up in the Steam Sale I think you could actually get your money out of it but at the moment at least I think the RP was £3 35 here in the UK correct me if I'm wrong I'll put it in the uh description below if that's a mistake but for 35 I think to be honest you can do quite a bit better you've got stuff like Shadow Mordor that is at the moment looks maybe not quite as good but it's certainly one of the best looking games I said it was one of the best looking third person games I've ever said so it kind of feels a bit of Rises Thunder there and along with that you get a much deeper core game with a lot of stuff to do and unfortunately that just isn't the case with this game but I think most of us knew that was going to be the case obviously the reviews for the Xbox One version so the actual reviews of the game itself rather than the platform it's on has been out for a while so I think most people are expecting that so yeah you'll get some enjoyment out of it but if you really do want to pump up all the settings you will need a powerful rig as well bang anything I would say like a 680 770 maybe 780 and you'll be able to hit all the max settings you do need quite a bit of vram to actually do it so maybe actually the 680 with its 2 GB of RAM isn't going to quite be enough it is an unfortunate Trend now that all these ports of the uh PlayStation and Xbox One games use more vram but that's just because of the shared me memory architecture off new Next Generation consoles it's quite hard to talk and combat at the same time no we go there we go done yes so should you play Rise well if you like fairly repetitive button prompt gameplay then yes if you want a game that is going to keep you entertained for hours and you're going to get loads of your you know good value for money like most of us do I can't say I can recommend this game for you not full price anyway if you do want something that looks absolutely beautiful um has quite a lot of multiplayer DLC maybe you've played rise before then I think actually yes this probably isn't a bad bad shout for you you can see that we're on act four and there are um eight yeah eight acts so there's a fair amount of stuff to do but it's not going to take you that long and personally if I PID £35 for this game full price I think I would have been disappointed don't forget though that there is that multiplayer um I might put that in another another video in what you call it a casual player I can't even remember the name of my own series now but yes this has been rise this has been the PC Centric should you play and the answer is should you play Rise not really because there's not actually that much to play but like I say looks absolutely gorgeous I wholeheartedly encourage you to actually go and take a look it is very interesting on the graphic side and if you do have the hardware and you can get it at a decent price might not actually be that much of a bad shell so thank you very much for checking out this full review of Rise um there's loads of good stuff coming up on the channel you might have noticed that I mentioned um that I've tested this out in 4k how have I managed to do that what's changed Hardware wise find out on the channel very soon if you'd like this video give it a like if you dislike this video give it a dislike and of course subscribe to PC Centric for more videos like this and other game reviews as well as other videos on PCS gaming and technology so thank you so much for watching and I will see you next timehello what is up guys and welcome to should you play Rise Son Of Rome this is of course the PC port or maybe you can't use that word PC version of the Xbox One game well the XBox One exclusive rise Sun of Rome it's developed by K Tech and because of that reason it's using the cry engine and it's not going to really ruin the surprise to say this is just an absolutely gorgeous game we get on that more a bit later it's worth noting that I have played this game on the Xbox One and of course it does run out a lower resolution on the Xbox one but the game play is the same it's the same game the options menu provides many things you can see we've got some pretty standard game settings uh you can change the controls if you want you can okay control SK I think you can't actually rebind the keys though I think you can only change between presets which is quite annoying but for a game like this I much prefer to use the controller anyway in the graphics menu we have this which is my new favorite thing new favorite PC setting which is rendering resolution how does that differ from window resolution well if you're running a 4k monitor and say you only have one GTX 970 or you have a 770 or something like that which realistically isn't powerful enough for 4K but you know so you have this 4K screen you want to get the most out of it if you set your rendering resolution to about 80% and then you set your window resolution to to the full 4K then you're going to get the 4K overlay uh everything's going to be nice and sharp it will upscale the rest but you're actually going to save yourself the frames per second while getting similar image quality which is great you can go the other way and use super sampling as well so you can see I can either run it at one and a half times or two times which is essentially just going to improve the image quality through reducing jaggy lines so very similar to antialising graphicss Quality I've got here on custom but you've got low normal and high take your resolution I don't think you can change that's automatically set as far as I can tell depending on how much uh well Ram you have in your uh texture vram I should say make that very clear native upscaling so that is um linked to that so upscale if you turn that off the window thing will go away full screen pretty obvious vsync and lock frames a second lock frames a second will cap it at 30 so if you got a lesser power powered rig and you're running the thing at 60 frames a second 60 HZ I should say but you only 1 30 frames a second for a smooth experience then you're going to want to use this we go to Advanced we every all of these only go up to high so we got shading object Shadows particle animation motion blur I like to leave off but if you want to leave that on you know if you're a fan of motion blur then sure by all means and then temporal antialising which does a good job and anistropic filtering it's worth noting that if you set it everything to high then that goes to eight times rather than 16 times for some reason so you have to change that you get all the DLC so if you want the DLC you've got it um how much You'll Play of the multiplayer I'm not sure that is just essentially a theater esque mode I'll show you that yeah I might show you that in a minute but the campaign is obviously what this game is all about so I'm about 5 minutes into a level and you can see that this game is just beautiful I'm not quite sure how whether it's as good as crisis I mean it is using the same engine so it certainly should be but everything on the screen looks good gous there are very few things that look out of place like these leaves you know I'm being particularly picky but literally look at it it is very beautiful character models are incredibly detailed and even running at 4K I only managed to get about 20 frames a second off a single GTX 980 at Max settings but it looked absolutely beautiful so if you have the hardware and it's definitely worth doing the game play however does not get quite as much praise from me um essentially what you have is this wheel thing that she says do you want extra do you want to gain Health do you want to gain uh this boost thing do you want to gain attack damage or XP so you select one of those so you you kind of have to semi micromanage that but not really there's no stealth system you just have to kind of go up there and attack people and let's be very clear I've just gone from playing Shadow of Mordor on the PC uh to playing this game and that does not help rise out at all because simply put the gam playay just isn't as good all you really seem to do is try and hack people down you can block you block using a light attack using uh X and then you use these button prompts to do an execution and they look pretty good don't get me wrong they look pretty nice uh you can do this boost thing as well bang I'll show you a second one I'll get some I'm not that great it but it just the whole thing just doesn't feel quite as smooth as something like the man system you could maybe say that that's because it's trying to be more realistic but then again it's not very realistic is it oh I'm going to I'm going to die in a minute need to take this guy out so it's all right once you actually get used to the actual combat but this is really all the game is sometimes you got to like do some arrows but you see if I deliberately all right I was going to say if I deliberately Miss I'll show you here if I deliberately miss one and press X I just get this recruit here so it doesn't really make any difference at all it just means you get less points and then you use these points to actually upgrade your abilities so I'll show you that now you go into skill upgrades and then you have these things you can upgrade Health focus and then your actual XP and boost gain there we go but I kind of just just do it really I don't really think about what I'm doing it's not like some of the other systems when I spend about five minutes actually uh in the menus choosing what's going to be best it's kind of you know it doesn't really seem to make that much difference if you ask me so it is a bit of a shame but I think actually there weren't that many people that were really looking forward to getting this game on PC to actually um experience the games it was all about the graphics and on that front it's a big success it runs very well it hasn't had any um really major bugs or anything there's been a couple of times uh that it crashed due to low Ram but I believe that was because I was uploading 200 photos at the same time so we let that off and it hasn't done it since there you go I died the other thing as well that's a bit weird is you oh ouch the other thing that is a little bit weird I'm playing with the Xbox 360 controller and it uses the Xbox One Button prompts not a major difference but I have no idea why they couldn't change them or at least add a you know clause in the code the way it works now is that there's like a Loop that always searches for a controller I don't get why they couldn't have one you know two different if statements one for if it's a Xbox One controller and one for if it's a 360 controller it just seems like it would have taken someone an hour to put that in but you know I'm not a gamees design I'm not sure so that's a little bit weird but I'm sure you can you know get over that but I don't get why they didn't change that just seems a bit weird to me I mean not many people use an Xbox One controller yeah so if you like Buton prompts great but if you actually want some rich solid gameplay I'm afraid there's not that much to be seen here there's plenty of different environments the game itself is going to take you between five 6 7 hours maybe and there are more Collectibles but I personally can't really see many people doing that it's just a tiny bit too repetitive if you ask me so even something like Batman the combat can get a bit repetitive after a while but obviously you've got plenty of story and stuff to do while there as well and exploration but this is just 100% linear game using this game play and I can't really recommend that anyone buys it at full price if they want a really nice big solid game if you do want a game to show off your new graphics card then actually this isn't going to be a bad shell whether you want to do that at full price though is another matter there is no Benchmark which I think is a big opportunity missed a lot of people will be getting hold of this game because they want to see how good it can look and push their rigs to the max especially with um the 4K uh scaling that it's got cuz it does look very good at 4K or the textures pop and it looks pretty fantastic so why there wasn't a benchmark in it I think that is a bit silly really you got to do heavy attack there we go heavy attack so outside a few cool looking executions I can't say there's much here for you and if you it's one of those gam if you picked it up in the Steam Sale I think you could actually get your money out of it but at the moment at least I think the RP was £3 35 here in the UK correct me if I'm wrong I'll put it in the uh description below if that's a mistake but for 35 I think to be honest you can do quite a bit better you've got stuff like Shadow Mordor that is at the moment looks maybe not quite as good but it's certainly one of the best looking games I said it was one of the best looking third person games I've ever said so it kind of feels a bit of Rises Thunder there and along with that you get a much deeper core game with a lot of stuff to do and unfortunately that just isn't the case with this game but I think most of us knew that was going to be the case obviously the reviews for the Xbox One version so the actual reviews of the game itself rather than the platform it's on has been out for a while so I think most people are expecting that so yeah you'll get some enjoyment out of it but if you really do want to pump up all the settings you will need a powerful rig as well bang anything I would say like a 680 770 maybe 780 and you'll be able to hit all the max settings you do need quite a bit of vram to actually do it so maybe actually the 680 with its 2 GB of RAM isn't going to quite be enough it is an unfortunate Trend now that all these ports of the uh PlayStation and Xbox One games use more vram but that's just because of the shared me memory architecture off new Next Generation consoles it's quite hard to talk and combat at the same time no we go there we go done yes so should you play Rise well if you like fairly repetitive button prompt gameplay then yes if you want a game that is going to keep you entertained for hours and you're going to get loads of your you know good value for money like most of us do I can't say I can recommend this game for you not full price anyway if you do want something that looks absolutely beautiful um has quite a lot of multiplayer DLC maybe you've played rise before then I think actually yes this probably isn't a bad bad shout for you you can see that we're on act four and there are um eight yeah eight acts so there's a fair amount of stuff to do but it's not going to take you that long and personally if I PID £35 for this game full price I think I would have been disappointed don't forget though that there is that multiplayer um I might put that in another another video in what you call it a casual player I can't even remember the name of my own series now but yes this has been rise this has been the PC Centric should you play and the answer is should you play Rise not really because there's not actually that much to play but like I say looks absolutely gorgeous I wholeheartedly encourage you to actually go and take a look it is very interesting on the graphic side and if you do have the hardware and you can get it at a decent price might not actually be that much of a bad shell so thank you very much for checking out this full review of Rise um there's loads of good stuff coming up on the channel you might have noticed that I mentioned um that I've tested this out in 4k how have I managed to do that what's changed Hardware wise find out on the channel very soon if you'd like this video give it a like if you dislike this video give it a dislike and of course subscribe to PC Centric for more videos like this and other game reviews as well as other videos on PCS gaming and technology so thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time\n"