another year has come and gone and we're finally on the precipice of E3 again, after the whole affair seemed dead in fetid waters last year! that daunting triple threat of the pandemic, the organization leaking the private details of over two thousand journalists working in the gaming industry, and big-name publishers realizing they can create their own presentations and sizzler reels without a centralized expo to unveil everything at...it should have spelled the end of it all if you ask me, but obviously the trade event's a stubborn bastard. if you're anything like me, you completely forgot E3 was happening this year, so naturally you're a little bewildered and extremely wary.

i've seen most of these shows with friends since around 2012 and they're always horrid wastes of my time but i just keep on attending anyways. the whole things a sisyphean cry for help if you ask me. if you've been around the block, you might have heard of the occasional scandal when it comes time to present a game, and how this presentation often doesn't reflect the final product. just off the top of my head i can name countless instances of this kind of thing - killzone 2, the last of us, cyberpunk 2077, no man's sky, bioshock infinite, destiny, the bureau: xcom declassified, aliens: colonial marines, and so on and so forth. accusations get hurled around using the same tired old jargon - graphical downgrades, scripted events, tech demos, what have you. there's always a glossy veneer of 'too good to be true' in the eyes of many viewers. a lot of these demos and presentations appear conceptually similar and rote (you'll notice this in several of sony's E3 demonstrations) because, as neil druckmann pointed out in 2018, they're nothing more than glorified advertisements - demonstrations of 'real' systems working in tandem to convey authenticity while performing optimally, so as to show the game at its most radiant and alluring. this is the definition of an E3 demonstration that seems the most reasonable, even if it remains an optimistic endeavour as to whether or not everything will make it to the final cut, so to speak.

“So at an E3 demo you take complicated systems that are random and we’re making them deterministic and we play it a lot and rehearse it and choreograph it, so we’re showing off very specific things. But those are all real systems that players will experience when they play the game.”

what makes ryse unique in this regard is simple: all those pejoratives you've heard since time immemorial are apt descriptors for this title. this game offers the rare and unheard of opportunity of being the director and choreographer for a sleek, gleaming, counterfeit E3 presentation. from the moment that you're exposed to the menu's stark and brutalist UI, commonly aped in eighth gen games that had a GAAS element, ryse reveals one of the most sickeningly child-proof games i've ever played. i winced a little bit when i manned a scorpio and felt control wrested from my grasp as the title's obscene auto-aim jerked to life, spasming wildly the instance it detects an enemy hitbox to annihilate. combat borrows heavily from assassin's creed and batman, so every encounter is a bit of a snoozefest as you'll tap the same sequences of buttons rhythmically and efficiently. it actually also reminds me a bit of the lord of the rings games developed by EA redwood shores; your blocks are incredibly lenient, some sequences are overly padded to inflate the runtime of the game, and there's a sense of scale afforded to the experience's delusions of grandeur because it doesn't really stop, it just funnels you from action setpiece to action setpiece. as a crucial contrast, ryse is missing charm. there's none to be found here. the dynamic yet fixed camera angles of the LOTR titles led to some genuinely effective moments, combat allowed for ease of failure yet was easy to pick up and play, and obviously the IP itself brought life to the sometimes dry flavourings of the mechanics. not so in ryse. you'll marvel at the same five or six canned executions against the same five or six enemies across a campaign that feels much longer than it is despite a 6 hour runtime. there's no confidence here beyond a meager multiplayer experience and its admittedly crisp visuals, although they're hardly used to memorable effect. you'll play a mission that, as with dozens of other games, appears to crib from saving private ryan's visual palette, only superimposed on an ancient roman invasion of britannia, and you'll ask yourself if the comparison even registers before an achievement hazily manifesting on your monitor tells you that your brain was correct to subconsciously pick up on the reference. derivative doesn't even begin to describe it. add a limpdick narrative into the broth and the title becomes borderline insulting, it's not worth picking apart but i did laugh a lot at a character saying "son of rome...rise." there are five bosses here, three of them work the exact same, one of them has four phases despite each phase being functionally identical, and the final boss is a three minute long quick time event sequence that, just like the rest of the game's execution inputs, you don't even have to press the right button for in order to succeed. it's the kind of launch title everyone implicitly knows isn't worth it, but websites like ign have a gun to their head, so they can only award a 6/10 or 7/10 when they really mean 3 or 4.

awarded it 1 star instead of 0.5 because i enjoyed some of it the same sick and demented way i enjoyed drakengard. i like to flog myself from time to time what can i say