Well this was a pleasant surprise! Ryse had my interest way back when it was announced for Xbox Kinect of all things. It was heralded as one of the first “real first party title” for the addon & that intrigued me. However I never picked it up when it changed from a Kinect game to a Xbox One launch title… both because it lost some appeal just becoming a standard action/hack & slash game, but more importantly due to Microsoft’s horrific Xbox One launch marketing.

Now roughly a decade later I picked up the game from Steam cheaply &.. It’s a pretty fun time? Admittedly it’s a quite short game (beat it in 6 hours & I’m not a person who breezes through) but it was an enjoyable ride I’d say. It’s still a shockingly gorgeous game despite being like 11-ish years old & the combat is also pretty solid… Which is a relief because going in I had heard it was pretty dull, though it holds up without issue & has enough variation to be interesting + the executions are all quite varied & stylish.

In the context of this as a retail game that originally launched for 60$.... Yeah under those circumstances I’d rate it quite a bit lower, but at a fraction of that nowadays I would give it a recommendation to people who are drawn in by Ryse’s setting or just want to play a solid hack & slash game that doesn’t overstay its welcome.