Ryse Gameplay Video Combines Heavy Rain With Dynasty Warriors

If you've always wanted a quick-time event fighting game that allows you to fight lots of guys with pretty graphics and not have to worry about skill-based gameplay mechanics, then Ryse is the game that fits the bill.

German gaming site Pietsmiet.de managed to showcase some off-screen footage of Ryse from the GamesCom 2013 Xbox One exhibition. I'm shocked Microsoft didn't throw the Piets guys in journalist jail the way that poor guy from Jalopnik got Microsoft-arrested when he went snooping around trying to actually perform the duties of a real journalist.

There are more than 12 minutes of actual gameplay on display... it's not press-selected footage or fixed up to look a certain way for the public at large. Instead, we see unfiltered, unedited, hard-to-the-core 1 to 1 gameplay of Ryse in all its ancient Roman glory.

Now depending on what kind of game you're looking for depends on whether or not Ryse will appeal to you. While many people classify it as an AAA title it appears that it only fits the bill because of Crytek's CryEngine 3 and the visual weight that the engine brings with it. Stripping away the shiny visuals and post-processing effects, the core of the game fits closer in line with David Cage's favored quick-time event gameplay fused with the “kill countless soldiers” motif of Dynasty Warriors.

Unlike Tecmo Koei's thousand-army hack-and-slasher, Ryse focuses more on the intimate one-on-one battles. Players will have to strategically fight through and fight off opponents as if they were actually fighting these soldiers on the battlefield, using real-world style sword attacks, parrying and blocking.

I like what the developers tried to do with the game, insofar of trying to limit the arcade-style mechanics present in many of Tecmo Koei's titles. The problem is that the execution looks kind of sloppy so far, with poor hit detection, disjointed animation transitions and inconsistent collision spacing and clipping. It's hard to appreciate the more intimate fighting mechanics when they aren't that good.

With a release set for November I'm somewhat worried about how polished the game will be by the time it actually launches for the Xbox One. Hopefully we're looking at a several month old build (probably the same one from E3, which could possibly make the build more than six months old to date). If that's the case then we can definitely look forward to something more polished by the time it launches this fall.

You can learn more about Ryse, the Xbox One exclusive, by paying a visit to the game's official website.