Topic: Pure Xbox Game Club Double Bill - Banjo-Kazooie / Solar Ash (Apr)

I accidentally pressed buy gold when I was upgrading stuff and it took me to the MS store. Gold is free for some reason? I'm not sure if this breaks the games balance but you can load up on the free gold from the ms store to upgrade your skills and executions instead of gaining valour.

@ralphdibny Lol for some reason I thought you were referring to Xbox Live Gold. I would've been like, wow that's amazing, a glitch where you get free XBL Gold? lol

But yeah I don't think you're supposed to be loaded on gold so it's definitely going to make upgrading less fun. Although I don't know if it breaks the balance or not since I haven't noticed many differences in combat as I've been upgrading stuff, or at least when upgrading finishers.

@LtSarge ah that would be awesome if Live Gold was free! I'd just convert it all to Game pass ultimate

Yeah I meant the Ryse MTX currency, I just loaded it up with 75K gold, it doesn't make a huge difference because the upgrades are still locked behind XP anyway before you can spend gold.

I guess it's more to level the playing field in online multiplayer or just because the user base has dwindled, looks like there are booster packs available for gold and stuff like that.

I'm 85% through chapter 3 now. I think I am liking the game so far though I was a bit overwhelmed at first. I don't really like on the fly strategy so I was a bit worried when it was telling me to organise my troops but it hasn't been too intrusive so far. I quite liked it when it got me and the army to do the turtle formation with the shields, that was something I remember learning about at school.

I think this chapter is set in Dover which is quite interesting, but I don't remember seeing huge towers with massive chains when I've visited there! I was sort of saying this about the early god of war games too (which I'm also playing through) but I wonder how much of this sort of thing is historically accurate in terms of scale. Like the huge buildings and statues and those absolutely massive chains. It's hard to imagine something like that existing in real life. There seems to be some mystical elements to this game and obviously that's the same with the god of war series so it does throw the accuracy of the more realistic elements into question too.

Between chapter 3 and 4 they march from Dover to York?! That's a crazy distance to walk. I just searched it on Google maps and it would take 4 days without breaks or sleep and that includes a ferry to get across the Thames. I don't doubt that it is doable, it's just amazing. Especially if they were slowed down by constant battles, I'd imagine it took them weeks or months to get there. They haven't mentioned anything about horses so I guess they walked.

I played this game in November and i loved it. Stunning graphics and i enjoyed the combat especially as you get used to the blocks and counters. I believe I was able to execute 3 at once but i never went through a second playthrough once I had the hang of it to see how high i could bring that number up. I also enjoyed the shield wall moments, nice to take them all out without any damage. The story was great for me as well.

Really hope they make a sequel

I'm definitely enjoying it more the further I get into it. I'm about half way through now (end of chapter 4), venturing beyond the wall. Hadrian's wall I assume, not the giant ice wall in game of thrones lol.

I quite like the main character, he's got the face of Jon bernthal but the voice of Sean bean. I looked up the actor and he's done quite a lot of English Tele including a brief stint in "classic" channel 5 soap opera Family Affairs!

I love games that let you feel like a seasoned warrior without sacrificing tutorials and improvements (or without making it feel like the game plays itself). Really enjoying ryse so far.

Ok, I've finished Ryse Son of Rome and I really enjoyed it by the end. I think I'd liken it to a popcorn flick in terms of it being worth a watch. It took a while to warm on me but I was quite invested in Marius and his story by the end.

It was interesting have the quick time events have colour coded characters instead of button prompts. I'm not great at QTEs at the best of times so I probably hit about 50% accuracy on these. I'm not sure if it's less or more immersive to have a character be highlighted in a colour as opposed to having a huge button appear on screen.

The graphics are great, considering this is an early Xbox one game. I've definitely played more recent games that look worse. It is a fairly linear experience though so I imagine they had the resources to make the game look as good as it does.

The voice acting is great too, I don't know why historical films and games always have characters with British accents but here we are. I actually really rooted for both sides in this game. I liked Marius and Vitallion but I also really loved Boudica, she was a really good character. Also when Commodus first appears, he really sounded like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises which gave me a chuckle. I think that film came out the year before this game so I'm not sure when the dialogue was recorded and if the actor took some influence from that movie.

It's great to see some of the UK in this game too, I always like seeing places I've seen in real life in games and films. I've never been to York though, but the landscapes are familiar (but not the same) across a lot of the UK.

I felt some de ja vu at the beginning of mission 7, I actually think I've played a bit of this game round a mates house a few years ago but I never knew what the game was. I don't think I asked at the time.

So yeah, good shortish game in the end. I can't see there being a sequel because I imagine it was fairly expensive to make considering it only has a 6 hour campaign. Having said that, if they have the assets knocking about on a hard drive somewhere then maybe they could whip something up without too much cost. I don't think I'd be going back for the collectibles, I think the experience was better when I was just continuing through the story and occasionally stopping to look at the locations.

I finished the game a couple of days ago.

I enjoyed the combat and I thought the graphics were fantastic. I also liked the story-telling, and it made me want to find out more about Britain under the Romans, and about Boudica in particular. But for some reason I didn't enjoy the game very much as a whole.

Having thought about it, though, I'm not sure why 🤔
Maybe there wasn't enough variation in the enemies (I enjoyed the one-on-one "boss" fights - a few more of those would have been cool)?
Or, maybe I got tired by the kinda aimless wondering from one battle to the next..??

Would be interested to hear other people's criticisms of the game..!

@sib I think if I had played this game any other month, I would have agreed about the wandering aimlessly from each battle to the next. But I've been playing through early god of war games lately and they are like that but turned up to eleven. Monotonous combat against relentless waves of enemies and they outstay their welcome at 9-12 hours each. In comparison, Ryse Son of Rome was a breath of fresh air!

Honestly, I don't think this is a game I would recommend and tout as the best game I've ever played, but it's also far from being the worse in my opinion. I'd say it was a welcome distraction for a game pass game but it's not something I'd pay full price for. In terms of the sort of games I like, id put this at slightly better than average, maybe the top of the slightly better than average range at 7/10. Whereas I would put God of War 1+2 at around 4/10 (I'd put GoW: chains of Olympus at 6/10 because it's only 6 hours long and doesn't outstay it's welcome).

@Kaori-chan Welcome! I think you are spot on with your thoughts there! Except I played it in one day because I wanted to get it out of the way! As I've said I've been playing the similar God of War games and I don't like to play two similar games simultaneously because the difference in controls really confuse me.

Anyway, I'll add you to the tag list!

I played it over 3-4 sessions so was nice jumping back into the story and combat with a day or two in-between.

I got done with part 5 of the story yesterday, so I'm more than halfway through the game now. It's still a blast thus far and I'm enjoying the story more than I thought. I really like Marius' character! It's obvious that he doesn't agree with a lot of the stuff that his superiors do, such as the commander who executed the king of Britannia. I knew it was coming but it was still sad and nonsensical to kill him just because of a personal reason. Really goes to show that you can't really make leaders out of family members just because e.g. the father is a leader. Some people are just not cut out for the role, because a smart leader wouldn't let their feelings cloud their judgement. The commander was upset because the king handed him over to the horned people in the woods and they imprisoned him, so he wanted revenge by killing the king and that pretty much ruined all the relations between Rome and Britannia as well as peace between the nations. And I'm guessing that's why the "Barbarians" invaded Rome again at the start of the game due to the death of their king. What an absolute fool that commander was, I hope he gets what he deserves later on. Oh yeah, and the fact that Marius is constantly saying stuff like "Are what we doing really for the glory of Rome?". I'm glad that the developers designed the protagonist this way, because it's obvious that the players would feel like this and our feelings should translate over to the protagonist as well.

@LtSarge thats an interesting and more detailed reading of the power play for sure! I just kind of thought that that commander (Commodus) and to a lesser extent his brother Basilius and their dad Nero were just rotten to the core. They favour the idolatry that power affords them and in the case of the kids, it's all they've known so they are just wicked people. It was kind of amazing how similar their world was to today in terms of their class system and the different factions i.e. military, artists, politicians, workers (more likely slaves in those days) etc. I'm not sure if the game framed their society like that in order to make it more familiar to us. The game obviously has a lot of fiction in it (Nero died young and was childless in real life) but with the real life fall of Rome, I do wonder if that's the end game for every major civilization and whether the US, UK and Russia and associated nations will suffer a similar fate because of their faffing about in the middle East, south America and other places for the last 40 years. Obviously that wouldn't be good for me as I live in the UK and (perhaps selfishly) don't really want the security and comfort of my life here to change.

@ralphdibny I mean while I was watching that cutscene with the king and the commander's brother I couldn't help but compare the situation to the US and specifically Trump. Like these are people who aren't leaders but have still been chosen to lead their respective nations. Because of that, they keep making decisions that only favour themselves and not the people since they don't know how to behave as good leaders. From a strategical perspective, was it really wise to kill the king just because of revenge? No, because this would cost countless amounts of people's lives as a consequence. And I feel like people like Trump or maybe even Boris Johnson are similar to guys like Nero and his (fictional) children. They aren't taking their positions as seriously as they should. In this regard it truly feels like humankind really hasn't changed much since ancient times with Rome. We're still electing selfish people who make selfish decisions and hurt others in the process. It's like you say though, I believe that we humans are ultimately always going to end up destroying ourselves. As a civilisation reaches the height of its development, its own people are going to turn against each other. Same with the USSR and how Gorbachev lost his power and the Soviet Union became dissolved. I guess in the case of the Roman empire though, it became too big to control, but I also think that the competence (or lack of) of the leaders at the time also contributed to its fall. We humans are just too imperfect, we keep making mistakes over and over because so many other things are influencing us (greed, lust for power etc).

Wow I didn't realise I'd written so much, lol. You know a game is good when it makes you think so much about it and I haven't even finished it yet!

@LtSarge haha yeah it certainly is thought provoking! Honestly though I think modern leaders are more or less the same, whatever party line they fall under. Even the "serious" leaders since the end of WW2 are mostly people that are completely unqualified to decide whether their military should be sent to die in a proxy war in some other country. Trump is just more obvious about it, I suspect he was trying to create his own party line which didn't gel with the typical US administration which is partly why so much of it became public. Normally stuff like this gains mainstream awareness after the fact, hence the (UK) inquiry into the 2003 Iraq invasion. I honestly have no faith in politicians here in the UK whether they are Labour or Conservative (the two main parties here). They are both completely awful and as organisations have done truly terrible things in the past, though people tend to forget the bad stuff when their chosen party begins to push small positive changes. They really are very similar and voting for one is no different to voting for the other. There is very little point in voting for any party other than the big 2 here because not enough other people will do the same. At best we would get a hung parliament which we've had twice in the last 15-20 years. The more notable one had the lesser "liberal democrat" party have no meaningful effect on any policies that the main "conservative" party they were in coalition with. It was embarrassing for the Lib Dems which traditionally have been a third alternative to the main Labour and Conservative parties and I think many Lib Dem voters turned to the main 2 parties after that because of how ineffectual their coalition was seen to be.

@ralphdibny Yeah I agree.

Well, I just got done with part 6 and I'm halfway through part 7 now. Man the story has really taken a turn for the unexpected, lol. Did not see that plot twist coming at all! But I'm glad that it happened, it's going to make for a great finale!

@LtSarge sorry I got a bit over zealous with my scantily informed political opinions there! I generally try not to voice my opinions on stuff because Im so middle of the road, reasonable, apathetic and anti establishment that generally people (on both sides of an argument) always treat me like I'm on the opposite side and it's not very pleasant. You either have to be "this" or "that" these days and I'm usually more of an "either" or "neither" and that doesn't sit well with anyone for some reason. But yeah, I digress again!

Glad you are making it further into Ryse! It's the perfect sort of game for this game club with its short length and relatively easy game play I think.

@ralphdibny Don't get me wrong, I didn't find any issues with your opinions. I just felt like our conversation was steering out of the topic of video games completely and so I decided to just leave it at that. Nothing wrong with it, but I felt like we needed to move on!

@LtSarge I know me too, that's why I apologised!! And then attempted to long windedly explain why I was apologising which led me back into it haha, for an apathetic person I am passionately apathetic!

@ralphdibny No worries mate, I completely understand!