You play Shadwen as an assassin on a quest to kill the king, but along the way she encounters a little girl, Lily. Lily follows Shadwen on her adventure throughout the kingdom, and you have to make the moral decision along the way of whether to murder enemy guard’s right in front of this poor little girl’s eyes or find another way around.

The main game play in Shadwen is quite simply, remain hidden from enemy guards. If you get caught or detected, you will fail. The game’s rewind time mechanic allows you to rectify any mistakes you make really easily and you will make a lot of them. Accidently knock over some glass bottles and alert the guard? Just rewind time and be more careful next time! The game also offers a unique element where if your character is not moving time freezes. This took me a while to get used to as it can be a little disorienting when you are used to the world just carrying on around you when you are idol, but you soon get used to it and are able to use it to your full advantage. It allows you to plot your next movement precisely without worry of being caught, it also makes clambering up buildings and scaffolding much easier as you can pause time and carefully aim where your next grapple hook is going to land.

Speaking of the grapple hook, this will also be a key piece of equipment throughout the game. You can use it to grab onto objects in the environment to cause a distraction for the guards. You can pull crates, shelves, pretty much anything which can be moved around with your hook. This will allow you to slip past guards unnoticed and without brutally killing them. You can even make deaths of guards look like it was an accident, maybe by pulling a box down on their heads, and whilst this does count as you killing them, the guards won’t instantly become alert of any suspicious activity. You will also be able to create traps and decoys too, these more or less will also kill the guard, but in much more interesting ways than just stabbing them in the back, with items such as poison traps and spiked devices.

The aim on each level is to create path safe for the young girl Lily to pass through unharmed. The game right down to its core is essentially a long escort quests, but don’t worry – Lily’s AI is absolutely stellar. She will remain hidden in shadows, boxes and haystacks and not cause you any unwarranted hassle. You can more or less forget about her right up until you reach the end of the level and have to backtrack to clear a path for her. She won’t just walk out in front of guards, or make any noise which you wouldn’t normally expect. I was really impressed with how well Lily reacted to every situation thrown at her such as guards unexpectedly changing their patrol path.

Ryse: Son of Rome is a third person hack and slash adventure game. It was initially released in November of 2013 as an Xbox One exclusive launch title, but was later ported onto PC in October 2014. The game is set in an alternative version of Rome history. You play as a centurion named Marius Titus as you battle through the game as you seek revenge for the killing of your family.

The main gameplay element in Ryse: Son of Rome is the hack and slash combat. This feels very similar to other action games such as the Batman series, a very simple but fluid action system means you have no problems taking on hordes of enemies, as you weaken your foes, you get the option to perform an execution on them – this prompts for a small quick time event as you have to press the corresponding mouse button with the colours on the screen, carrying out an execution every time you can tends to make the gameplay feel very repetitive though; it’s nice for the first few times but it soon becomes the same over and over again. You are able to learn different variations of executions through the upgrade menu, allowing you to purchase upgrades using the experience points you have earned, ironically though performing executions. On top of being able to upgrade the executions, you can also add the points into more passive talents such as straight health upgrades, or adding a multiplier to the amount of experience points you earn. If you are like me and you don’t really like learning combos and such, the passives tend to be more the attractive options here.

There is a hint of strategy involved in Ryse: Son of Rome too; a couple of battle scenes allow you to command orders to squads of men, such as ordering archers to cover a flank, or ordering the catapults to aim on different targets – these are few and far between however so don’t go into this game expecting a really in depth strategy element. The larger scale fights are really impressive though, one scene which stands out the most to me would be where you have to defend a castle against an oncoming barbarian army, whilst it is completely reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings scene in Helms Deep but has some really action packed gameplay as you avoid incoming fire bombs, preventing enemies from scaling the walls by kicking off their ladders and tackling any enemies which make it through.

Ryse: Son of Rome has some excellent graphics – this is one of the first “next gen” games released, and it really does look next gen; it looks almost photo realistic, the characters look real and the environments which the game is set in look absolutely stunning. There are a couple low quality textures but nothing you will really notice unless you go out of your way to find them. All of the animations are perfect too; the fluid combat system allows for some exciting fight scenes as you string together plenty of combos.