Finally got a chance to play a bit of Ryse over at my friend's house.
Graphics are very impressive, and it's difficult to impress me nowadays.
Material shaders are fantastic. Combined with their lighting it makes a lot of materials and surfaces feel almost lifelike. Marius' shield at the start in particular is quite impressive with the leather and gold reacting to ambient lighting. Especially impressive when inside the building and reacting to torchlight.
Water does splash and react to character movement through it, but it isn't overdone (not in your face). However, water coming out of fountain spouts appears to just be a texture and does no react to your character if he moves under the stream of water. And if you rotate the camera while standing in a stream coming out of one of those fountain spouts, the stream also rotates around your character somewhat. It's a bit weird.
Antialiasing is fairly well done for the most part. Edges are mostly clean. But the bane of all AA solutions still exists. Specular aliasing is still here, and is still distracting to me, but from past experience with people's sensitivity to it, many people may not even notice. Haven't gotten a chance to see how well it copes with transparencies as I only played a bit of the first level and there isn't much in the way of transparent textures there.
Combat feels very much like the Batman games. You have the same one button attack in both. You have the same Dodge (Batman)/Shield block (Ryse). And a button for Taking out weakened enemies (Batman)/starting Executions (Ryse). You have the same Stun (Batman)/Shield Push (Ryse, serves a similar purpose). I just wish Shield Block was on the right trigger instead of executions. I kept trying to shield block with the executions button.
Unlike Batman combat, however, when you start an execution it goes into a God of War like QTE. You don't have to use Executions in order to kill enemies, but it gives you more experience if you do. Also allows you to heal yourself if you choose heal execution bonus instead of XP execution bonus.
Voice commands are interesting, but seem somewhat awkwardly implemented (at least what I've seen in the first level, it may get better in later levels). You have to press the left shoulder button to issue a Voice Command. But, again in the first level, you can only ever issue one voice command at a time. So why not just have the button execute those commands? If later on in the game you can issue multiple voice commands then it'll make sense. Either way, I would have preferred being able to just issue the voice command without requiring a press of a button in order to issue the voice command.
Oh, and looking at Marius's face while you play him is kind of weird. It's so relatively lifelike that it almost feels like it was photoshopped onto the head of the character you are playing. I mean it still fits with the model and everything but you just get a weird feeling when watching it. Kind of hard to explain. Uncanny valley, for sure.
Also, with word of there being FMV, I was expecting to see transitions between the FMV and gameplay. But, while the opening cinematic may be an FMV, the start of the next level (in game cinematic) looked pretty much identical in quality so I was not expecting to suddenly find myself in control of the character. I think this may be the first game ever where I'm not wishing for CG FMV for cutscenes. And that is very odd as up until now, I've always wished that all cutscenes (rendered by game engine) in games were offline rendered CG instead. It's still not up there with the best offline rendered CG FMV, but it's pretty close. Close enough that, as I said, I'm not sitting through it wishing that it had been CG rendered.
And, did I mention how gorgeous the graphics are? It is hugely impressive and I'm leaning even more towards getting the Xbox One. My friend is giving me until the end of next week to decide whether I want to buy the Day One edition off of him or not. Otherwise, he's putting it up on Ebay/Craigslist. I'm still not sure I actually want to fork out ~500 USD + tax for a console that while impressive still isn't complete in the feature department (I expect it to be much more capable with living room stuff by end of next year) with only one, maybe two games I'd be interested in.
Regards,
SB
What's mediocre about the review? It's a fairly glowing report of the technology used. 
