YMMV / Ryse: Son of Rome

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Commodus stabbing King Oswald to death could qualify as Revenge Before Reason in addition to Stupid Evil. After all, when Commodus tried attacking the Britons before, they overpowered him and took him captive, before sending him to the beastmen in the North to be burned in a wicker man. He most likely felt like he had to save face before returning to his father, and he most likely was aching for a chance to get even with his former captors.
• Broken Base: Whether the gratuitous Artistic License – History / Martial Arts falls by the wayside due to Rule of Cool, or if it makes one's inner historian cry and/or rage.
• Cliché Storm: Has every Sword and Sandal revenge thriller trope you can think of.
• Designated Villain: You can't exactly blame the Britons for wanting to be free of their Roman oppressors, especially Boudica, since Commodus killed her father. Boudica even brings up the fact that the Britons never asked for the Romans to invade them, and Vitallion and Marius, for their part, feel that Rome's oppressive treatment of Britannia is basically preventing their two nations from ever making peace. It also doesn't help that Boudica's murder of women and children is Offscreen Villainy, whereas the only people we see her kill on screen are Roman soldiers who are giving as good as they're getting.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some players complained about the game being too easy, even on the hardest difficulty. The combat is very simple (you can't go wrong simply spamming Heavy-Light-Light attacks for the entire game), the timing to successfully parry enemy blows is very forgiving, and killing a single enemy can restore a large amount of health. Even screwing up the button presses for the finishing moves doesn't really punish you at all - you simply get less points than you would have had.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Another major point of contention is that the game can be beaten in less than 5 hours.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The beastmen go screaming across this line when they burn captured Roman soldiers alive inside wooden cages.
  • Commodus jumps across this when he brutally stabs Oswald to death in front of his daughter and hundreds of his people, and then has the gall to demand that everyone kneel before him. Fortunately he gets a rock to the face for his trouble.
  • If Nero didn't already cross this line by ordering a False Flag Operation to murder Marius' family purely out of envy towards his father, and blaming the Britons for it, he crosses it in his final moments by refusing to Face Death with Dignity at Marius' hands, and setting his Praetorian Guard on the centurion to distract him while he stabs Marius in the side like the Dirty Coward he is. Luckily, Marius decides "I'm Taking You with Me" right afterwards.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The beastmen and their lands "north of the Wall" certainly qualify. Depraved savages who seem to have regressed into death-worshipping monsters, their skull headdresses and penchant for flaming human sacrifices are bad enough. But where they are is a tangle of dead trees, mist, cliffs and half-glimpsed shadows that seem to be stalking Marius and his detachment. Taken together, it makes their part of the game deeply unsettling.
  • The state of Rome near the end under Nero's rule edges into this. Streets deserted save for the homeless, the orphaned and the dead, and Nero's Praetorians are butchering and robbing anyone they come across. It's amazing the Empire is still functioning given how far its seat of power has fallen.
  • You can hear the Praetorians talking at one point, dumping a fifty-ninth victim down a pit. They're commenting on a purge of another street, because someone there drew Nero's face on a horse's backside. Since they can't find the culprit, everyone on that street is subject to execution. Jesus.
• Polished Port: The PC version has support for widescreen resolutions, no framerate cap (except for an optional 30 frame cap), has all of the DLC that was in the Xbox version, and no microtransactions. Though as a downside, the keys are not rebindable, only allowing you to choose between 3 presets (two WASD presets and one arrow key preset).
• Retroactive Recognition: Charlotte Hope has a Small Role, Big Impact as the Oracle in Basilius's chambers.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Marius and Boudica. They share all of five moments on screen together, most of them trying to kill each other, and barely exchange a few words, yet in the end both of them lament, "In another life, perhaps." Of course, as the feisty daughter of the barbarian chieftan, narrative causality practically obligates her to fall in love with the gruff and handsome protagonist. The achievement for beating her is "Not my type after all".
• So Okay, It's Average: Few would say the game is bad. Most agree it has the seeds of greatness but they never quite bear out. With the game costing a fraction of what it did back in 2013, it's good value for its money today, but at the time many players objected to paying full price for what was basically a high-end tech demo.
• Tear Jerker: The murder of Marius' family at the start of the game. Really, you can't blame him for flipping his lid and swearing to kill the barbarians whom he deems responsible for it.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: For a game that came out in 2013, it looks amazing - easily equal if not superior to many "AAA" games which were made up to a decade later.