Rise of the Ronin (PC) Review – Stormy Port

Rise of the Ronin (PC) Review

I’m a huge fan of Team Ninja’s games, especially Nioh and its sequel. Akin to Soulslikes, those games featured visceral combat that required more than a little skill and persistence to master. They had interesting stance systems that added a cool new wrinkle to the ARPG toolbox. I wasn’t alone in looking forward to Rise of the Ronin, which transposes some of those systems to an open-world adventure.

For reasons I can’t remember, I totally missed Rise of the Ronin’s console release last March. I was happy, then, to finally sit down with the game on PC.

Political Gains

Without rehashing too much of the narrative, Rise of the Ronin is set in the mid-19th century Edo period, when the conflict between Western and Japanese cultures created several warring internal factions. As the player, you control one of the Blade Twins and are part of the Veiled Edge resistance movement that’s attempting to overthrow the power of the Shogunate. The game’s story spans a large geographical area and over a decade of history. Rise of the Ronin isn’t quite the deep dive into Japanese customs and culture as the recently released Assassin’s Creed Shadows. However, it’s still a fairly dense exploration of the complex politics at play.

The game begins with a detailed character creator and an exciting mission to assassinate Commander Perry. Of course, anyone who’s a bit familiar with history knows that the attempt fails, but it sets the larger story and open world in motion. By and large, Rise of the Ronin’s open world and mission design follow very familiar models. The map is cluttered with markers, small villages, and enemy camps to clear. There are lots of busy-work quests and distractions from the main narrative. If it wasn’t for the game’s excellent combat and challenging bosses, Rise of the Ronin would be fairly shallow.

Slice, Dice, and Shoot

While Team Ninja re-names stamina as ki and calls parries countersparks, combat will feel at least vaguely familiar to fans of Nioh or a dozen other Soulslikes. As always the goal is to break the enemy’s posture through a combination of light and heavy attacks and blocking. Combat is brutal, fast, and tactical. It’s a bit simplified from Nioh’s systems, which might disappoint some fans of those games. That said, combat is punchy and fun.

In part, this comes from the variety of thrown and bladed weapons, toys, and firearms, all of which can be upgraded and coordinated with the game’s skill tree. Standard issue ARPG mechanics, but hey, if it ain’t broke, just iterate on it.

Qualified Success

If you look at Metacritic or the Steam reviews for Rise of the Ronin, you’ll see a lot of complaints about performance. This seems to vary widely, however, and not everyone encounters issues. I guess I was lucky. With a Ryzen 9 7950X, Nvidia 4080, and 32 gigs of RAM, performance at 4K with all settings at ultra was certainly not bad. There was some scenery pop-in to be sure. And while I didn’t experience every mission or sequence, there were certainly no more issues than with most sprawling open-world games. I’ve played a lot of PC ports lately with far worse performance and optimization.

That said, Rise of the Ronin still looks decidedly pretty average, whether we’re talking cut scenes, copy-paste villages, or character models. I didn’t play the console version, so I have no point of comparison. There are plenty of ways to dial in the graphics, but even at max the textures aren’t super sharp and the level of environmental detail is a bit lacking. That’s not to say there aren’t some pretty scenes, beautiful environment,s or flashy combat animations. There are.

A Tale of Two Games

Rise of the Ronin is a little confusing. Hardcore fans of Team Ninja’s Nioh might find Rise of the Ronin’s otherwise excellent combat not quite as satisfying as in the earlier game. Fans of meticulous open-world games could be disappointed by Rise of the Ronin’s focus on combat more than a compelling narrative and dynamic world. Finally, PC players looking for an awe-inspiring graphical showcase might run into performance issues. Overall, Rise of the Ronin’s flashy combat and action sell the experience and make it worth playing, but not as convincingly as one might wish.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***