According to an update on Crytek's website, its upcoming first-person hack-and-slash game Ryse will – as rumoured – be an Xbox One exclusive.
For those who've forgotten – and who could blame you – Crytek originally announced Ryse back at E3 in 2011, though we saw it under the name Codename: Kingdoms as far back as E3 2010. Ryse was originally touted as a Kinect game, though the rhetoric shifted to suggest that it would actually be one of these “Better with Kinect” games, and that has turned out to be true. From the website, Ryse features “controller-based gameplay enhanced by Kinect”.
What else do we know about the game? Well, it's set in Rome. The CGI trailer that we saw at E3 2011 featured a dog running through a grim Roman “squalor” with bodies strewn about the place, before the camera pulled back to show lots of Romans running about with swords generally trying to do each other in. This was the gameplay bit, where a young man fought off an assailant with the power of Kinect, slashing his hands at the air to slice the man with his sword, even head-butting him in the face.
That said, the game will probably look a lot different now. Despite the vastly improved Kinect 2.0, Microsoft seems keen to play down this idea of playing a game entirely with the Kinect controller, presumably due to the response from players.
As the website charmingly reveals with Roman numerals, we'll find out more about the game at E3.
