Rise of the Ronin review for PC

For the first two hours or so of my time with Rise of the Ronin, I was wondering why everyone was so upset with the game’s PC port. Given its initial overwhelmingly negative reaction and the fact the game had a Day 1 patch planned, I figured it would be best to give the game a few days, then check in and see how it was going. And, for that first little bit of time, it seemed like my patience had been rewarded.

And then, around the time when the game’s world opened up and I gained the ability to soar across the map…something happened.

Weirdly, that something wasn’t that the game’s performance took a noticeable hit. Because I was playing the game on a handheld, I kept the graphics settings fairly low. This meant that the game looked fine throughout my time with it – not dazzling, obviously, and there was definitely some pop-in, but at no time did the game become unplayable because of the graphics. Even when I was surrounded by enemies, being attacked from all sides, it was fine.

Rather, it became unplayable for other reasons. Most notably, the world suddenly became full of invisible walls. I would be walking or riding along, the path ahead of me completely open, and then it would stop. I’d be able to get around whatever was blocking me if I moved a few steps to the side, but it happened enough that it became a regular annoyance.

Similarly, people just disappeared, or never appeared in the first place. I had missions where I was expected to escort people, only to have them vanish into thin air, even as a marker told me where they were supposed to be. Similarly, there was a time when I entered into enemy territory, and I knew I had because the game told me that I had a specific number of enemies to defeat if I wanted to win over the territory, except there was no one around; they only showed up after I restarted the game from the previous checkpoint.

Mind you, that specific restart was when things first started going off the rails – and I knew they had because the game got stuck on a loading screen for a few minutes, only for it to suddenly reappear with a sped-up cutscene that ran through a few minutes of dialogue in the space of about 5 seconds, with voice acting that rapidly pronounced every third or fourth word. From that point on, it was a constant crapshoot of whether a cutscene would work properly; it got a little better after I turned off the ability to skip cutscenes, but it was still a little wonky.

What’s especially annoying about the weird performance issues is that I was really enjoying Rise of the Ronin before they kicked in. To some extent, I understood where Tyler was coming from when he said that the game felt like a pale imitation of a bunch of better games, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much. Sure, it meant that Rise of the Ronin felt like a less-good version of Ghost of Tsushima, but seeing as Ghost of Tsushima is the pinnacle of the genre, that’s hardly the worst thing for a game to be.

In fact, even as the game felt like it was falling apart, it still had plenty of fun moments. You build affinity with other ronin, for example, and for some reason one of the first ronin I allied with had an accent that made him sound sort of like an English person making fun of Tom Hardy’s version of Bane; it sounded goofy, but I found it endearing. Likewise, it was a blast clearing out enemy encampments, since the game gives you so many options for approaching those side quests – you can sneak in and try to kill everyone one by one (assuming they show up), or you can swoop down from the heavens and assassinate someone from the sky, or you can go straight for the encampment’s big boss and try to demoralize all the underlings.

As an aside, going for one camp’s boss led to a moment of presumably unintentional hilarity, when the game decided that a particularly large boar was the camp boss. Not only did it mean the boar withstood quite a few killing blows, it also meant that as soon as the boar died, every human enemy in the camp basically folded. It was silly, but at the same time, the game featured clanging noises whenever you parried an enemy attack, even if you were being attacked by a wild animal, so I don’t think that Team Ninja put a tonne of thought into certain aspects of the game.

But no matter how fun the gameplay is, that doesn’t matter if the game doesn’t consistently work, and I don’t think anyone could realistically say that Rise of the Ronin works as it should on PC. Given a bit of time and patches, I could absolutely see Rise of the Ronin becoming a must-play for anyone who wants to roam around an open-world, exploring 19th-century Japan and slicing down all kinds of enemies. But as of now, you need to wait and see if the game gets there, because it certainly isn’t at the moment.

Koei Tecmo provided us with a Rise of the Ronin PC code for review purposes.