Rise to Honour Thoughts

Rise to Honour has to be one of the most fascinating case studios on how *not* to do an action game both when it comes to melee combat and shooting. I have seen some call it a "hidden gem" but this game is anything but that.

First impressions aren't too bad, the animations, models and general production values are really good and generally still hold up now to some degree. The checkpoint system is shockingly forgiving and isn't overly punishing if you fail, you get lots of health refills both after and even upon getting game overs.

Then there is fact the game feels like a weird precursor to Batman Arkham, Sleeping Dogs and the Uncharted games. The Arkham series with it's counter based rhythm game combat that emulates martial arts movies, Sleeping Dogs in it's Hong Kong action movie style presentation and that it has shooting and melee in it, and Uncharted for it's over the top scripted set pieces. All sounds good, right?

However in spite of Rise to Honour being seemingly being a precursor to all those games, it does everything much, much, much worse.

Throughout all my time of playing this game, I can't help but think that Rocksteedy knew what they were doing when making Batman Akham Asylum while the devs of this game didn't. In Rise to Honour, when you attack, you primarily use the right analog stick to attack, the R1 button to block, L1 to do focused slo mo attacks and all 3 plus it being contextual to do counterattacks.

Yup, that's right the face buttons get no use at all, 4 buttons on the controller that are unused, want to map a dodge roll, dedicated attack button, or lock on? Not in this game.

Which leads to my first issue, there is no lock on, not even a soft one, this is where Batman Arkham does this sort of thing better, in the Arkham games Batman lunges and bounces off to different enemies automatically so if there is far off enemy when in combat, he will constantly close in the gap between large distances, in Rise to Honour, Jet Li will flail around where you "slap" the right stick but he will never close the distance on enemies that are a few feat away from him, so you'll either have to have an enemy come close to you or you will have to wait for the attack animation to finish then run up to them.

Then there is counter system, in Batman Arkham, the titular character's head will have a blue flash telling you to press a button to do a contextual counter it can be done as long as a enemy's close and you pressed within the right time. In Rise to Honour? You have two defense buttons and both are mapped to the same button and use the right stick. With generic thugs just hold R1 to block which is fine but enemies rarely ever give any audio or visual telegraphs on when to press the counter button by comparison to Batman. With bosses and tougher enemies you have to use counters that two buttons and the analog stick, yup in most games countering is usually one button but in Rise, it's two plus hitting the right stick in the direction that the attack is coming from and it feels cumbersome as it sounds.

Combine this with previous issues, and combat is basically a game of, "slapping" the right analog stick untill you randomly hold R1 to block and with tougher enemies and bosses hoping that you pressed the 2 button and right stick parry in time you can finally combo on them. Counterattacking at times feels like a borderline game of how lucky you can.

The shooting is just as if not even worse than the melee combat. To put simpily, the shooting feels like a much, much, much worse Dead to Rights, it's DTR in that it's heavily based auto aim and you have slo mo except in DTR, auto aim is much more reliable and it's much easier to cycle between targets, on top of that slo mo dodging feels reliable in DTR where Rise, it feel awkward and isn't very reliable. In DTR, the auto aim isn't connected to by using the right stick. Plus there is cover mechanic but I can't recall being able to shoot from cover. Enemies who use submachine guns can stagger you like crazy and can rip your health bar to shreds.

Finally, there is the action set pieces and this is where I feel Uncharted wins out, and I'm not even big on Uncharted. In Rise, you have simplistic running away from explosions set pieces while you move the left stick forward but in Uncharted the x button is always use for jumping, in Rise? The button for jumping and evading obstacles is contextual so even if you did press R1 the game won't register the command until the prompt pops up so because of this running away from over the top explosions in Rise to Honor feels like a rhythm game where the right button presses are done with the game feels like acknowledging them.

Overall, I didn't even finish Rise to Honour, but I spent more than enough time with it to the come to the conclusion that I can't stand playing it. This is a game so bad that it made me understand why I like the games I like so in sense I can Rise to Honour that backhanded complement