Platform: PS5
After years of fans clamouring for an Assassin's Creed entry set in feudal Japan, Ubisoft finally confirmed its stealth-action series would indeed be headed Far East for its next entry. And while the highly anticipated project is due to put players behind a throat-slitting samurai early next year, Rise of the Ronin may have stolen some of its katana-wielding thunder.
Team Ninja's PlayStation 5 exclusive is an open-world, samurai action-role-playing game that'll immediately feel familiar to anyone who's strategically sliced, diced, dodged, and countered their way through the studio's more recent efforts, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and the Nioh series. Similar to those entries, Rise of the Ronin is a combat-heavy affair that finds you regularly engaged in punishing, yet satisfying encounters that reward skill and thoughtfulness over mindless button-mashing.
But outside of the frequent blade ballets, the title recalls Ubisoft's open-world formula as much as Team Ninja's tried-and-true template — for better, but sometimes worse. On the plus side, Rise of the Ronin borrows from Assassin's Creed's use of historical settings, characters, and stories. Set in 19th-century Japan, it takes place in Edo, Kyoto, and Yokohama, across nearly two decades. Tackling this historically rich time and place is a tall order, but the game mostly pulls it off, balancing real-world elements with the more fun, fictionalised stuff you won't find in textbooks.
A combat-heavy affair that finds you regularly engaged in punishing, yet satisfying encounters that reward skill and thoughtfulness over mindless button-mashing.
Much of the latter spawns from the many ways in which you can mould the story, from choosing which allies to back and factions to join, to making critical decisions that'll potentially change the course of history. But while the massive world — and the myriad interactions within it — breed these narrative-enhancing connections, the bloated map can also bury the story. In offering a fully explorable world, packed with content, the game is almost too generous, pulling you every which way for collectibles, side activities, mini-games, and countless other distractions that threaten to break the immersion.
The game's many upgrade paths and character progression features, including a particularly tedious loot system, similarly suffer from feeling superfluous. Of course, it's difficult to fault the game for being overstuffed when its bells-and-whistles approach also fuels a brilliant, feline-fetching meta game — you can not only pet and collect the cats in Rise of the Ronin, but also send your furry friends on reward-yielding missions.
While we wish Rise of the Ronin had used its sharp blades to trim some of the fat, the game builds on the rewarding combat established in Team Ninja's previous few entries and is a worthy open-world romp that'll easily hold your attention until Ubisoft's samurai assassin arrives.