Rise of the Ronin PC Review - Solid Game, Shoddy Port
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. Step right up to the game everyone loves to play, the PC Port Lottery. For a measly $80 you have the chance to get a beloved console game, enhanced and improved on your PC. Recent winners include God of War: Ragnarok and Red Dead Redemption. Of course this a game of chance so results are not guaranteed, it behoves me to mention Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us: Part 1 to our paying customers. This week’s draw is Rise of the Ronin, an open-world title set in historical Japan that saw success on the PS5. Will it be a winner or will our players go home unhappy? Let’s spin the wheel to find out.
*Gamble responsibly.
So here we are again. Another PC port, another chance for devs to take their game to the next level, yet somehow the release is fumbled and PC players are left with an inferior version of the game. Rise of the Ronin on PC is not pretty. It is a poor port. There is no escaping the fact. That this is still happening is beyond me. Players are used to delays at this point, if the game is not ready, just don’t release it yet. Instead, the C-suite has to get their next Rolex or whatever, so they push it out the door in a condition that embarrasses the people who worked on it just to meet arbitrary deadlines. This, or some variation of, is clearly what happened here because there is no way known that the development team didn’t know they were sending out a dodgy product.
Let me start with the good first though. Rise of the Ronin is an interesting open-world title that sits somewhere between a Soulslike and Assassin’s Creed as far as gameplay goes. I quite enjoyed my time with it on PS5 and while it never felt like an essential title, it did have an enjoyable gameplay loop and a tight and engaging combat system. I won’t dwell on this too much because you can read Jason’s excellent review of the PS5 release here and while I didn’t love it quite as much as he did, I will say the game surprised me and I would love to see a sequel.
The PC release of the game includes PC specific upgrades like Ultrawide support and ray tracing, which is undoubtedly nice. Well, it would be if the game wasn’t so poorly optimised. I ran this on three machines, a 5080, a 4080 and a 4060 laptop. The results were wild, to say the least. The 4060 really struggled to maintain a solid 60fps, with massive dips in the framerate even at a medium graphic setting and no ray tracing. The 4080, which is my main gaming rig, performed better but I still had to play around with settings for quite a while to get an acceptable performance, something I haven’t ever really had to do with this rig. Even the 5080 couldn’t seem to run this at ultra settings without a wildly inconsistent framerate. Everything about this feels like it is a rush job, with a huge amount of work still left to be done to optimise the experience.
Oh and you can forget about playing Rise of the Ronin on handhelds. My poor ROG ALLY X could even get this one rolling acceptably plugged in on Turbo mode. I thought it was going to melt even trying. I have never had a game that has struggled this badly on a range of quite powerful systems. I would hate to see how it fares on the minimum system requirements, I can imagine it is something akin to a slide show.
There are also a host of other technical issues that I came across in my time with the game. From graphical glitches to borked animations to some serious pop-in. What makes this even more frustrating is that the game isn’t that pretty to begin with. It isn’t an ugly game by any means, but when compared to something like Assasin’s Creed Shadows (which ran perfectly on the same three systems) it isn’t exactly stunning. Based on what is currently available, any semi-decent PC should be able to run this game but as it is, things are just too dodgy to play on anything but a beast of a system.
To be fair, there have been a couple of patches so far that have gone someway to resolving the major issues. The game launched with a bug that deleted savegames, (which in an 80-hour+ game is hardly ideal) which has now been resolved and there has been some improvement in the framerate issues, but there still seems to be a long way to go for it to get to where it should be. Even exiting the game can cause problems with it seemingly not liking the use of ALT+F4 to close and requiring a forced stop from within Steam. Sadly, about the best thing I can say about the tech side of things is that it doesn’t crash.
All of this is upsetting because, like I said earlier, I quite enjoy the game. The combat system is fun to get a handle on, there are some cool movement mechanics involving a grappling hook and a glider and the open world, while a little on the generic side, is still fun to explore. There is a huge variety of both melee and ranged weapons to master and there is more content here than you can shake a very large katana at. This should be a pretty easy win for Koei Tecmo, but sadly it is an own goal instead. I have no doubt that after another month or so, this game will be in a much better place but as it is, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone who doesn’t have an absolute beast of a PC. The experience is just too compromised on anything less than the latest and greatest gear.
Rise of the Ronin was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
