When I saw Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome demonstrated during Microsoft's E3 press briefing, I was worried. The once Kinect and now controller-driven game, apart from being visually impressive thanks to an Xbox One upgrade, looked pretty generic. When I sat down to play it at an event later that night, I learned something that improved my outlook dramatically: Ryse has no block button.

It's still too early to tell whether or not Ryse's hack-and-shield-bash combat will hold up over the course of an entire game, but this one simple fact is enough to give me hope.