One of the Xbox One’s hotly hyped games was available for play at San Diego Comic-Con 2013, and Hypable had the opportunity to talk with Ryse: Son of Rome’s producer.

In speaking of the derivatives of the Roman Spartan warrior game Ryse: Son of Rome, the game’s producer Mike Read said “There’s definitely influence from Spartacus and 300. We wanted to take a lot of those elements in, especially in providing a huge cinematic experience.”

And from what we played of the game, we’d have to agree. Storming a rocky beach, fiery boulders land gruesomely on your comrades, scattering limbs and lives. In the mean time, a fellow soldier wails as he clutches at the arrow sticking out of his eyeball.

Unfortunately, it seems as though this wasn’t the way things really went down back in the Roman warring days. “Ryse was originally historically accurate. We found the limitations in that […] but we’ve kept the visuals and the armor and the things of the time period and the way they do combat and we did a lot of researching on that,” said Read.

One of the most fun elements we experienced during our demo was of the in-battle button command kills. However, if you miss a command, the battle doesn’t end there. “The closer you get to timing executions properly, the bigger the bonuses you’ll get back,” Read said.

The leniencies in gameplay allow players who may not have the best hand-eye coordination to still fight on. Thankfully for this reporter, the demo would simply state “you have died” and let you play on, as opposed to cutting your play time short.

Ryse: Son of Rome is developed by Crytek studios, and is releasing exclusively for the Xbox One later this year.

Are you excited for a ‘300’-like game in ‘Ryse: Son of Rome’?

Additional reporting: Anna Roberts