The nineties were a golden age of PC gaming, with a wealth of titles that never reached out to the console market and earned a hardcore group of fans. One of these games was Rise of the Triad, and the 2013 re-imagining of the first person shooter seems to have struggled to shed the habits that made it a hit almost two decades ago.
• Developer: Interceptor Entertainment
• Publisher: Apogee Software
• Reviewed on: PC
• Release Date: Available Now
The scene is set for the single player through a brief introductory comic book style video, though the premise could just have easily been laid out with a line or two of text. An extremist cult have taken residence on St. Nicholas Island, and the military team H.U.N.T. (High-risk United Nations Task-force, which was obviously the first and only acronym thrown up in the development cycle) are dispatched to investigate. Of course, only minutes after arriving on the island, their boat, and only way back to the mainland, is spotted and destroyed. And thus begins the shoot-y, exploding action.
While your pistols and machine guns should be more focused on the former, and much less on the latter, they still have the potential to blow up portions of enemy bodies into hilariously gory blood fountains. These are few and far between when using bullet based weaponry, which make them all the more satisfying when you do get that ludicrous gib message, and a pair of disembodied eyeballs slapped against your field of view. Still, the interesting weapons are all either rocket-esque launchers, magical relics or the various power ups/downs that all come with timed uses and limited ammo, unlike your more traditional guns which are unlimited. Launchers are scattered around the missions liberally, so there’s few instances when you’re without heat seekers, firewalls, split missiles and rocket launcher gatling guns.
You get a selection of characters, each with varying stats in speed and endurance, but ultimately your decision will depend on which voice you can stand to hear the same lines repeated from. That just adds to the white noise that is the looping rock soundtrack that lasts for missions at a time, it starts off good but after the third mission of hearing the same beat, you’ll want to rocket-jump straight into lava. Which unfortunately is the most merciful way to take yourself away from the game, as the single player campaign is rife with notoriously difficult enemies, unforgiving jumping puzzles, overused environmental hazards and soul destroying infrequent checkpoints.
Difficult games should be celebrated, as the current generation of games (particularly those on consoles) are slated for being cinematic driven, easy experiences. But Rise of the Triad isn’t just difficult, it’s the type of difficulty that drives you to want to quit rather than face the same cheap excuse for a meaningful encounter. Had the game been a direct remake of the original, it’s flaws would be completely overlooked. But this is a game built from the ground up, to try and emulate as close as possible the original product from 1994. All complete with it’s fast movement and jumping speed, hover pads and own brand of tongue-in-cheek humour.
While Rise of the Triad didn’t meet my expectation of a completely insane run-and-gun shooter, there’s bound to be an audience that this game still appeals to. But for all of the fans out there, it’s likely that there’s also a bug to match. I encountered numerous glitched doors, vanishing enemies, body armour that wouldn’t take damage while my health dwindled and even the original cheat codes for the game failed to take effect. I have also been unable to join a multiplayer game since launch, and Rise of the Triad is a game I can quite happily walk away from. Still, for the low price it’s at, and the future modding potential it’s bound to pique some interest at a later point.