Advent Rising

I was going to give this game 3 stars, and then: "Your system has recovered from a serious error" This, along with about 2 dozen other crash to desktops really set me off. Advent Rising is no 5 star game. It was panned by critics for a reason. People didn't buy it for a reason, and if you buy it you'll see why. Now don't get me wrong, it's not a total piece of crap, in fact it has a lot of good things going for it. Namely: 1. Music - the music is suitably epic, and some of the better music I've heard in a video game. 2. Graphics - even today, the graphics are pretty good. Mind you the game isn't all that old, but it is a few years. Still the explosions, tanks and so forth are all pretty and blow up pretty good. 3. Story - the story itself isn't that bad. Some reviewers here are complaining its too anime or too lofty, well, to each their own. But the story has potential. This is more of a "high brow" sci-fi with human transcendence and that sort of thing. As for the graphics, well as I've said they're good and having a style does not make it a bad game. If the characters are all designed with a certain aesthetic in mind that's fine, not every game has to be hyper-realistic. Now the problems: The story of the game itself is crap. Now, this seems to contradict what I said just above, but it doesn't, not entirely. As reviewers said when the game first game out, the story is poorly told. My point is that the story, or what they're going for is okay, but the story as its presented in the game itself is garbage. There are huge plotholes. For example your character seemingly gains these super powers simply because some guy thinks its a good idea. There's no real initiation, it doesn't even show the guy helping your character learn them. He just starts doing it. None of the characters are all that likeable either. On the one hand, the game wants you to care about the characters, on the other hand, it gives you no reason to. In fact the game itself doesn't even seem to care. Potentially major spoiler alert here, but for example, the main character at one point loses someone very close to him, a love interest. Five minutes later he's practically in the arms of another woman. If he cares so much about the first girl why does he forget about her 5 seconds after she's gone? There's no real depth to the characters. And then even with this "huge epic story" going on, the gamplay itself is boring. Really there's very little connection between the story and the gameplay, sometimes to the point of absurdity. The gameplay is basically the character shooting bad guys. He shoots bad guys on a ship, then shoots them somewhere else, and shoots them again in some other place. Theoretically he's going somewhere, to do something, but he rarely does anything, he mostly just shoots people. For example at one point your on an enemy ship, then you fight your way to the bridge, then what do you at the bridge? Absolutely Nothing! You turn around and leave the way you came and then go off in some other direction. The whole game is basically the character vs 3-10 bad guys, broken up with the occasional very easy vehicle section. Occasionally the character has some allies helping him who range from useful to useless, all of which are invulnerable at least to the player's fire anyway. They'll disappear and re-appear at random. Basically long story short, the music is epic and you play the game and you want to get into this epic battle but there is no epic battle. There's just repetitive shooting with no real purpose. I mean your character interacts with elevators, he even interacts occasionally with devices to DO something story wise, but this is extremely rare. In fact I think he does it all of one time. The rest of the time he's not doing anything other than moving from room to room or street to street shooting things. Apparently he's going somewhere most of the time, but for what purpose and to what end I don't know. It gets a little better near the end, but also near the end is where stability issues start coming up big time. Oh and what else, some of the boss battles are annoying. Advent Rising takes the route of "your weapons are useless, you have to do something special" in boss battles. This is fine, in theory, you have to find the kink in the boss's pattern right? But sometimes your waiting for like 5 minutes to even get a shot at it. Seriously. At one point you fight this big monkey thing, and like many bosses you have to wait til it attacks to do something, but sometimes the boss does this attack 3 or 4 times in a row. Other times he's chasing you around for four freaking minutes and all you're doing is trying not to die while the completely random AI does its thing. Basically if you're going to have a pattern make it a pattern, don't make me waste my time WAITING for this stupid thing to happen. So in summary, it's a game that has potential. It has a good story IDEA behind it, with a very impressive musical score and some good visuals BUT the gameplay falls short, the story is very poorly told and sometimes doesn't make any sense in relation to the gameplay, and its just repetitive and not all that fun. Oh, and stability issues. 2/5!

Advent Rising is a game that clearly had a lot of ambition behind it; it was initially planned as part of an epic science-fiction trilogy with its own universe, an allegorical narrative written by Orson Scott Card, as well as large set piece battles. Although Advent Rising is deeply mechanically flawed, I could appreciate its attempt to elevate itself beyond simple genre fare. The graphics show some design flair, the music is excellent and the narrative had promise, even if it is somewhat unsubtle and heavy-handed. However, this game completely falls apart when you have to play it. The controls are absolutely horrible on the PC, complete with awkward targeting system, floaty jumping that is hard to use and feels awful, a variety of uninspiring weapons that you can level up through use for some reason and clunky melee combat. Nothing about the game feels right or is easy to use. Moreover, the level design is very much made up of corridors with endlessly respawning goons that mob you. The boss fights are pure gimmickry. The way the battles are set up between friendly marines and the invading aliens is very reminiscent of Halo. Levels are made up of running from point A to point B, occasionally stopping to survive from waves of enemies, the same enemies the entire game. In short, the gameplay is broken and the campaign design is phoned in, borrowing from the design template of a better game (not that Halo is such lofty heights). While I don't think Advent Rising is pure trash (the narrative and setting are kind of charming in a cheesy way) it's far from a classic or hidden gem. It's rather an interesting failure not entirely devoid of charm, but also a relic of ambition too great for the talents of its creators.

This game exists on pure ambition. The combat system is floaty and WAY too slipshod, relying on a mouse-wheel auto-aim that doesn't always work, feeling at worst like a sci-fi version of Drake of the 99 Dragons...BUT it's also flashy and frantic enough to be fun and there's tons of options for weapons even before you get upgradable powers. This game has crashed on me on every pre-rendered cutscene...BUT the auto-saves are plentiful and the levels short enough to avoid this being much of an issue, especially since you can skip every cutscene and even sections of the game with the touch of a button. The graphics are jittery and often a bit stale...BUT are so huge in scope if you see a place you can usually get there and you will fight armies between times, and if you throw a grenade chances are surprisingly good the terrain will get blown to individual pieces. The writing is quite frankly so awkward and cringy it's like watching a terribad SYFY movie, which has it's own charm...BUT the story is intriguing and original and with such high stakes you can't help but get drawn in. The bombastic music says it all: this is a game that shot for the stars and captured a little magic on the way to the ground. Almost nothing they tried worked quite right, but there's just so much raw imagination it's like playing a demo for a game that got canceled for being too ahead of its time. If you can stand a bit of maintenance and jank, you will be in for a completely unique blending of Mass Effect, Max Payne and Jet force Gemini. If ever anything needed to be remade it's this concept and all its potential, but like everything else about it, Advent Rising will probably be the one and the only.

A love/hate game, doing both right and wrong all over the place. + The music. Outstanding, and just about perfect. Not just the quality, but the mood. It turns a firefight into a tragic, desperate stand against terrible odds. It turns a shot in space into a grand sweeping one. It turns revelations into emotional affairs. It makes things exciting and engrossing, and elevates all. + Plot, developments and the intro is like a Hollywood movie with the credits in the cutscene, and when you get control, it continues it. Love it! The middle sometimes takes a backseat to action set-pieces, moving you from fight to fight and one reminiscent of the Beach of Normandy. It’s not a happy tale, but it’s an interesting one and well worth playing for, despite the massive cliffhanger. + Fun combat and powers, from the usual gravity manipulation and energy blasts, to time dilation, energy shields and frosty projectiles. You can dual wield guns and powers, bullet time and matrix dive while firing, and level them up enough and they get an alternate fire. Power recharges at a nice rate and ammo is plenty. - Bugs. Generic crashing issues throughout (Critical error), hangar bug near the beginning, and an instance where if you die in a vehicle segment in the first part, you respawn without a vehicle and have to restart and replay a chunk of it. Only a single instance of it freezing up though. It really does hamper your enjoyment and kills any momentum. - Controls, solid in parts, including swapping weapons and powers but flick targeting is a mess and hampers the camera, sometimes requires you to free aim and hope for the best. - Difficulty is all over the place. Pre-powers are tricky, gimmicky bosses, and a particular, short segment late-game where you can get one-shot by mook snipers. Not enough words for this but it’s a flawed, fun game that deserved a sequel and some polishing. The conclusion? Tops, cliffhanger aside. I enjoyed it, I hated it, and I don't regret playing it.

A lot of people regard Advent Rising as somewhat of a hidden gem or a diamond in the rough. It's neither. The controls and camera are notoriously bad. Compared to games like Jedi Outcast that did the same thing when it comes to shooting + extra abilities or Psi-Ops, this one is just awful. The game has your powers and guns occupy the same slots and swapped through the same uncomfortable and unintuitive controls, which means that A) In order to equip your powers you need to unequip your weapons and B) When you equip either, you are likely to want to stick to it since the controls and the menu are awfully clunky The game's combat encounters are horribly paced. It doesn't know when to stop spawning enemies. Compare that to Serious Sam in which combat encounters with dozens upon dozens of foes are tense and fun. Yeah. This one just makes them dull, constantly spawning more enemies on top of the ones you just killed, probably in an attempt to prolong a game that would otherwise last around four hours. The enemies don't feel good to kill and while there is some enemy variety, they don't *feel* different. The controls are a mess. You are either stuck with a clunky as hell autoaim system or with just as clunky manual aim. Manual aim is clunky because if you aim just a little lower than normal THE MAIN CHARACTER'S MODEL OBSCURES THE CROSSHAIR. What?! Did anyone playtest this? Probably not, because all the bosses take VERY specific ways of defeating that the game doesn't feel like telegrahing you about. Not to mention that the game is a complete shitshow from technical standpoint. By default it runs in letterboxed widescreen but doesn't support WS resolutions outside of the box. Once you mod that in, there's still the issue of missing shadows which were intended for some Radeon card from God knows when and crashes. It crashed on me several times, including right after the epilogue. Lovely. Don't play this game. Play Jedi Academy and Mass Effect. They did it all better.