Advent Rising

If it wasn't for a bug that caused a crash I'd have given it a full five star rating. I've only started playing and this review is based on first impressions. Then again, better not to spoil anyway. I can tell this game is a forgotten OG Xbox masterpiece by scifi author Orson Scott Card of Ender's Game fame. It's an epic story of humans gaining "Force Powers" and fighting against hostile genocidal aliens. But unike in most Human on alien violence stories, say Halo there are friendly neighborhood alien homies that happily got humanity's back like bros. So tragic how great art pieces get overlooked because of low advertising budgets or at worst bribed critics.

Advent rising is, if nothing else, a very ambitious game. It is the first part of a planned trilogy (that sadly never got any further than this). One of the main highlights of this game is its story. It is by famed sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, who is known for the immensely popular Ender’s Game series. And even though the story of this game is quite different from that of Ender’s Game, you can see similarities in the way that the story is told, and how the characters are handled. It is an Orson Scott Card story, that is very obvious. The story starts with you entering an alien ship, as part of a diplomatic envoy who are about to make first contact with an alien species. These aliens turn out to be friendly, and say that they want to protect humanity from another alien species, who intends to wipe out humanity from the face of the galaxy. Things quickly go sour though, as the hostile aliens shows up and attack both the human owned planet and the alien spaceship. I won’t spoil the rest of the story, you need to play it for yourself to find out why these aliens did what they did, and how you intend to stop them. Another outstanding part of this game is its sound. The music is used to great effect, in order to set the tone of each scene. Many other games, and movies, could learn from this game when it comes to proper use of music. The sound effects are not as outstanding, but they work well. The graphics also look quite nice, with a good artistic design that is not afraid of using colours. From a technical point of view, the graphics look good enough, though it is not outstanding, even for its time. Some of the character animations looks a bit strange from time to time, but this is never bad enough to seriously detract from the overall experience. One major fault with the game is its vehicle controls, at least with a mouse & keyboard. At an early point in the game you get to drive a car, but the driving controls never feel natural. On foot things works a lot better though, and your character move like you would expect him to. A lot of games frontload most of their content and after a few hours you will have seen all that the game has to offer. Advent Rising on the other hand keeps introducing new powers up until the very ending of the game. It also has a rudimentary experience system, where you get better at using powers and weapons as you use them. You even get better at jumping & dodging as you jump & dodge. Apart from all of this, there is one other thing worth mentioning, and that is all the bugs. Some events don’t trigger as they should from time to time, which means that you have to reload from the last checkpoint, and the AI sometimes bugs out, which can result in enemies mass suicide down a hole, like a bunch of fictional lemmings. With its flaws, I can’t give this game a perfect score. It is a good and highly ambitious game, but it is not perfect. It is also a game that needs to be experienced by any and all sci-fi fans out there, for its story and setting. There is a fan patch out there that restores some cut content. Check the forum for more information about this.

I played this when it was released. Such an underrated game! I love everything about it - story, graphics, gameplay. One of my all time favorites. Too bad we didn't saw a sequel!

I'm pretty much echoing others' comments. There are some really bad things about it, the constant crashing was the worst. However it's almost always at a cutscene so I rarely lost any progress. The story line has interesting things about it but also a lot of plot holes and a few clichés thrown in. The controls take a bit of getting used to but by the middle of the game you should have no problems with it. The gameplay does get a lot better the more you play it. It's an OK 3D shooter but it really is a lot of fun once your powers start emerging. You aren't going to spend weeks on this game and it doesn't have a lot of (immediate) replay value but it is intensely fun for a short time.

Take Neo from The Matrix. Give him Master Chief's weaopnry, Halo PC/Quake Live/Unreal Tournament controls, and a few neat superpowers, and you have this. It looks beautiful on the lowest graphics setting. The action is always fun. Plus Dual wielding, 3rd person action, leveling up skills with weapons and powers, and a pretty cool story, if you can figure it out. A steal at $6. Just make sure to download it overnight. 4 Gigs is alot.