Rise of the Triad (2013)

I have never played the original Rise Of The Triad, so I am new to this. The GOG version is the most up to date (1.5.5), so some problems from the older reviews, like glitches or crashes, must be gone, because I have never encountered those. The game itself is about a team of five characters with different health and speed stats, shooting nazi-like enemies, known as Triads, on San Nicholas Island, to find and kill the big bad boss, simple. Although it is a 1st person shooter, it is more like a classic platformer and a tough one indeed. The enemies, that are hard to spot, have, despite their low AI, pinpoint accuracy and there are many traps in the levels, so prepare to get killed a lot. There is a checkpoint save system, which you should use, as quick loading your game, which has been implemented after some critiques, deducts your high score. According to my taste, the game still looks pretty well, especially the huge explosions, there are a lot of secrets and some of the weapons are really cool. Yet, I advise you to start at easy difficulty and learn where the enemies and traps are located, so that at one point you will know it all, to run and gun through the game like a speed runner, you know, like in the first Prince of Persia. Unfortunately, you cannot change your player name from John Doe, so you are always called this name in the high score list. Frustration mostly comes because of the bad jumping controls that are not really smooth and some levels (like E2M2) are an exercise in frustration, with all of their traps and jump pads. Yet, the soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult rocks, especially if you love metal, which can also be changed to the classic soundtrack of the original. Indeed, this shooter is not the best out there, but it is, in my opinion, not the worst either, especially now, with all the old problems patched out, so on a good discount you may want to give this a try, because it contains more than enough classic action and truly kind of a 90s feel.

I consider myself fan of old FPS games. I've been playing Doom, Heretic and Quake for ages. But somehow, I never really got into ROTT. I played a couple of levels, thought that it was really imaginative (with cool MIDI music), and left it after that. Maybe I should give it another chance, since 2013 reboot is... disappointing. Maps are mostly linear. Forget about interconnected rooms like in Doom or Ion Fury. You only move forward along the path, no backtracking at all. At least some of the traps are original. Level design is also uneven - some maps, like E2M1 have some interesting architecture, but E1M5 mostly consists of rectangular, non-detailed room! ROTT 2013 looks ugly. All characters look like dolls - they seem lifeless, artificial. Bloom is overused. Game assets appear like they were randomly put together in Unity from free model packs. Original ROTT looked consistent, despite containing Nazi-looking guards, big coins and robots. To make things worse, ROTT has performance issues. I played on default video settings at 1920x1080 resolution, and I frequently experienced FPS drop (below 30). For comparison, I played Doom 2016 on the same machine on Ultra settings, also 1920x1080 and gameplay was smooth all the time. But the worst thing is that ROTT 2013 is just buggy. I couldn't get audio settings right - Lorelei's voice and music were often unaudible due to SFX. Graphical glitches are common. But the last nail to the game's coffin is E2M2. It consists of multiple rooms filled with traps, which you can visit in any order. To progress, player must beat all of them. When I died and reloaded last checkpoint, game thought that I have beaten another room - at least that's what I thought when I saw checkpoint name. However, in reality it didn't record any beaten room! It was that moment when I was done with this game and uninstalled it. Personally, I don't like bashing someone else's work - but with ROTT 2013 I have hard time to find anything positive.

At first glance, Rise of The Triad 2013 seems pretty fun. I mean, It’s a fast-paced shooter with an unapologetically cheesy vibe, featuring old-school level design and powerful weaponry that lets you turn dozens of goons into piles of guts, what more could you want? Yet, while it held promise, I found ROTT 2013 to be hard to enjoy, as its gameplay is… kinda bad: indeed, while this game commits itself to emulating mechanics from its predecessor, those turn out to be either poorly imitated or straight-up backwards and irritating. The way the weapons handle is disappointing (even some of the most devastating ones lack a good sense of impact) and depending on their numbers and placement, the enemies are either boring or frustrating to fight, with little-to-no in-between. They are dumb, stilted, unresponsive, bullet-spongy, don’t seem to receive increased damage from headshots… The gunplay simply isn’t fun. The boss fights are also terrible. On top of its sloppy combat, the game accumulates small issues that further tarnish the experience, being notably buggy and poorly optimized. I genuinely struggle to find something positive to say about this whole mess… I’d argue that the level design is full of fun secrets and mostly decent (provided of course you ignore the bad enemy placement, annoying booby traps and dreadful platforming sections). The graphics are okay, and the music is good. Sadly, none of these few qualities redeem this mediocre reboot, which often plays like the first Unity project of an amateur developer. It’s a game that understands the quirks that made retro shooters so fun, but fails to implement them properly: I’ve played a lot of FPS games at this point, many of them classics, and this is pretty much the worst! At release, maybe ROTT 2013 felt like a breath of fresh air for the boomer shooter crowd... but ten years later, there is a whole market of better alternatives out there, and absolutely no reason to revisit this particular one. Stay away!!!

The idea of a ROTT update is terrific, but there are many things that keep this from being great. First, enemy physics is all over the place. Shoot someone with the pistol and he may literally launch hundreds of feet toward you then rubberband back again. Second, there appears to be no splashback from higher powered weapons. Shoot a rocket launcher at the feet of a baddie, and he'll keep coming, uninjured. Third, what is up with the incredible amounts of unnecessary profanity?? Doug drops the MF bomb when getting God mode...really? Where's my option to turn it OFF?? Also, ROTT:DW had a robust, zoomable map...where is it here? And, ans been mentioned many times already, the game freezes at inopportune times, even on low settings. It's not all bad: Level design is creative, and fans of the original game will definitely recognize the layouts; a ton of work has been put into its design. The soundtrack is a stellar update of ROTT:DW (if a bit more repetitive than its predecessor). It's obvious the devs have love and respect for ROTT:DW, so why release it in this state? As it currently stands, this is a 2.5 to 3 stars, max. If it had been optimized before released this would have been an easy 4. Let's hope for a patch, and soon. It's currently just a little too frustrating to be the frantic fun that the original was.

The game looks amazing but plays like a stuttery fool. Loading takes forever and when it finally loads its a fight between the glitches and the crashes. Patch is required. I want to like this game but can't when the game is broken.