Rise of the Triad (2013)

Let me start by saying I'm a fan of the genre. I grew up on games like Wolf3d, the original ROTT, Descent, Doom, etc. I consider those games timeless and fun to this day. This game is not fun. There's a lot of problems, but most notably: 1. The AI is stupid. Mindnumbingly stupid. Like "Babby's first pathfinding routine" stupid. Enemies either stay in one place and shoot, or they charge you single-file and shoot. No attempts to dodge, no concept of using cover or trying to flank the player. They also tend to ignore you if you aren't in the magic distance (while you can still see and shoot at them). 2. The music feels really out-of-place. For example, the E1M2 track sounds like it belongs in Pokemon. 3. The playable characters are nearly as one-dimensional as the enemies, complete with the Black character who exhibits every Black stereotype you can think of. 4. The VO is bad. Not intentionally-campy-The-Asylum-Presents bad, but we-spent-our-budget-on-hookers-and-blow-so-we-made-the-programmers-do-the-VO bad (or, if we're being generous, we-accidently-shipped-our-game-with-placeholder-sfx bad). The ROTT reboot tries to be over-the-top action, but it only succeeds in being halfway-to-meh. Needed more time in the oven.

The Unreal engine used in this game is poorly optimized and runs choppy. Play is like a badly done Duke clone, with awful voice overs,and no real feel of the weapons you are using. I only paid $3.75 for this, but the money would have been better spent on Duke Nukem with mods.

First bought this on release and was sorely disappointed. Picked it up again a couple years later, with a new graphics card and several dev patches later, and it's fantastic. I played through it and had a blast, and I highly recommend anyone who got burnt on it before or is on the fence to give it a chance - it deserves better than the original reviews gave it and it's fairly cheap. The levels are large, open and vertical, littered with jump pads, traps and secrets, and feel like actually playing a classic FPS, rocket-jumping between ledges and over impassable walls; I love the remade metal soundtrack, it fits well, it's very catchy and most tracks make you want to gib someone with a bazooka; the explosive weapons are crazy-fun, from homing missiles to rocket-gatling-guns, and combined with hidden powerups and old-style score collection you are really rewarded for searching the level for secrets; bosses are fun, zany and challenging, and now that there's quicksave/quickload I even found the platforming challenges fun. At worst you can just cheat past them, it's not like the game takes itself any seriously. This is a labor of love from start to finish, full of tongue-in-cheek humor and gameplay that respects the players' intelligence and experience, and I found it a real joy to play through. And it kept getting updates over a year post-release! Cons: - Some bugs (much less today than before), bad voice acting and unapologetic (possibly offensive) humor. 2 serious bugs crept up: 1) I would sometimes load a quicksave that would lose my weapon and have to reload to get it (happened a handful of times). 2) In certain levels, an event didn't trigger (killing all enemies didn't open a door) and I had to reload from checkpoint (happened twice throughout the game). - somewhat bland bullet weapons Pros: - You get to run around at 60mph, turn into a crotch-biting dog and fire mini-nukes at nazi wizards for $15. If you love fast-paced FPS, consider giving this a try.

While I admit it's still a bit buggy even as of now, this can be mitigated in the launcher settings by turning off Physx which seems to have worked for me though I could be wrong; I haven't finished the game like this yet. So besides it's mild bugginess, which I hope will be patched again in the future, It's EXACTLY how Wolf The New Order should've been: a fast paced, adrenaline pumping, run-and-gun shooter filled with explosions and gore galore. Levels are kept almost exactly as they were in the original albeit with enhanced graphics, added secrets/easter eggs and interactable objects. This was obviously a product of love and you can tell the creators really cared about this game, not to mention the killer rock music blaring in the background, just to remind you you're in a do-or-die action game!

This is one of those games I REALLY wanted to like. Like many kids of the 90s, I loved the crazyness of the original title back in the day. I wanted this to succeed and bring back that insanity. But that insanity was ironically only really possible because of the limits in the engine of that game. Platforming was there, but it worked because there was no jump button and all "floors" had to be built with sprites, requiring it to be much more simple just due to these limitations. It just wasn't going to work without them. And to try to turn up the volume on it just made those differences all the more glaring. This game is a mess, plain and simple. I salute the attempt, but I recommend you just move on to something else.