Rise of the Triad: Dark War

... you're gonna enjoy this one. Linear gameplay, kill'em all mission statements, innovative weapons (John Woo dual-pistols), lots of gore, mean traps, being able to break stuff, cool final bosses. No surprises, just good ol' fun straight from 1995.

Summer 1995 - A 16-year-old boy was in a computer store with his dad getting his first PC (a 386SX 40Mhz). The summer intern was playing the ROTT shareware episode (The H.U.N.T. begins) and it’s safe to say the rest was history. Rise of the Triad is the pseudo-sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, the game that essentially started the FPS genre. Chronicling the hyper-violent escapades of a 5 member team of the H.U.N.T. (High-risk United Nations Taskforce) sent to investigate paramilitary activity at an island-based cult off the coast of the US. Mere minutes into the mission, the groups escape route is destroyed and when only one course of action presents itself, that course of action must be taken. What follows is a veritable tour-de-force of violence, innovation and floating anti-grav platforms. Whilst initially gifted with basic projectile weaponry and standard launchers such as bazookas and heat-seeking missiles, the game quick steps up a gear and starts throwing more innovative tools of destruction, culminating in the mighty Firewall & Firebomb weapons, both of which literally obliterate rooms of hostile guards, frequently resulting in showers of meaty chunks that continue to fall as you step over smouldering corpses and continue your mission. The innovation does not stop there, as the game contains such features as limited weapon load-outs (not properly seen again until the more realistic Medal of Honour games), subterfuge (wounded guards will feign death, only to shoot you in the back as you pass moments later), unique character statistics (not seen at that point outside of RPGs) and obscure and self-deprecating power ups such as God Mode, which casts your character as a Aryan superhuman who throws homing balls of energy at the massed enemies whilst yawning loudly in his/her boredom. It’s pretty hard to see how ROTT passed under as many radars as it did, seeing as its game play was more sophisticated than Doom (despite using an older engine), the innovation more pronounced and the whole game just having a great sense of... well, fun!

Some people really love Rise of the Triad, but I didn't enjoy this game at all, even back at the time. A wannabe Doom-killer, this game feels actually like Wolfenstein 3D 2.5, with lots of b-movie flavour and silliness. The game is mindless action with virtually no plot, but lots of humour, thanks to creative director Tom Hall. Levels look and feel blocky, and it's immediately obvious why all the maps are square-like, with no curves whatsoever: the level design was of the "drag and drop on a grid" type. If you want to play this game, you have to be aware that you are going to feel like a "rat in a maze", with arbitrary traps and platforms standing in your way. The graphics consist of digitized characters taking shots at you in boxy surroundings. There are many weapons but you can only carry a few, and the most powerful ones have very limited ammunition. Still, they enable you to see the high point of the game, which is of course the amazing "ludicrous gibs!" (the enemy gets blown up in chunks). I have to admit that Rise of the Triad is not my cup of tea. Still, it's simple enough, and if you like over-the-top FPS action and brutal Prince-of-Persiaesque labyrinths full of traps (yes, there's a lot of jumping), you may want to try it. Not all players will appreciate it, so it's always a good idea to try the demo before getting the full game. This is a release from the shareware era, so the first levels were available for free!

Yep, this is exactly the ROTT I remember playing once upon a time. It just has one big problem: Vertical looking, as implemented in this game [when it was still revolutionary] is broken in this GOG repackage. When I say it's broken, I mean that you'll randomly be looking at the ground because the game either thinks an enemy is underground or it just glitches out on its own - most of the time it can fix itself, but this is usually after you're staring at 5 different enemies and have lost half your pills [aka life force] from getting shot forever. This is dangerous when you just picked up a missile weapon and are about to charge in and clear out a room, as you'll be clearing out your own gibs instead because you can't manually fix your view or "lookspring" like later games such as Quake or Hexen allowed. Other than that issue, it hasn't lost any of its charm or personality. You can still get the infamous "ludicrous gibs", you can still get the "republican bonus" for destroying all the plants and the "democrat bonus" for shooting all the money, you can still trip balls on shrooms and be the world's sleepiest god, you can still get your hard-earned Drunk Missile taken from you by a certain ballsy enemy type, and you can still hump walls for secret areas. If you're a fan of games like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior, this one's right up your street. Try it out. You won't regret accidentally triggering Cujo mode and barking enemies to pieces.

I remember when this game came out in 1995. I saw some review praising the realism and great gameplay - what a joke. Two years after DooM (and a year after DooM][), Rise of the Triad was game running on slightly modified engine from Wolfenstein3D - levels made from "square blocks", unlike Wolfenstein you could now have parallaxed ceiling of variable height (but the the same height for whole level). So from technical side it was a huge leap back. Graphics were outdated, even when they used live actors to make them and sound effects are .. weak, as if someone was impersonating various sounds instead of recording them. But people don't play games on GOG for their technical inovations, right? What about the gameplay? Well it sucks. It plays worse than aforementioned Wolfenstein, with some cool ideas and some very poor ideas. For example many traps were well implemented, however jumping and picking up ankhs as in some 3D Sonic? Story came from scrapped ideas for DooM (as do names of the PCs) and the level design is one of the worst I have seen. I played the game for some time and yet I could not tell one level from another - they just look so similar. DooM (1993),Duke Nukem 3D (1996), Quake (1996) - they all had their unique feel on many levels, unlike RotT. Some crazy ideas (god mode versus dog mode, shrooms) and pretty violence does not make a good game. RotT is not a complete let-down but there are so many better games that you have no reason to play this one.