Rise of the Triad: Dark War

Average shooter. Levels are really abstract, meaning they don't feel like actual locations that could exist. They merely feel like video game maps put together for the sake of creating a FPS game. You never feel any emotional connection with the world, unlike with Doom, Heretic, Blood, etc. Enemies are boring and take too many hits to die. Bosses are cheap as hell. After some time, levels tend to blend together and become repetitive due to their maze like and uninspired designs. Graphics are decent enough but can't compare to doom. All in all...a very mediocre shooter.

... 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.