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 Graphics were outdated, even when they used live actors to make them and sound effects are ..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.
Great game - simple mechanics, yet realy hard gameplay. Random events, that can kill your crew in five minutes, or let it go throught whole gallaxy, just to smash you by one extra hard battle near end - or let you live and win, actualy! Different ships, different races, all the ship's systems, all this make for great addictive game with what seems like unlimited possibilities. I would appreciate a save game feature, but that would be against nature of this game. Real gem.
Incredible premise, cool retro graphics and clever level design are all to be found in this quite small game. There are many interactive pieces that form great puzzles. Game is fun and fast, however some puzzles are not only about thinking but about realy fast reflexes and timed jumps - those may take a little longer to master, as even if you know exactly what to do, it may take as much as twenty tries to actualy accomplish it, not counting tries that you must make to figure the puzzle in the first place. Great game overall.
This game is not worth your time, or the money spent for it. Being an offspring of multimedia hype, it is a pretty random collection of puzzles with a story. Story might be actualy good, but it is told in form of subtitle-less animations with extremely quiet speech, so most of the time you have no idea what is going on. Puzzles are not that bad, but all of them are made with very slow pre-rendered animations, so most of the time you will click and then watch 30 seconds of meaningless animation, before you can click again. Music is ok, soundeffects.. i cant recall any, apart from really annoying tesing from house owner. I bought the game in local store just for the nostalgia, and after realising its true nature tried to get over with it as fast as possible, only to realise it just was NOT worth the effort.
