Rise of the Triad (for PC)

Pros Embraces classic FPS game design in a way no other modern shooters do. Lots of weapons and opportunity for violence.

Cons Mediocre to ugly graphics. Mindless enemies. Maps are haphazard and confusing. Horribly unbalanced and unpolished. Bottom Line Rise of the Triad is the purest example of "back in the day" shooters we've seen in years, but that doesn't mean it's actually a good game.

By Will Greenwald Let me tell you about "back in the day." In this case, the day was the mid-90s, as it often is, and the reason for the nostalgia is first-person shooters. Long before Call of Duty made modern and near-future shooters a steady rhythm of running between cover points to fight terrorists, shooters were bright, colorful, and involved nothing more than blowing up everyone. Apogee's Rise of the Triad was one of those golden era games, standing alongside Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake. It was a gory spectacle with little finesse or sense of self-preservation for the player, and that's what we loved about it. Interceptor Entertainment, along with a strangely reborn Apogee Software (a spin-off publisher from 3D Realms, which was the original Apogee itself before it changed its name), have brought it back with a remake/reboot of Rise of the Triad that updates the graphics and sound but very little else.

This new Rise of the Triad is not a good game by modern standards. Calling it flawed would be like calling a Bethesda Softworks game buggy, or a Volition game subtle. However, at $14.99 on Steam, it's one of the purest and most faithful evocations of mid-90s FPS nostalgia I've ever seen, eclipsing Serious Sam in dedication to form and utterly demolishing the disastrous Duke Nukem Forever in doing what the developers intended for it to do. If you cut your teeth on Call of Duty, this game probably isn't for you. If you know what "idkfa" means, this is a magnificent time warp to the golden age of shooters.

Simple Violence
This game doesn't have much of a story, to the point that it openly mocks you if you ask for a mission briefing in the first level, telling you to just run around and kill everything. You play one of five members of H.U.N.T. (High Risk United Nations Task Force), who have different speed and endurance stats, sent to San Nicolas Island to stop a mysterious cult called the Triad that is big on Nazi imagery and wants to take over the world.

You can forget about cover or stealth or any other FPS advancement made in the last 15 years. Rise of the Triad is purely about running around areas shooting dudes with increasingly powerful weapons. Enemy mooks magically sense you whenever you're within range and shoot at you immediately, and you can absorb a good amount of damage before you go down, especially as you pick up armor upgrades and bowls of "monk meal" to refill your health. These items, along with weapons and coins, usually float in the air while slowly spinning or sit on the floor, letting you collect them by running over them.

While the graphics look years ahead of any FPS from the mid-90s, they look nearly a decade out of place against today's shooters. Rise of the Triad uses the Unreal Engine 3 with PhysX, which means some very nice-looking fire, smoke, and blood effects. However, the character models look like they came from a high-definition remake of Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, right down to the scrunchy faces. The background detail and weapon design feel like they came from 2006.

Weapons and Levels
You start with a pistol, then quickly get a second pistol for dual-wielding, then a submachine gun. All of these small arms have unlimited ammunition and while you "reload" them (triggering a reloading animation), there's no reason whatsoever to do that. They're also pretty weak weapons and most enemies take a second or two of concentrated fire to take them down, so you're probably going to stick to the more specific, limited-ammunition weapons. The game has several different types of rocket launchers at your disposal, all of which can make enemies explode in satisfyingly ludicrous gibs. There are bazookas, heat-seeking missiles, "drunk" missiles, and more in the explosives category. Then you move on to blasting out flame walls, calling lightning, and using a magical baseball bat with an eye in it to blow up people. All of these weapons can be found floating and rotating a little off the ground, as mid-90s FPS games intended. Pickups like coins contribute to your score for judging your performance, but they aren't useful for much more than points in the game.

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