Rise of the Triad Review: It Is What It Is

When judging the merits of a movie via review score it's not really a putdown to give one a 7/10 or ¾ stars or something like that, and so it's a good spot for critics to throw something like Fast & Furious 6, a movie that most folks enjoyed greatly but wouldn't call it like a profound work of art or whatever. And that's fine. It works. Nobody really interprets that missing star as a subtraction or penalty. 

Games scores aren't that nuanced, and so putting a 75 on something you had an absolute blast with and believe absolutely accomplished what it set out to do makes everybody else think you think it's mediocre, even if you specifically say it isn't. That's how our industry works, and it's totally dumb but that's just how it is. The benchmark minimum score for “game I liked” is drifting downward, slowly, but it'll be a while before the very small but vocal part of our community (the people who think a score overrides what a review actually says) will stop trying to make it difficult for critics to make full use of the scale we have.

What I say above is extremely relevant to what I'm about to say about Rise of the Triad. See, ROTT is not some profound artistic experience, but it's a lot of fun. It knows exactly what sort of experience it wants to deliver, and it totally nails it. You won't see compared with The Last of Us, for example, due to the perception that TLOU aimed high and ROTT did not. Rise of the Triad, however, is a better experience, and its method of throwing back to the Golden Age of Shooters is so effective – think Quake channeled through Duke Nukem – that it ends up being a more satisfying overall experience that those games it is trying to emulate.

One reason for that is it feels truly fresh arriving in today's environment where other shooters are nothing like this. I didn't even really think of it as a revival of dead convention but rather an attempt to shake up the shooter genre with the pretense of a throwback. That is never more evident than with the game's weapons. You start out with a pistol, and then you get two pistols to dual wield and you also get a submachine gun. Those selections each have unlimited ammo and are the only parts of the arsenal you will keep permanently. 

But those aren't what you want to use in Rise of the Triad, although they can get you through some situations in the campaign and may be occasionally useful in online matches if you're lucky. But the jewels here are everything else, which you pick up, use and discard when you're out of ammo. Most of these “other” weapons use some sort of explosive, which of course is far more effective than a pea shooter, and it's far more thrilling to fire bomb somebody or dash into a room and blindly shoot a heat-seeking rocket at whoever might be in there. The mad dash for a spawned weapon in a deathmatch isn't a new idea, but the Interceptor folks are geniuses in their placement; they love to put a really potent weapon in a wide open space – such as an exposed platform directly in front of the CTF flag – and watch the carnage ensue.

In the midst of all this are the occasional weird twist like a wizard staff, “dog mode” (can you guess what that is?) and thing that gives you wings and allows you to fly around the map. Yeah, that's a thing.

Sure, there are probably balancing issues in online play – not that I care, but I'm sure there are people who do – and the campaign is pretty damn difficult, for reasons you might expect and also because it's super easy to accidentally do some damage to yourself with one of the many explosions you will cause while playing.

But what matters to me, being a person who doesn't take video game competition seriously or care about scores (which you get for playing the campaign, and there are leaderboards and whatnot for that),  is that I am entertained – using that word very broadly here. When I first hopped into ROTT, I was kinda numb in the head, and I found that ROTT fit my mood perfectly. I didn't, or couldn't, think too hard about what was going on, and the Serious Sam 3 tagline “No Cover. All Man.” really does apply here. (You CAN play as a woman character, though.) I had to backpedal sometimes, sure, but mostly ROTT is about being quick on the trigger and making sure you have something that blows things up as often as possible.

The kicker is that it isn't all about shooting, which is something of a lost idea in the current era, leading me to be one of the few who actually enjoyed the gameplay of Duke Nukem Forever. In ROTT you'll have to navigate maps that are like mazes and avoid traps and deal with that whole lava room thing (it's better that you not know what that means until you see it). ROTT is a shooter and a 3D adventure, which is way less boring than the alternative. 

What it all comes down to is that Interceptor knew exactly what kind of game they wanted Rise of the Triad to be, and their execution of that vision is just about perfect. ROTT delivers on its promises better than any other game I've played this year, and while it might be easy to call it slight compared with something that had far more money pumped into it, I believe it matters that a developer set out to accomplish a thing and then totally did it. It may not be pretentious like a BioShock Infinite, but that's why it works. That, and the fact that it's completely hilarious.

Final Verdict

10 out of 10