Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition from Publisher and Developer New Blood Interactive, Nightdive Studios, Apogee Entertainment
A remake of a cult classic 90’s first person run-and-gun shooter. Adrenaline runs high with crazy fast movement speed and occasional frustrations from not being able to find the exit for the level. Recommend giving it a try and blasting some enemies with your super bark of destruction or Excali-bat today!
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is the updated remaster of the cult classic 1995 game Rise of the Triad. It’s a retro First Person Shooter that actually lets you pick from one of the five Members of the High-Risk United Nations Task-Force (codenamed H.U.N.T.). Each of the characters has different stats in movement speed, health (or hit points), and accuracy.
As expected it plays like a 90’s FPS run-and-gun which is both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. If you didn’t grow up playing these kinds of games you will get frustrated as there are no tutorials and there are hidden entrances all over the place. You end up getting stuck and have to just start spamming the A button against the walls hoping to find one of the hidden doors and open a path. Some of the levels feel like a maze where you keep going back and forth trying to figure out what you missed to find the exit. There is a map that is a little bit of help but there’s no mini map so you need to open the menu and check it all of the time or you risk having to run back and forth for something you missed. The story is about what you’d expect from a 90’s FPS game. There are bad guys you need to stop, that’s pretty much as deep as it gets.
As someone who didn’t play the original Rise of the Triad I was surprised by the crazy powers you get in this game, like being able to fly for a small amount of time, turning into a dog with a super bark, having a magic baseball bat (Excali-bat), becoming a god, and making people explode. The powers added some diversity to the game play and let you experiment with different play styles. Just like most good FPS run-and-guns, it’s all about the weapons. Along with the normal standard weapons like pistols and machine guns, they have some other interesting weapons with several of them firing different types of rockets.
Since it is a remake, we wish they would have added some quality of life improvements, like autosave. You read that right. It’s 2023 and there is no autosave, only manual saves, which is easy to forget to do nowadays as that has become a standard function in games for quite a while now. It’s frustrating when you forget about that and end up losing hours of gameplay. This happened to us as we stopped playing for a bit and when we reloaded, we realized that our last save was from hours ago. Another thing we would have loved to see is the option to change the controller sensitivity. It felt like it was set way too high which made some of the platforming parts much harder than they needed to be.
There are 4 different campaigns to play, with a total of 109 levels, giving you hours of gameplay. Just make sure you remember to save often (or at the very least, save before you stop playing). There is also the option to use the game’s original cheat codes if you remember them or you can look them up online. The game gets bonus points for letting you unlock achievements while using cheat codes. Unfortunately, the console remake did not include the multiplayer game type from the original game. But we hear the PC version does include this game type. Would love to see this come to consoles in a future title update.
Overall, it did hit that 90’s FPS nostalgia nailing the ever so classic look and feel of those games. The controller sensitivity was a challenge at times and made us feel like our character was speed skating on ice, but the option to play as different characters was a really cool option and we ended up playing as the character with the slowest movement speed to help offset some of the issues we were having with the controller sensitivity.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition is available on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Windows. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
Super Destronaut: Land Wars from Publisher Ratalaika Games and Developer Petite Games
Repetitive but enjoyable retro FPS
A Neon First Person Shooter
The game is a First Person Shooter where you shoot enemies and pick up the coins they drop to buy upgrades for weapons and health. It has two game types: challenge, and arcade mode.
Challenge Mode has 30 stages to play and provides you with a specific challenge you need to complete before receiving your Gold, Silver, or Bronze rating. The ratings are based on how quickly you complete the challenge but there’s nothing to indicate what the requirements are for each rating until you complete the stage and see what your time was.
The first 15 levels or so, we didn’t find the challenges to be particularly challenging. Most of these stages were able to be completed in under 1-2 minutes. At times, the most challenging part is just finding the enemies.
Arcade Mode has 5 game types
Classic Mode – Normal Classic mode
Hardcore Mode – More Enemies with more HP
Combo Breaker – You need to keep a combo going if it runs out its game over.
Maximum Strength – You start out using a Rocket Launcher.
Snail Mode – You move slowly and can’t jump.
We enjoyed classic mode and maximum strength mode the most.
The artstyle is a neon voxel and has a retro mid 80’s feel. Enemies look like they could’ve been taken right out of arcade classics like Space Invaders or Centipede. The level design and sound effects fit the game’s aesthetic and are in keeping with that retro feel. They chose dubstep for the music. While this is not exactly in keeping with 80’s retro it still feels like a good fit for the gameplay. While the controls are very simple they work nicely and are pretty responsive.
Sadly, there is only one map that is used for every stage both in challenge mode and in arcade mode. After about 15 minutes you’ll figure out the fastest way to make it around the map and where to take cover during combat. While this does help make the challenges a little easier since you’re familiar with the terrain, it also makes it more boring.
There is no story or narrative and the challenge mode (30 Stages) can be completed in under 1 hour. With no online leaderboards, once you complete the challenges you are unlikely to replay them unless you want to try to get a higher rating for personal reasons. The arcade modes were more enjoyable as the stages last until you die (or lose your combo in Combo Breaker). That at least kept things going longer than a couple of minutes.
Super Destronaut: Land Wars is available on Xbox One, PS4, PSVita and Nintendo Switch. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.
An open world FPS set in a 1980’s Sweden that’s ruled by robots. You explore the world looting cars, trucks, backpacks, toolboxes, houses, and all types of building looking for items and weapons to help you survive and fight the robots. The story is told through reading notes and listening to recording on answering machines.
It has a decent amount of character customization right off the bat as well as a lot of clothing items to make your character look the way you want; some even provide perks. It has a hint of an RPG element with skill trees to unlock and help level up your play style.
The controls are decent and the atmosphere is great as you explore the Swedish Countryside and everything that comes with it.The game does have some bugs from getting stuck in/under the map as well as quest items sometimes being missing. The navigation system needs work as well as there were mission objectives with no indication of where to find them.
The online co-op is a game changer taking the player from defensively avoiding the robots to proactively hunting them down. The co-op option is needed when coming up to the larger robots on the more difficult later stages.
