I was just thinking about this game a couple of days ago... there's going to be a new Rise of the Triad!




This was an underrated, unhinged Doom-a-like by a group of developers at Apogee who you could tell just had enormous fun making it, digitizing themselves into the game Mortal Kombat-style and creating bosses by gluing a load of corrugated cardboard to an office chair or enhancing tin of baked beans with laser guns and robot parts. To call it a bit odd would be like saying Danny Alexander looks 'a bit' like Beaker the muppet - they left all sense behind from the very start and filled the levels with trampolines, bouncing walls made of lava and life-restoring porridge. Hearing about a revival of it took me by complete surprise - and my opinion went up and down like swings and roundabouts throughout the video.

First of all - someone, tell people to stop overwriting their older games with identically-titled updates! Recently we've had Mortal Kombat, Total Recall and now Rise of the Triad all over again... it makes things immensely confusing. "Remember Prince of Persia?" "Yes, it had an overabundance of condescending achievements and a knackered combat system." "Oh, piss off." If you really don't want to slap a number on the end, at least give it a subtitle or something - it isn't that difficult!

Still. Disregarding the usual stuff about the title, I was terrified at first that they'd gone the usual modern-day first person shooter route and darkened it up into a gritty war film where you spend half the game staring at your leader's rear end as you follow him according to the script. The flags on the castle wall make it much more obvious that these are Nazi-replacements in a game that was once meant to be the sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. After that... things got a little better with the voice sample appeal to nostalgia and the Knightmare giant insane spinning blades visible in the background, but I was still uncomfortable with the bloody close-ups that they introduced the game with. I can't really describe why, because when I think back to it, Rise of the Triad was always meant to be a very violent game. But I could cope with it when it was obviously not real, with sprites of the development team exploding into showers of about twelve eyeballs - close-ups of more... believable representations of humans being blown to pieces doesn't quite sit well with me.

However! A couple of seconds later, we see the main character fly a hundred feet through the air, fling a Firewall bomb at a truck, and everything in the entire world explodes while the 'chorus' of Going Down the Fast Way starts up - and I was completely sold :) The Rise of the Triad music is actually one of the very few game soundtracks that I didn't think of as being metalized - it was more an odd sort of techno-rock/brass blend and reminded me of something like Sonic 2 - but it's amazing to suddenly hear it reworked. And it's strange seeing such fast, unrealistic gameplay combined with modern-day graphics (the same uncanny feeling that I got from Legend of Grimrock).

I find the Duke Nukem-like voice samples a bit... stupid, but the original game had those and they can get away with more now. Anyway, who cares - the Excalibat is back and has an eye on it like Soul Calibur! And... did he just reload his two pistols at the same time in mid-air by catching cartridges in them like in Devil May Cry? This is incredible. What else do you expect from a game where about three quarters of the weapons are rocket launchers?

Ultimately, I think this is all going to hinge on the level design - whether the game just looks fast all edited together like that, or it really is going to bring back exploration and non-linearity in a first person shooter - two things that have been sorely missing since the genre metamorphosed into on-rails shooters with added arrow keys. It's one of my favourite classic oddball games, because it never took itself seriously at all - so I really hope that this will be the one to bring the spirit into the modern age.