Finished up Rise of the Triad '13 and man does it leave a lot to be desired. For starters, the combat throughout is numbing in repetition. You're mostly going through with two weapons, an infinite ammo MP40 and one of a few explosive launchers, so right there is the first strike against it -- no shotguns. How you can qualify as an FPS without a shotgun is beyond me, damn you Tom Hall. Anyways, that's not entirely damning because explosives are fun, and the game offers a lot of opportunities to explode guys. However, you're effectively fighting against two enemy types in the entire game, and the second doesn't even appear until the last episode. Up to then you're fighting soldiers who all fight the same way, walk straight into line of sight of you and shoot. Sometimes the one you're shooting will always roll after being shot, sometimes the one you're shooting takes a little more damage than the norm, but it's all the same damn thing. It doesn't help that the enemy introduced later doesn't vary it up all that much, I mean imagine playing Doom and the only enemies you fight in the entire game are zombie men, and zombie men with slightly more health. Does that sound like fun? Damn you Tom Hall.
Secondly, game's pretty buggy; it's a regular occurrence for the scripting to break. There were a few times where I just found myself stuck in a level wondering if it was because I couldn't figure something out, or if something failed to trigger the means for progression, and the latter was
always the case. During the final boss, despite being an unenjoyable encounter all its own, there was a situation where the boss would just suddenly break into ragdoll while its head would remain in a stationary position,
leaving a long Dhalsim-like stretch until the body properly ragdoll phased itself out of the arena, forcing me to restart the fight. This happened
twice.
But the one thing I did find interesting about the game was its level design approach and how it took inspiration from platformers, but that was a holdover from the original. Interesting as it was, it's still like playing a game that routinely breaks into Xen. Platforming in first person shooters has almost universally been bad and RotT's is no different, who thought it was a good idea in the first place? Damn you Tom Hall.
I wouldn't recommend this, even at the $3 that I got it for. Just do yourself a favour and play Ultimate Doom again and skip all of Tom Hall's levels.
