Rise of the Triad

I have a soft spot for shooters that refuse to hold your hand, and Rise of the Triad (2013) tests that sentiment pretty hard. Interceptor Entertainment took the cult 1994 Apogee original and rebuilt it from the ground up rather than just slapping an HD coat on it, which is either admirable or foolish depending on your relationship with mid-90s design philosophy. The result is a game that moves fast, explodes constantly, and will absolutely kill you in ways that feel deeply unfair until you accept that fairness was never the contract. On the movement side, this thing screams. The player movespeed is high by any modern standard, and the level geometry leans heavily vertical with floating platforms, jump pads, and balconies stacked in ways that reward spatial awareness over tactical cover play. You pick from five characters in the H.U.N.T. squad, each with slightly different stat tradeoffs, and then you spend most of your time sorting through a weapon roster that includes a Firebomb rocket launcher, a lightning staff, a flak cannon that chains explosions, and a gatling-style rocket launcher that is as stupid as it sounds and better for it. No regenerating health, no quicksave mid-level, no hand-holding. Health pickups sit on the ground and you run over them. Classic. The campaign runs across 20 levels plus four secret ones spread across four episodes, and a first playthrough lands somewhere in the 10 to 15 hour range depending on difficulty. The "Ludicrous" difficulty setting is not a marketing joke - it is genuinely punishing. Traps like breakaway floors, rolling boulders, and spike pits sit between long checkpoint gaps, and the platforming sections in particular are where the game loses people. They are not fun in the way the shooting is fun. They are annoying in the way that old games were annoying. Some reviewers bounced hard off this, and I get it. When you are trying to nail a precise jump for the eighth time over a death pit, the kinetic joy of the rocket combat feels very far away. Multiplayer at launch was a mess - reports of broken matchmaking and bugs were common across reviews from 2013. In 2025, finding a live lobby is going to require either a coordinated group or a lot of patience. The deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes were genuinely well-designed around the game's absurd speed when they worked, but treating this as an active online shooter today is optimistic. Workshop support exists, which has kept a small community producing maps, but do not buy this expecting a live population. The Metacritic score of 67 is accurate as a signal: this is a niche product that lands hard for its target audience and baffles everyone else. If you grew up on Quake or Unreal Tournament and you want something that skips the last two decades of shooter conventions entirely, the campaign alone justifies the entry price at a discount. Go in knowing the platforming is rough, the checkpoint spacing is brutal, and the multiplayer scene is thin. Go in also knowing that the Firebomb rocket launcher is one of the most satisfying weapons in any shooter from this era of the retro revival.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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