Rise of the Triad Doesn’t Make Any Sense

It’s been almost two decades since Apogee’s Rise of the Triad was first released. That reaches all the way back to when nonsense ruled the first-person shooting genre, when few attempts were made to develop characters and layer themes. You loaded in, picked up a floating gun and killed absolutely everything you saw. Things bled, exploded, died, you moved on and ten seconds or less later you repeated, shooting and circle strafing until the credits.

With the reboot, Interceptor Entertainment is hoping to keep much of the original’s nonsense intact. You’ll pick up floating weapon icons that bob and rotate in place in stages. Your MP40 will have infinite ammunition and you’ll need it to cut down swarms of fast-moving enemies. You’ll use a weapon called the Excalibat – a baseball bat with a magical eye set in its center that as a secondary fire will launch a wave of explosive baseballs.

When shot enemies will be cut to pieces. Their hands and legs will snap and flip off their bodies and their heads will roll away like gruesome bowling balls. Your character will unload one-liners because dismembering an enemy wasn’t quite satisfying enough. You’ll rocket jump, uncover secret rooms, catch enemies in environmental traps and put together kill chains to drive up a score to post on leaderboards.

The game will feature a single player mode where you infiltrate an island overrun with cultists trying to destroy Los Angeles. To stop them you’ll use a drunk missile launcher to fire clusters of unpredictable spinning explosives, use a flame wall gun to ignite enemies and watch as they flail around before exploding, and pick up other strange tools of destruction. Infiltrator is still working out how all the alternate fire modes might function, but the examples given so far have especially interesting implications for multiplayer. For instance, the Split Missile launcher will fire out missile in different directions, and the alternate fire might cause them to converge on the same point and collide, which could be useful for splattering a player hiding behind a pillar.

While shooting at others online, expect the type of experience that emphasizes control of fixed weapon spawn points. Particularly powerful weapons may also be set on top of traps, so if you wait for someone to walk into the room to try and scoop up a coveted weapon, you might be able to drop the floor and watch as they’re skewered in a spike pit, or crush them under bricks, or burn them with jets of fire.

Built with Unreal Engine 3, this version of Rise of the Triad looks great so far, the perfect kind of experience for someone who just wants to sprint and shoot and not have to think about much beyond where the next enemy might attack from. Though it’s only scheduled to launch on PC, Interceptor is open to creating a console version as well if there’s interest. The only sticking point could be the user sharing features. Rise of the Tried will be completely moddable when it’s released. Interceptor is very enthusiastic about giving users the ability to generate and share content and isn’t very interested in putting together a version that doesn’t allow for that.

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