Despite its tiresome platform puzzles, Rise remained one of my favorite shooters throughout the ‘90s…
Another aspect of Rise that I would like to see more – especially in the massive arenas found in modern game engines – is the shifting blocks of walls used to open new areas of a level or change its landscape entirely. The puzzles that required the right sequence of triggered pressure plates ensured that, despite their largely uniform texture and form, no two sections of the game were identical. Clapping a crowd of Oscuridos into putty between partitions is a visceral joy on the same level as tricking an assassin into tripping over a sticky Black Mesa barnacle tongue: indirect, bloody, and possessed of a unique sense of accomplishment.
Anyone still looking to trump the Rise of the Triad will likely need to dust off the old 486, since my copy stopped working at around the same time that I bade good old DOS goodbye. Still, a half-dozen playthroughs over the course of one year should speak for the game’s quality as much as it serves as a testament to the paucity of comparable shooters during the genre’s formative period. Nothing beats a good first-time experience, so even though more recent gems of mass destruction like Painkiller and Postal 2 also contain a gory gib-tastic appeal, I will always remember Rise of the Triad as the very first game that occasioned the statement, “Augh! Dude, that guy’s eyeball is sliding down the wall!”