Rise & Shine Review- An Exercise in Frustration

Developer: Super Awesome Hyperdimensional Mega Team

Publisher: Adult Swim Games

Release date: January 13, 2017

Available on: PC, Xbox One (reviewed)

In the beginning, when videogames first gained prominence in the arcades, the idea was to make things hard enough to get players to keep feeding in quarters. That feeling of “Just one more try. I can get it this time!” was used to make games seem deeper than what they were, when the reality was these games were short in length, and artificially added hours of gameplay by ramping up the difficulty. To be sure, there are plenty of people who absolutely loved this and still do. And making a game challenging can be a good thing, if that challenge is rewarding and leaves one with a sense of satisfaction. It’s when that challenge doesn’t feel rewarding due to cheap deaths and clumsy controls that ramping up the difficulty in a game works to its detriment.

Rise & Shine is such a game.

The game’s story takes place on Gamearth, a world populated by generic nods to classic videogame characters. This, along with the brightly colored, cartoony graphics, makes up what charm Rise & Shine has. You follow a young boy named Rise, making his way through a world under attack by the planet Nexgen. Rise encounters the Legendary Warrior (an obvious stand in for Legend of Zelda’s Link), who has been mortally wounded. The Warrior hands over the sentient gun Shine, tasking Rise to take the weapon to the king. And off the boy goes, battling various enemies, making his way through minefields, using specialized ammunition to aid in solving puzzles, and doing battle with gigantic bosses across 14 levels. Along the way there are collectibles to be found, and, if you’re good at this type of game, your journey can be accomplished in around two hours. Completing the game unlocks the Ironman difficulty, which gives you but one life to make it to the end.

And this game could have been fun. You get various types of ammunition, each type useful for a specific task or attack on certain enemy types. Each bullet type has a normal firing mode along with a remote controlled mode, where you can steer the bullet around obstacles. This is used to navigate the puzzles for the bullet to hit a switch that opens a door or strike a vulnerable point on a giant boss. The trick is, when this mode is activated, spheres appear on the screen, and the bullet can only be steered within these spheres. However, your target is usually outside these spheres, necessitating you to hit the right trigger to launch the bullet at your target. Lining up the shot is tricky enough when doing the puzzle sections, but while fighting a boss you’re on a time limit. Failure to reach your target in time resets the boss’s health, making you take him down all over again.

Problem is, a boss’s attacks vary each time, meaning there’s no memorization of patterns. Adding to that is the fact you will run out of ammunition and have to reload, and it’s very easy to be killed while caught in the reloading animation, as you may need to dodge or jump to evade an attack. You may also end up wasting ammo on incoming projectiles, as they often come in a large enough swarm that can’t be simply evaded without destroying a bunch of them. Then there are missile strikes, highlighted by targeting reticules on the platform you’re on. Sometimes there are only two strikes, with plenty of space left to maneuver on the platform. At other times, the platform will be almost totally blanketed, leaving you the smallest safe space possible. Being off by just a sliver and you’re instantly dead.

Needless to say, this gives Rise & Shine a level of difficulty that is bound to frustrate many. Had the controls been sharper, this could have been a bit more fun, despite the challenging difficulty. But all too often the controls didn’t seem to respond fast enough, leading to multitudes of cheap deaths. This level of frustration had me cursing the game quite a bit, and finally defeating a boss never felt satisfying in the way beating a boss in a Souls game feels, because the game doesn’t want to play fair. It was more a sense of glad that’s over so I can move on, and the game’s end had me finally glad to be done with it rather than giving me a sense of satisfaction and making me want to do another playthrough. To be sure, there are some who will absolutely love this game. Fans of games like Contra or Battletoads may revel in this game’s challenge. But many players may abandon this long before it reaches that final level out of the incredible frustration the game raises.

Developer Super Awesome Hyperdimensional Mega Team had a neat idea with their debut title for Adult Swim Games. Having a platformer combined with elements of bullet hell games with plenty of NPCs standing in for classic videogame characters should have been lots of fun. It’s just fun picking out the generic equivalents of characters like Link, Mario, Bomberman, Snake, Marcus Fenix, and others, as well as catching nods to other games like Duck Hunt in the background. The bright cartoony graphics work well with the game’s story, which some will find quite amusing (for myself, the humor was hit or miss). But ramping up the game’s difficulty to masks its short length worked to its detriment. Being difficult for the sake of being difficult generally doesn’t work, and making gamers replay a section over and over and over due to deaths that never feel earned is just poor design. To be sure, this game will have its fans. To others, I’d say wait for a sale or until it’s offered for free with Games With Gold. It has a nice idea, and could have been fun. Instead, this is an exercise in frustration, and there are better games in the genre you could be playing.