A couple of weeks ago, I picked Yars Rising as one of my favorite games I’d played at this year’s PAX West. WayForward (River City Girls, Shantae) has a solid overall track record with exactly this sort of game: a cartoony, self-aware action-adventure that takes a lot of inspiration from gaming history. The demo was short, but I had fun with it.
Skip forward to last week, when I noticed a couple of things happening online. One, Yars Rising was coming out a lot sooner than I’d realized, and two, a handful of critics hated it like rats. I wasn’t expecting it to be this divisive, so naturally, I had to check it out.
Now that I’ve beaten Rising, I understand why it’d annoy people. Rising comes off like a decent but short Nintendo DS title that’s been brought forward in time, with janky gameplay that it tries to paper over with charm and humor. Instead, it just ends up accentuating its issues by pointing a spotlight at them.
Yars Rising is the latest in a series of franchise reboots from Atari, which has quietly been rebuilding itself as an indie publisher. Earlier this year, it revived 1979’s Lunar Lander as a space-trucking sim called Beyond, and it featured a new Fatal Run game at both PAX and Gamescom. Yars Rising, as weird as it may sound, is essentially a reboot of/sequel to 1982’s Yars’ Revenge, although it takes an hour or two before that part of its story kicks in.
You play Rising as Emi Kimura, a hacker for hire in Syzygy City. Her latest job requires her to pose as an office drone so she can infiltrate the QoTech corporation headquarters and install a tap on QoTech’s mainframe. The plan goes south, and Emi gets trapped in the building with QoTech’s high-tech security cadre hunting her down.
Luckily, she finds a series of bizarre “bio-hacks” that even the odds, including the ability to fire blasts of energy out of her hand. Those bio-hacks are the first evidence that QoTech is actively pursuing alien technologies, which slowly turns Emi’s failed hack into a fight for the fate of two separate planets.
Rising is much more Metroid than “Metroidvania,” with no RPG elements to speak of. It’s initially a blend of action, stealth, and platforming, as you navigate the strange mazes inside, outside and underneath the QoTech building. Your rewards for exploring include more bio-hacks that expand Emi’s abilities, so you can access new parts of the map, as well as an assortment of passive skills that you can equip in a Tetris-themed grid in Emi’s inventory.
At the start of the game, Rising is surprisingly easy, but that doesn’t last. It’s got a few hardcore platforming sequences and a couple of good boss fights, but it saves most of its really challenging moments for its hacking minigame.
Whenever Emi needs to open a door, deactivate a trap, or pry a new bio-hack out of a terminal, you play a quick arcade challenge level based on Atari’s ‘80s lineup. Yars’ Revenge is the most common basis for a minigame, naturally, but there are a few hacks based on Centipede, Pong, and Missile Command.
It’s a cool idea, but it’s got some underlying issues, the least of which is that it can’t not emphasize the degree to which Yars Rising is a deliberate brand exercise. More importantly, it isn’t long before the hacks get more frustrating than fun.
Some of them, to be fair, are clever action puzzles that test your reflexes and pattern recognition. You can also equip a number of passive skills to augment your hacking ability, so there’s room to tweak Emi’s loadout for particularly difficult minigames.
Once you hit the back half of Rising, however, most of the hacks are more obnoxious than entertaining. There are also dozens of them, which keeps Rising’s main game from building any sense of momentum. Every time you’ve just won past a tricky fight or a gauntlet of lasers, the whole game has to stop dead so you can hack another terminal.
Initially, I didn’t mind this due to Rising’s script and characters, who’re a fun bunch of dopes to spend some time with. It’s a low-stakes cyberpunk story, and no one in it is taking things too seriously.
As Rising progresses and its stakes get higher, however, it doesn’t adjust its irony level to match; Emi takes a couple of massive emotional hits in the late game, but never stops talking like she’s in a spec script for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Every character in Rising is so intent upon joking about the natural dissonance of their situation, like how most of QoTech is infested with unattended lasers, that it feels like a preemptive apology from the narrative designer.
This sort of self-parody was fun in River City Girls when it was an occasional event, like Kyoko wondering out loud why everyone in her hometown is a karate maniac with an anger disorder. In Yars Rising, that same reflexive self-awareness has both hands on the wheel. It’s a useful reminder that if you’re going to be meta, it works best in small doses.
I did have a few laughs with Yars Rising, but I doubt I’ll ever play it again. Many of the hacking minigames are such a slog to get through that I can’t imagine making a second run. There’s some potential here, particularly in where it leaves Emi and her friends; the character design is on point; and the soundtrack has some high points, but this is one of WayForward’s weakest outings in a while. – Thomas Wilde
[Yars Rising, published by Atari and developed by WayForward, is now available for $29.99 for PlayStation 4&5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. This review was written using an Xbox code sent to Hard Drive by the game’s PR representative.]
——–
Bird media can go one of two ways. It can be a celebration of the feathered masses that serves as a gateway to bird-watching, like Flock or the popular board game Wingspan. On the other end, it can be a reminder that birds are airborne nightmares that are only out to kill and create chaos.
Just Crow Things is the latter. At first sight, Unbound Creations’ latest game looks like Untitled Goose Game in crow’s clothing. With its sandbox approach and level variety, it actually plays a bit more like early-era Tony Hawk.
You play as a crow who partakes in numerous “crow things” throughout a handful of levels, such as stealing shiny objects, pooping on pedestrians, and scaring the daylights out of Edgar Allan Poe. I didn’t fully appreciate Just Crow Things until I realized how unchained it wanted me to be in creating chaos. An early level in the game provides you with a flamethrower. To my surprise, most things were flammable, including the Mii-inspired ‘Hoo-mans.’
Moving your crow is simple, but a little frustrating. Playing on a gamepad, flight is tied to the triggers; you pull the right trigger to ascend and the left trigger to swoop down. Movement speed depends on ascending and descending in rapid succession.
This can be tricky at first. My early attempts found me hitting the ground often and losing all of my momentum. Swooping down also grabs items off the ground or from a person. That’s great, but I found myself instinctively pressing A to grab an item anyway because I wasn’t always certain I had actually grabbed anything. Once you do get used to the movement, swooping in and out of chaos is fun. I was unable to reach a few rooftops in some levels, which is frustrating given that you are a bird.
Your adventure takes you through city playgrounds, haunted woods, and Egypt. There’s plenty of variety across the campaign and while you may be doing similar tasks in each level, Just Crow Things does enough to make each iteration interesting. A later level sees you caught in the middle of an on-going conflict between medieval cats and dogs. What could have just been another level of fetch quests and pooping on things becomes a tug-o-war as your actions drive you toward siding with one of the factions.
Just Crow Things knows you’re not here for a long time, just a good time. Each level can be completed in its entirety in ten minutes or less. That does come with the caveat of not having the ability to save progress and quit mid-level, though. Still, it’s fun to goof off and torment the locals without focusing on a level’s task, and I rather enjoyed the cosmetic options, like flying around in a goalie mask.
Bird-watchers and those just looking out for birds will find something to like about Just Crow Things, between its chaotic gameplay, level variety, and the titular crow. It’s not without its flaws, but it packs in enough entertainment to murder an afternoon. – Nick Coffman
[Just Crow Things, published and developed by Unbound Creations, is currently available for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series consoles, and on Steam for $19.99. This review was written using a Steam code purchased by Hard Drive.]
