A welcome remake but broken and boring

User Rating: 4.5 | Rise of the Triad PC
I was looking forward to this title. I'm one of the developers of the original ROTT, so I had high hopes for a re-kindling of this great title. But I also had concerns that it would be 'pushed out the door' before it was really finished and polished. Basically, I hoped it wouldn't be like the re-release of Duke Nukem awhile back. I realized my concerns weren't unfounded as I played the new ROTT.

The gameplay, while trying to use some of the original hazards, moving disks, jump pads, etc., is basically boring. In the original ROTT we included features that had been planned for DOOM but never made it. So we added them to ROTT. But the new ROTT, while using these mechanisms, gives the appearance they were simply thrown in here and there. No real planning or good level design other than "let's just throw in all the old ROTT stuff". As much as I tried to enjoy the gameplay, it quickly became repetitive and boring. So much potential for new level design and gameplay but yet wasted on these thrown-together levels with no real purpose behind what you're doing other than shoot everything.

The engine is NOT finished. Horrid graphic glitches, which I tried on many settings but none worked well. Obviously this engine wasn't optimized or tested very well. Even after lots of customization on the advanced graphics settings, which should have fixed most of the graphics glitches, the appearance was still awful. Even at the start of the first level, the lightning totally sucked. Tons of screen tearing even with v-sync on and other adjustments which should have stopped it. I have a super high-end PC and graphics, and while other games play easily at ultra settings, ie, Tomb Raider, Crysis, etc., ROTT at times became almost unwatchable. Between the horrid lighting, screen tearing, odd movement with bad collision detection, etc, it's obvious the engine was rushed and unfinished.

Overall, I'd recommend other users avoid this title. There's many other polished shooters out there that look and play much better than this attempt at rebooting an old title. The new ROTT could have been spectacular and a great re-boot to an originally fun game. But not this time....