Yars Rising review

I would be willing to bet that a large percentage of people who play Yars Rising will have no idea about the series it’s based on. Yars Revenge is more than just a “classic”. It’s as important to the history of videogames as Pac Man, Donkey Kong, or Doom. Released by Atari in 1982, it’s a side-scrolling shoot-em-up focused on a war between two alien races, the Yars and the Qotile.

Yars Rising is a reimagining by WayForward, the team behind the Shantae series. As such, it’s bright, colourful, and filled with the kind of quippy sass that started to get old seven or eight years ago. You play as Emi, a hacker hired by the QoTech corporation but secretly working for an activist group looking into the company’s shady dealings.

Guided by a handful of fellow hackers, Emi finishes her shift one day and goes full stealth mode, creeping through the hallways and air vents of the QoTech building. What she’s actually looking for initially isn’t really made clear, but once she finds out that the company builds killer robots, “anime mechs” (her words), and is keeping insect-like aliens in huge jars, it all goes somewhat sideways.

Once the game begins, Yars Rising is a fairly standard Metroidvania in most ways. You run, jump, climb, and eventually begin to unlock latent powers that are really all just ways to open doors. The structure is a little formulaic, though. Emi will find a door or wall she can’t get through, and then the solution will present itself two or three rooms later, and you unlock the door and move on. It’s lacking the sense of wonder that the best Metroidvania’s have, and just feels like you’re going through the motions a little.

Emi can hide in recesses that guards will walk right by, but as the guards are mostly deaf and like to spend half their patrol time staring at the closest wall, this feels like something the game doesn’t necessarily need. There are laser puzzles, gauntlets of floating security bots, boss fights with QoTech’s creations and mutated alien bugs, but before long Emi starts to get to the bottom of what’s happening, which is where it all ties back to the original franchise.

The major selling point here is the hacking. Everything you hack presents a version of the original game, where you pilot a little ship to destroy the node that’s prohibiting your access. Some of these are pretty straightforward, but unlocking new powers like the standard attack or the ability to break through special construction walls often have multiple stages. Every one you unlock becomes playable from the menu, too, which is a nice touch.

Initially, the hacking felt pretty unique and original. But there’s so much of it that a good portion of the game is spent playing what is, essentially, a forty-year-old coin-op arcade game. It mixes it up a lot, in all fairness, presenting multiple different game types, but at brass tacks this is just you playing a game to hack systems and it makes no sense whatsoever.

It’s also quite frustrating at times, as failing a multi-stage hack will send you back to the first stage, which is just tedious and annoying. I get the idea of combining the two games types, but the Metroidvania elements aren’t all that engaging and the hacking is so regular it almost feels intrusive.

None of this is helped by the writing. Emi is incredibly vocal, commenting on everything from how many vents she has to crawl through (which really just highlights how many vents the player has to make her crawl through), to what she had for breakfast, and when she’s not talking to herself one of the many interchangeable NPCs is on the radio. All of these could easily have been one person, as they all perform the same function.

Yars Rising is a pretty game though. Characters are chunky and cartoonish, environments are colourful if a little standard for the genre – but some of Emi’s animations are very odd. Jumping to catch a ledge seems to have a bunch of missing frames which never stops being jarring.

There has been a valiant effort made to marry the old with the new in Yars Rising, but how successful it is may well depend on your fondness for playing older shooters. The hacking stuff is fun at first, but it feels like there’s just too much of it. And when it’s broken up with rote, by-the-numbers 2D side-scrolling, and a constant barrage of early-noughties “witticisms” it becomes hard to just go with the flow. Yars Rising is a decent enough adventure, but it feels like an odd way to revive Atari’s legendary franchise.