So because Junior Barbarian has been pestering me, I created a new Steam account (he long ago usurped my original one) and loaded it with cheap games over the holiday sale. After poking at all of the games, I started with Rise of the Triad because I hadn’t played a big stupid FPS kill-em-all in… a long time.
Did anyone else give up at the level where you have four stupid and insanely difficult puzzle rooms to solve?
I heard that game is known for its brutally bad checkpoints, forcing you to go through tedious difficulties without saves and making you restart too far back when you die.
Is that what you are experiencing?
No - maybe because I’m playing what seems to be a Steam rebuild on the Unreal engine, but the checkpoints are reasonable and you can quick-save at any time.
This is about the third level in the second episode. You go into a huge, rather pretty courtyard and collect a key. The key lets you open the central tower. In the tower are four buttons, each of which opens a door. Behind each door - which closes behind you and can’t be opened - is an (IMHO) insanely hard puzzle room you have to complete to get back out - and then three more of them await you. You have to solve all four to get past the level. All four are crazy-hard and tedious as hell; get through fifty chomper-thingies, or use a sequence of bounce-pads to get higher and higher, or dodge flames for a thousand feet… just way too much. I think I’ll move on. It’s not fun to spend hours trying to hit exactly the right bounce-pad sequence in room after room, even though there are no enemies or health hazards.
Interesting if they fixed that. I ask because I considered getting it, but IGN wrote this in their review:
So they fixed this problem?
Moved Cafe Society --> the Game Room.
As I said, this is apparently a modern rebuild of the original game, and yep, it’s fixed/added/changed. The only game I’ve ever been pissed about lacking a save feature was the original Alien v Predator, which was insanely hard and frustrating to have to repeat at the beginning of each level. They eventually released a patch allowing a limited number of saves per level, which I thought was a fair compromise.
But back to the issue: even using cheat codes, the puzzle rooms are difficult and tedious to clear. I think even an experienced and agile gamer would spend days getting through this level (Episode 2, Level 2, “The Room.”)
My stupid.