Gamearth was a once peaceful planet, but after a colossal attack from the warmongering space grunts of Nexgen a child named Rise is given the task of carrying a hugely important gun named Shine on his travels. Don’t worry though Rise, it’s not like the fate of the whole world rests on your shoulders! It does? Damn…well let’s dive into Adult Swim’s platformer and see if we can sort this place out…
First thing’s first, Rise and Shine is a staggeringly beautiful game. The scenery consists of hand drawn illustarations and between level comic book strips. It’s just majestic to look at. I’m honestly not exaggerating when I say it is one of the best looking games I’ve seen on Xbox One. But don’t be fooled by its beauty. Rise and Shine is hard as nails. It’s not impossible by any means. But this platformer will test your wits, skill and your patience as you will be dying all over the shop. No really, constant death. Respawn city. You will di…ok you get the idea.
The game combines an arcade style shooter with solving puzzles – with bullets! Sounds nuts, and it is, but it will make more sense while you’re playing. Being able to direct the flight path of your bullet slowly is not only a cool feature, but an essential one to progress. Your projectiles aren’t just reserved for enemies (you’ll need to them to open electric gates etc.), but boy oh boy are those enemies fierce. A mixture of deadly robots, colossal bosses, zombies and more insure that precision is key. Even if you hide behind something, you’ll have very limited time to either nip out of cover and fire or just bloody hide and hope for the best. The second option doesn’t work too great to be honest.
Rise and Shine also has a brilliant sense of humour. I laughed a lot of times at some of the dialogue and it certainly broke up all that dying. You can just tell that this has been a real labour of love. It has been slaved over and the result speak for themselves. The only criticism I could possibly conjure up is that the difficulty does get relentless after a while, and the game clocks in quite short – at around the 5 hour mark (I’m sure players more skilled than me could do it in 4 or maybe even slightly less). But all in all, nitpicking aside, Rise and Shine is a superb game that deserves all the plaudits.
Brutal, bullet hell fun.
