Advent Rising is a third-person action-adventure game for Xbox that was released in May of 2005 (with a PC version being released a few months later). You play as Gideon Wyeth (Will Friedle), seeking to defend humanity from an alien race known as "The Seekers". To help you in this quest are the friendly Aurelians, your brother Ethan, your fiancée Olivia (Vanessa Marshall), and the fact that humans are apparently demigods with a vast number of powers.
Presently, the game is available on Steam and GOG.com for PC, as well as on Xbox through their backwards-compatibility program. The game also received a five-issue spin-off comic book series, which is available digitally as DLC on Steam. The PC version is also available on - for whatever reason - the DVD release of the Uwe Boll film Seed.note
This game provides examples of:
- Beam Spam: Level up your energy-blasting power enough and you can blast the hell out of EVERYTHING.
- Big "NO!": Gideon, when Ethan/Olivia drowns to death.
- Break the Cutie: Gideon is a cocky young ace pilot who has a loving brother and fiance. He loses both of them.
- Bullet Time: You get this ability if you level up your jumping skill high enough. Note that "bullet time" is more or less literal: you can only use this ability with a weapon in your hand that you're using to target someone, which means you can't use your innate Beam Spam powers while flying through the air in slow motion.
- The Chains of Commanding: Gideon isn't very comfortable with the idea of being worshipped. Most of the time he seems to avoid talking about it.Felidic Warrior: This is the hope of Aurelia, human. All that we see is noble and good and pure. All that we aspire to is held in that symbol. It is held in you. It is a heavy weight you carry, human. Epochs of history, the tides of war, the blood of nations, all this is laid at your feet. It is not easy being God.
- Colony Drop: The Seekers destroy the hero's home world by dropping asteroids on it.
- Convection, Schmonvection: A few levels later in the game take place in an underground lair inside a volcano, where you routinely jump around pits of lava.
- Gainax Ending: Seeing as this was meant to be the first part of a trilogy, this trope was practically inevitable.
- Game Mod: Advent Revising,
a fan-patch that, while not fixing any possible problems the PC version has when it comes to gameplay, fixes a buttload of problems it had with cutscenes & cinematics [including adding in cutscenes that were cut from the PC version, along with (arguably) better subtitles, less cutscene stuttering, and lowered music delay]. Essentially, this makes the PC version (available on GOG for about $6, or Steam for $10) basically the best version. - Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The bounty hunter boss. Jumps at you in the middle of a conversation with the Seeker ambassador, shouts something about a huge bounty placed on you by some never-explained "worried" people, is then killed and never mentioned again.
- Also a
Hilarious in Hindsight moment - if you turn on the subtitles, you see his name is Baraka Bahma. Say that quickly...
- Also a
- Ground Pound: Once his superhuman melee skills are upgraded, Gideon Wyeth can perform a 'Seismic Pound'.
- Guns Akimbo: You have the choice to dual wield any weapon in the game. Even the rocket launchers. You can use two different weapons, and use a weapon with a power, or use two powers.
- Humans Are Special: Obviously. So special that the Aurelians, at least, worship the humans as gods, while the Seekers will do everything they can to control and/or destroy them for the same reasons.
- Never My Fault: The Cockney-accented marine Bud has a grudge against pilots, and instigates a bar fight with Gideon and Ethan at the beginning of the game. Shortly afterward, Bud attempts to kill Ethan at the firing range. Gideon may respond by knocking him unconscious or killing him; either way, the MPs who respond are Reasonable Authority Figures who reviewed the security tapes before they arrived and saw that it was a clear case of self defense.
- Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: In a cut-scene, the hero falls out of a walkway, hits the side of a building hard, slides down it for about thirty stories and slams into an observation platform. He just shakes it off. And this is before getting any superpowers.
- Note that this is after Gideon has met the Aurelians, so it's either this or Foreshadowing.
- Loading Screen: Between levels, you are treated to in-game cutscenes that can only be skipped once the next level has finished loading. These cutscenes range from plot-moving action and conversation to long, pointless shots of gunfights and general destruction.
- Ominous Latin Chanting: Present in most music tracks. That or One-Woman Wail.
- One-Hit Kill: Using high-level melee attacks, Gideon may randomly snap an enemy's neck instead of just punching them.
- Out of the Inferno: Gideon does this after causing the self-destruct of a base stationed on top of a volcano.
- RPG Elements: The powers and guns the player uses will level up, unlocking a secondary mode for each weapon/power as they do.
- Sadistic Choice: You are forced to choose between saving your brother or your fiancee. Except that the game doesn't tell you you can only save one. And the one you save dies once you reach Aurelia. And the one you left behind is somehow transformed into a bizarre abomination that tries to kill you at the end of the game. So it's practically all sadism, no choice.
- Oh, and if you choose Olivia, every time you save there's a chance the file will be corrupted and after loading it'll turn out you have took the other option, making the above choice moot.
- Scenery Porn: Here, have a gander.◊
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: The game can be quite challenging in the beginning, before you get any superpowers. Then the first (unspoken) ability you get is the ability to fully regenerate your health by standing still, and suddenly things get much easier. Afterward, as your powers develop, how difficult the game is can vary wildly depending on what abilities you decided to invest in.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story: Unless the now-nonexistent sequel was going to involve bringing humanity back from the dead or setting right what once went wrong, the story begins with humanity being almost totally wiped out without warning or a chance of survival, only three humans surviving, and the race that did it has deceived almost everyone else in the galaxy into thinking they're a benevolent superpower. You have to choose to leave either your fiance or brother behind to die, but don't let the choice get to you too much—he/she will die a totally unnecessary death right in front of you halfway through the game anyway! The only friendly aliens you meet link up with you and make it back to their homeworld, where you should be safe...oh wait, a Seeker ship pops up out of nowhere right next to the Aurelian homeworld, and starts opening fire on an Aurelian ship without warning or provocation. Hmmm...no, no diplomatic consequences there. So you are part of a boarding party to survive by taking over the Seeker ship—which you do. Except that it's rigged to blow. Later, the two Aurelian characters you've been bonding with die, too, either by betrayal by their own people or something similar. So, a newly introduced Aurelian takes you and the only other surviving human in the universe to the galactic senate to accuse and prove the Seekers guilty of xenocide—until a humanoid abomination pops up out of nowhere, happens to be what's left of your brother or fiance (the one you left behind), and starts wrecking the place. You seem to win, except that you get sucked into your own singularity and end up on a barren, snowy planet. You slowly freeze to death until a new alien comes up and says, "Come, human. There is much to be done." The end. Hilariously, the main character lampshades the nature of the story early on, in 'why did I bother to get out of bed today?' fashion.
- Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Weakly present. While some new mooks showing up later do have new weapons, the ones wielded by the freshly encountered are not that weak and you often have a selection of quite good weapons from the weapon racks on the walls. Even the gun with which you embark on missions is quite good. And of course later on you may choose to forgo weapons entirely and blast everything with just your psychic powers.
- Space Opera
- Subtitles Are Superfluous: There is a subtitle option, but it only affects the FMVs, while the in-game speech is left unsubtitled.
- Superpower Lottery: Gideon Wyeth, has, once he unlocks all his powers, Super-Strength, Regenerating Health, Bullet Time when using his improbable dodging skills, telekinesis, various forcefields (which are impenetrable and harm any enemy that touches them), electromagnetic bolts, massive, devastating radial energy explosions, gravimetric teleportation, intertial damping, dozens of exploding ice-missiles, and cryokinesis. He's also skilled at piloting, marksmenship, and hand-to-hand combat. And, for his last trick, he can create a controlled singularity that can kill a Physical God.
- Unorthodox Reload: All guns are reloaded by twirling them around Western-style... including rocket launchers.
