- Awesome Music: The game's original soundtrack is filled to the brim with pop punk, future funk, vaporware, and other genres that invoke the feeling of 1970s and 80s. Special mention goes to ONLINE (feat. TORIENA) by Moe Shop
, which was used as a trailer song. - Cheese Strategy: It is completely viable to entirely change your upgrades to only hacking-related ones before hacking a terminal, or switching to only combat-focus ones before a boss fight. Sure, it might take more time to change your loadout back and forth than doing it legit with a balanced equipment, but the option is there.
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Most of the movement bio-hacks (the green ones) are extremely useful and make traversing and backtracking a lot easier. Some are even required for 100% Completion. The rest of the offensive, health, or hacking upgrades can be switched depending on the situation and player's taste, but the green ones are here to stay.
- Goddamned Boss: The fight against Phillip Ong can be quite frustrating due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change and the fact that it is essentially playing Pong against the computer, which has no real weakness and will just randomly lose at some points, making it more of Victory by Endurance than a display of skill.
- Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the game is considered a solid Metroidvania with an appealing art direction and an amazing soundtrack, the story was derided for being a Cliché Storm with cheesy dialogue. The protagonist in particular is a First-Person Smartass that never shuts up and constantly jokes throughout the game about the ridiculousness of the plot and gameplay tropes, which doesn't help.
- Scrappy Weapon:
- ZTurbo.exe, which greatly increases the Zorlon Cannon's speed, has a high skill ceiling and allows for impressive skips and speedruns, but is otherwise inadvisable and greatly limits one's options in regular gameplay, as they become more often prone to be Hoist by Their Own Petard.
- Emi's earbuds is a fun way to integrate informations about the OST through both story and gameplay in theory, but in practice there is no reason to use this over any other bio-hack. Why would you waste precious and limited inventory space, outside of giving yourself a Self-Imposed Challenge? It even fails at being a Joke Item, because it actually gives interesting info to the player, just one that is useless from a gameplay perspective, and that could have easily been a toggle in the menu just like Eri's commentary.
- Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The hacking sequences are really fun and offer a lot of variety, with a lot of new mechanics and upgrades, notably borrowing gameplay elements from Centipede and Missile Command, and are overall a good evolution of the original formula. They (as well as the original unaltered games) can be replayed as a bonus on the main menu, with high scores and more variants being unlockable.
- So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus on the game is that it is a fine Metroidvania, but that it does not do very much to elevate the genre outside of the Yars minigames, and fails to stand out alongside its many contemporaries.
- Tainted by the Preview: Upon reveal, Rising drew ire for seemingly having little to do with the original Yars' Revenge, with many accusing the developers of not learning anything from the failure of the 2011 game. In the end, the game ended up being a Stealth Sequel, with the war between the Yars and the Qotile taking center stage in the second half of the game, though the cheesy dialogue and voice-acting found in the trailer was still very much present and didn't win over many of its detractors.
- Underused Game Mechanic: The Firefly Drones are barely useful outside of the few puzzles that require them. Most of them are in rooms that you only need to traverse once, and a significant number of them become irrelevant once you unlock better traversal tools, most notably the Fly Wings.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/YarsRising
Go To
