When Atari announced that it was rebooting the Yars’ Revenge series with Yars Rising, a game that appeared to be an anime-style open-structure 2D exploratory platformer developed by WayForward, the response was… mixed.
“It’s missing the point!” some folks said. “Not my Yars!” And to be sure, I understand this reaction. Yars Rising, at least initially, appears to be riffing on the original Yars’ Revenge in various ways rather than acting as an actual canonical sequel, and I completely understand why that might rub some folks up the wrong way. Hell, I wasn’t sure about it when it was first announced.
Then Steam Next Fest rolled around and brought with it a playable demo for Yars Rising. And, having played it, I am very much on board with what it promises. So let’s take a closer look after the jump.
In Yars Rising, you take on the role of Emi Kimura, a hacker who goes by the handle “Yar”. By day, Emi is a corporate drone; by night, she’s a hacker seeking to uncover the truth behind QoTech, a company that is clearly up to no good. As the game opens, she is caught hacking into their systems and placed in confinement (what self-respecting corporation doesn’t have confinement facilities?) but, after a quick hack of the systems via a terminal just a short crawl through an air vent away, she discovers she has some unusual abilities that are seemingly powered by the Yar tattoo on her arm.
From hereon, it’s up to you to help Emi explore QoTech’s building, blasting robotic baddies with her new-found ability to shoot energy from her hands and sneaking around more powerful foes. As you progress, you’ll run into various terminals that Emi needs to hack, and these either allow her to progress by opening doors or, like the initial terminal, provide her with additional abilities.
You might quite rightly think that this has nothing to do with the original Yars’ Revenge and so far it would appear that you are right — at least in narrative terms, though marketing material for the game appears to suggest that there will be some interesting late-game revelations. Mechanically, however, Yars Rising makes use of the original Yars’ Revenge in quite an interesting way: to represent the hacking sequences.
Any time Emi hacks into a terminal, she is presented with a challenge that is, to varying degrees, based on the original Yars’ Revenge. Sometimes it is exactly as the original game was — playing as the fly-like Yar, blast your way through a shield and launch your Zorlon Cannon at the Qotile — while at others it brings in other elements, often inspired by other classic Atari games or famous arcade titles from the period. At other times still, it places constraints on the Yar’s ability, such as requiring it to destroy a shield entirely by nibbling rather than shooting.
Yars Rising’s presentation is as slick as one should have come to expect from WayForward at this point. While it’s a shame they seem to have moved on from the beautiful pixel art they made their name with to cel-shaded polygonal characters, those characters are, at least, packed with plenty of personality and are well animated.
One area where the game particularly stands out is in its use of sound and music. The backing music throughout the demo is all energetic modern takes on the ’80s-inspired “synthwave” style, and features actual songs from artists such as Moe Shop. The voice acting is also very good indeed, with Emi’s characterisation in particular successfully managing to pull off a wisecracking modern heroine without descending into full-on Marvel-style “well, THAT happened” territory.
I’m particularly fond of how her incidental dialogue often features callbacks to earlier, seemingly throwaway lines. For example, Emi quickly develops a mild obsession with the cleaning robots that show up as regular enemies, often commenting on how surprisingly clean her surroundings are, even when surrounded by traps and hazards. These lines are also delivered in such a way that they don’t interrupt the action; they just give a nice sense of life to proceedings and help Emi feel like more than just a simple cipher for the player.
The game plays nicely, too, with Emi’s controls being pleasingly responsive. While her animations are fluid, she immediately reacts to a control input, meaning there’s no waiting around for a canned animation to finish before you can do something else. To put it another way, despite being a slickly animated polygonal model, she acts like a sprite, and you’re never left feeling like you’re fighting the controls or that her animations have caused you to take damage or die.
Combat has a nice sense of “weight” to it, with most enemies taking a few shots to dispatch and providing a nice sense of impact when your attacks land. The one boss battle in the demo works well in that it tasks you with making use of the new abilities that Emi has learned in the run-up to the confrontation; it’s not just a simple slugfest. And the stealth sequences manage to avoid being obnoxious by being both brief and fairly forgiving; even if Emi is spotted, if she can escape her pursuer by, say, crawling into an air vent or climbing up to a higher platform, she can just proceed on her way. Hopefully this won’t change in the final game.
The demo doesn’t give us much indication of where the story is going to go from its initial cyberpunk setting, but as previously noted, some teasers from the promotional material suggest that it might go some interesting and weird places in its later hours. I’m intrigued enough to be well up for the full game when it releases later this year, and I’m confident that regardless of how good a “Yars” game it ends up being — and I suspect there are some surprises in store in that regard — it will, at the very least, be a good WayForward game.
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