Advent Rising – 21 Years Later |

Publisher: Majesco

Developer: GlyphX Games

Release Date: 05/31/2005

Available On

Advent Rising is one of the most infamous video game development disasters ever documented. Its release was at the end of the Xbox’s life cycle, and it got buried under the hype of the Xbox 360. I personally heard about the game, saw the terrible reviews, and ignored it. In 2005 I didn’t own any Xbox consoles, so I didn’t care as a PlayStation 2 and PSP owner. I also purposefully didn’t do any research into this game and let my memory of 15 year old me thinking this was a large RPG saga like Knights of the Old Republic make the decision to buy this and play it. I even bought the physical strategy guide, thinking I was in for a 30-hour adventure. This is one of those rare moments I wish I had looked into the game first. Sometimes the idea of not doing research for a surprise is not fun.

You play as a stereotypical young cocky sci-fi pilot who falls in love with every woman he looks at, and everyone seems to hate him. His older brother is a well-recognized pilot. The game has a, new for the time, cinematic opening, but not cinematic gameplay. This is a very early 2000s 3D action game that struggled to find its identity and gameplay style, and everything in this game is poorly executed. It’s obvious after about 1 hour into the game that most of the focus was on designing the lore, characters, and many cut scenes, but we’ll get that soon. Right off the bat, the lead character Gideon is a terrible character and completely unlikable. He’s just obnoxious and so stereotypical for the time. I honestly wished his older brother was the main character instead. The opening scene is probably the only part that seems to have been made as intended. As you are driving your space shuttle to a docking bay, there are tons of spaceships entering and leaving, credits flashing on screen, and radio chatter, and it feels like what modern games currently do. As soon as you enter the space station, the rest of the game goes to complete crap.

The game controls are like absolute donkey dung. Gideon runs around way too fast for the small and cramped interior areas, but later on you get completely confused after the first level’s design. You play the usual early 2000s tutorial level disguised as a training competition to learn the controls. They are awful. The game uses an auto lock-on feature, so Gideon’s arms are swinging all over the place like a madman, aiming each arm at an enemy, which is pretty neat. The lock-on feature actually works, as he will lock on to whichever enemy is closest. What doesn’t work is you can’t release the lock-on. The camera will face toward whatever enemy is locked on, even if you are running towards the camera. This can lead to frustrating blind deaths from falling off ledges and into death traps. The only way to play this game is to blast everything in sight with whatever guns have the most ammo. There are clearly other ways the developers had in mind. Each weapon does something different. From slow-shooting plasma rifles to rocket launchers, but you won’t care when switching weapons is a complete chore. The dodge button is the same button for equipping in the left hand. The left equip is X, and the right equip is Y. This makes no sense. Other games did this better, like Halo before it and even Splinter Cell. Equipping weapons doesn’t need to be complicated.

I just lived with blasting everything in my path since it didn’t matter. Once I realized that the current enemies coming at me weren’t dropping ammo for my guns, I picked up their guns and just repeated this so I never ran out of ammo. Enemies come in many waves, and clearly the combat system they had in mind didn’t support this type of combat gameplay. When you’re blasting tons of enemies, you can’t stop and think about which weapon is good in each situation. All enemies attack the exact same way. There are some larger enemies like giant mechs or taller aliens that use a staff to deflect bullets back at you, but that’s it outside of the few bosses there are. Later on the game introduces a bunch of psi powers, and clearly this was not designed around the current working combat system because they are all completely useless. Switching to them is convoluted by pressing the D-Pad to select the power and then pressing X or Y to equip that power into the left or right hand. The game slows down in the background, but then you might want a gun in another hand. So, if you accidentally equip a power in the gun hand you had, that’s another step of finding a gun, pressing the correct button to equip, and then realizing the powers don’t matter.

There are a lot of psi powers, and most of them are given to you in the last two chapters of the game in rapid succession. You can lift, push, and throw ice spikes, laser balls, and even a shield, but they all fall subject to the terrible lock-on system. In theory, throwing stones and objects at enemies is a great way to save ammo, but you end up locking on to every throwable object in the game, and then the camera swings around to lock on to something else, and you have to just guess where the enemy is and fling the right stick towards said enemy, hoping the object lands. This also goes for lifting an enemy up and throwing them. Other games did this better. The shield is completely useless when it’s not much wider or taller than you, and bullets can hit you underneath it as it floats in the air. What were they thinking? Powers and guns level-up by just using them, but there’s no experience bar. It just happens. Weapons supposedly get more powerful, but I didn’t find this to be the case. This is clearly an unfinished idea.

The story itself is fairly intriguing. Aliens worship humans as gods, and the race of Aurelians wants to protect them from the Seekers, but their own race is divided politically on sacrificing the humans to save themselves. There are some plot twists of betrayal, but in the end this lore is never explored because there’s nothing outside of cut scenes. No dialogue between characters, no logs or documents to read. Nothing. The voice acting is also hit and miss. There are many actors who went on to do other things. For example, the voice actress for Olivia, Venessa Marshall, went on to do voices for more games and Wonder Woman for the current DC cartoon series. However, the characters are just not likable. The two female characters are treated like garbage by Gideon, and they get dismissed constantly. Every woman is wearing crop tops and low-cut pants, but the men are in full armor and gear. It’s just very much a product of its time. The industry has matured and grown since then. The alien races have interesting designs but only appear in a few cut scenes.

Let’s talk about the terrible vehicles. They are all floaty and don’t have acceleration physics, so to get over hills you have to use the boost feature, or you will just end up stopped. This boost feature pushes the vehicle by borderline teleporting it, and I also get stuck on every wall and object imaginable. Many games did this better too, like Halo. When you’re not shooting endless waves of enemies, you have to contend with awful platforming, as you will get stuck on objects, not grab onto walls, or fall into pits because an enemy jumped towards you at the same time. The game was only playable because the lock-on system worked well enough to just blast everything in sight, and I didn’t have to aim at enemies.

This leads into the terrible level design and lack of cohesion with the actual story and cut scenes. It feels like the cutscenes were made before the levels. There’s also clearly rushed scripted scenes as I would drive a car through boring empty tunnels and streets with the occasional falling bridge. Clearly, there was meant to be more. Where are all the people? Where’s the chaos of the war with the Seekers? There are cut scenes showing people running out of a city, only for me to suddenly find myself in a vehicle with nothing around. I would run through an enormous empty outdoor area with nothing but enemies coming at me and nothing happening in the background. It feels completely unfinished. These levels felt as if they were hastily inserted between the pre-existing cut scenes, making the transitions feel jarring. Gideon would be up against a wall, leaning around a corner with a pistol out, and I would then just be standing in a hallway with nothing that was in the cut scene around me. No one was screaming or running around. Just a dead empty hallway with a few enemies. It was so jarring.

The game is an absolute masterpiece of what not to do. The game is completely unfinished, broken, and buggy. Music will randomly stop playing. Sound effects won’t play at all, and the music will. Falling through floors and getting stuck on objects, forcing checkpoint resets. Even the need to not kill most enemies and just run to the next area for a cutscene to play proves that these levels were shoehorned in between already made cutscenes at the last minute. The levels are boring despite the game being technically impressive at the time with huge chunks of geometry and long draw distances. There’s clearly love here in the beginning, and the game just didn’t evolve into more than AAA slop that would be the future of gaming.