Rise & Shine Reviews

There's no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution. And this game a good example of it. Rise and Shine at first feels like an inventive side scroller. Using the gun as a mechanic is mutiple ways from shoot, puzzle solving, narrative device and even Jumping. But there's very little explanation on how you can use these skills, that most of the time your going to die because you didn't know you could do something. Its a real shame because I liked the art style of the game and the story might have been better, but the constant motion of the frantic action causing you to focus on everything around you leaves little time to appreciate the craft that went into the art of the game. Even worse is the constant over use of refrencing other video games that range from okay to annoying and even after beating the game I cant recall anything that happened. I'm sure someone put a lot of time and effort into crafting this, but being only around 2 to 3 hours long and little reason to go back to deal with the frustation, its not worth trying.

[table] [tr] [th]Byte-sized review[/th] [th]Rage simulator 2017[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Review in under a minute[/b][/td] [td]For all its comedic nods to the classic games of yesteryear (of which you would honestly be better off playing) and some seriously gorgeous artistic design coupled with some interesting shooter mechanics that play out more like a puzzle than your traditional run and gun platformer, you would expect [b][i]Rise & Shine[/i][/b] to be a rousing success. Sadly it isn't. For all the things [b][i]Rise & Shine[/i][/b] gets right, it bungles it all away with repetitive and frustrating gameplay that eventually starts to border on pure sadism except that here there is no gratification waiting at the end of it. [b][i]Rise & Shine[/i][/b] is a short game (probably around 3 hours of content) artificially inflated by its frustrating difficulty. Try and play this one with a mouse and keyboard and not want to rape and pillage a small village by the end of it all. By the time I had reached the end of [b][i]Rise & Shine[/i][/b] I was hating it with every fiber of my being. [b]Super Mega Team[/b] tries to go straight for the jugular but what they finally end up with is a frustrating mess.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]One word to sum up the experience[/b][/td] [td]Rage[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Performance/Bug related incidents[/b][/td] [td]Throughout my playthrough I did not encounter any performance issues or defects - so clear on that front.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Similar to games[/b][/td] [td][b][i]Hell Yeah![/i][/b]; [b][i]Metal Slug[/i][/b]; [b][i]Bionic Commando Rearmed[/i][/b]; [b][i]Seraph[/i][/b][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Suitable for[/b][/td] [td]Teens and up. There is a fair amount of foul language so don't be fooled by the cutesey visuals.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Position in my games of 2017 cleared list[/b][/td] [td]31st position.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][b]Rating[/b][/td] [td]http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=869455135[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Looks beautiful, but is surprisingly lazy, old school design based around "kill the player a lot" and old school memorization rather than engaging or interesting gameplay. If you're looking for a Kaizo game, sure this works. Otherwise, avoid.

[u]Rise & Shine[/u] is a bad game. It is very bad. It has beautiful art but that is the extent of its good qualities and it doesn't even redeem it. You'd think, with a title like Rise & Shine, which refers to the names of the two characters, which come together to make for a catchy saying that makes for a good title, that this would be a light-hearted and enjoyable romp with the cartoonish visuals and colours. No; this is a very serious story about war and the horrors therein. While I believe contrary to popular belief that cartoonish visuals and bright colours can indeed tell a grim and serious war story, that depends on the story being good. [u]Rise & Shine[/u]'s story is dreadful. It's disgraceful. I thought [u]Hyperdimension Neptunia[/u] was as bad as game-as-a-world setting stories could get but this takes it to a whole new level. The game starts in medias res with Rise crying in the middle of a war torn city. A fellow Gamearthian is killed next to him, then a giant robot approaches Rise with killing intent. "How did we get here?" you might ask, and the game will oblige with a flashback sequence taking us to the beginning of the game... which is a mall falling under attack with death and destruction on all sides. Effectively, nothing is different. One might reasonably wonder why we even started the game at such a place, considering the actual beginning is already war-torn chaos. I assure you, dear reader, that this is far from the only thing that warrants an explanation and provides none. Secondly is Rise's partner, Shine, a talking gun. Rise comes across in the actual beginning the Legendary Hero, who is about to die from his wounds. He gives Shine to Rise, explaining that Shine is a legendary weapon who grants its bearer infinite respawns. Rise then asks why Shine can't just save the Legendary Hero from death. The Hero then goes "Heh... You're a smart kid... That's because..." And then he dies, not explaining this plot hole and colossal lapse in judgement. In game, you have extremely limited health to the point you might as well die in one hit. Your mobility is also quite limited, so you are expected to die a lot. Rise brings this up in a lot of cutscenes, expressing the toll that dying and respawning has on him. So the game mechanics intersect with the story and protagonist's characterisation, which is a good idea that needed to be pulled off by a better written game than [u]Rise & Shine[/u] (which is very poorly written, just to remind you). Being a game set in a world of video games, the game brings up a lot of "meta" jokes about video game mechanics and conventions. Some might call this self-awareness but it's not; it's awareness of other games. If [u]Rise & Shine[/u] was self-aware, it would be a vastly different game that wouldn't make this many stupid decisions, like the following plot development: other characters in the world, including the enemies, are aware of Shine granting Rise infinite respawns... so the invading enemy force dedicates its efforts to trying to kill you [i]despite the fact they know you'll only come back to life consequence-free![/i]. There are also two points in the game where you have to die to proceed. In the first scenario, you're killed by a security sign on a hill, so your skull rolls down the hill and you respawn there ahead of the sign. Here's the problem: each other time you respawn, you end up back at a checkpoint with all your progress undone. So not only is this game really poorly written, there's no internal consistency. I got this game for 60% off and I still feel ripped off. Its brevity becomes a blessing as I don't have to put up with more of it, so I won't force you to suffer through more of this review. There are far better games out there for the price of this one so just get those instead.

Fun, but ridiculously short. There are only 4 power ups, but the rate at which you get them makes it feel like there should be a lot more. It feels like this game was supposed to be a lot longer than it is, but had most of it scrapped. There are only two real bosses in the game, both of which are super predictable and not very fun to fight. There's a bullet hell-esque shooting stage where the difficulty curve goes from 0 to 100 in an instant, where basically you're left just hoping the time limit runs out before everything on screen finally kills you. The humor is very, VERY generic. I involuntarily whispered "oh, no" to myself when "ADULT SWIM GAMES" came up in the opening credits. I dunno. Buy it if you want an hour and a half of gameplay.

I'll keep this short and sweet as I'm just rehashing/confirming what others have already said. Rise and Shine is a decent, but didn't really scratch my 2d shooting puzzle platformer itch. It looks great, you tell a lot of work went into the visuals. Locations are diverse and the references were pretty great. My biggest complaint, and reason I probably won't try start another playthrough, is the mechanics. For anyone who has played these types of games. It's pretty standard to allow shooting/dashing while in the air. Rise and Shine forbids that. While I am sure it was a concious decision, it slows the game down and puts a pretty low cap on the skill that can be. You can destroy enemy bullets by shooting them, and I found I was able to complete pretty much every fight by just shooting everything before it got near me. I never really felt challenged. Overall, Rise and Shine did not justify its price to me, but I would definietly took look at the next game this studio puts out.

The kind of game you buy on sale. The music has got to be the best thing in this game, as you are fighting bosses and nearing its death, the music becomes super intense and just gets you pumped. Game is very short, beat it within 2 hours, however half of it was dying from the boss fights which are hard af. A few puzzles in the game as well that are straight forward.

I love the art and was looking forward to this game for a while, but like many have noted it's hard but in a bad way. To make a comparison. I played hyper light drifter, loved it and it was much more difficult than this game. The difference is when I died in HLD i felt like I screwed up, and overcoming the diffiulty curve felt like an accomplishment. Even if I died in in felt like a cheap way, I knew it was completely avoidable if I played better. Rise in shine I feel like i'm died because the controls are just so shitty. Feels like a tablet game that was ported to PC with no consideration for the difference in controls. Initially I started playing with a controller because I assumed side scroller would be better with a scroller, but it aiming and moving was a clunky mess. It was easier when I switched to a mouse and keyboard but it made it painfully obvious this was a tablet game as your basically just clicking the flashing parts of enemies to kill them. Killin a boss is just a grind and theres no sense of accomplishment or doing something hard, it feels like a waste of time because of artificially difficult it is. Realy dissapointing. I have to agree with other reviewers that it feels hard to pad out what is a fairly short game. If you like the idea of spending a couple hours practicing one trick shot of a boss fight and until you have down well enough to pull it off it 3 or four times in the fight and hope don't clipped by a random instakill abililty or miss the 2 second window you have to pull off the shot before you start all over again, you may enjoy this game. Imagine trying to play metal slug, but instead you can only shoot while standing still. And you have to hold the left trigger or right mouse button at the same time while you are hitting the button to fire, and you have to reload frequently and it’s slow, and you only have one type of shot, and occasionally in the middle of the fight you have to play a trickshot game of snakes with your bullets, only the fight isn’t paused. You have infinite lives, but every most enemy attacks are insta-kill and you have to start the whole fight over. It doesn’t feel like they tried something new and interesting that failed, which I could understand. It feels really poorly done. Something that would have been caught and early in any sort of QA and was ignored. You can tell a lot of work went into the game, but it almost like it was made by someone who doesn't play video games if that makes any sense ? Everything is great, except the actual game. I wouldn’t be so critical except, except I’d expect a lot better for 11$. Which should tell you just how bad the controls are. Especially given the long history of sidescrollers to draw inspiration and learn from the mistakes of. If you see it on sale for 3 or 4$ go for it, otherwise pass. GOOD: love the art OK: Story's not too bad, but notthing spectacular BAD: really realy really bad controls/mechanics.

This is a nice little game that shows a lot of potential, but sadly disappoints in a lot of ways. The gameplay is a mix of fast paced shooting and a little bit of trick-shoot puzzels. The movement of the character is very slow and in most battles you just stand on the edge of the screen (often behind cover) and try to shoot everything down as it comes towards you. Players that are into fast side-scrolling shooters will be disappointed in how basic the combat is. The Game is also incredibly and (in my oppinion) unnecessery hard. Your character has a healthbar, but most attacks kill you in one hit regardless. Most battles require multiple trys, and death often feels unfair or cheap. Which makes the game very frustrating towards the end. It feels like the developer raised the difficulti on purpose, trying to hide how incredibly short the game is. Without dying, the game could be beaten in one hour. It took me three hours. And one of those was just the last two battles, which i had to retry dozens of times. In the end i just felt disapointed and dont know if i actualy had fun.

Alright, not usually one to write reviews on Steam, but I felt it was necessary here in order to help combat some of the negative main stream games press this title has received. I buy and play a great number of games every month across all platforms. Typically, I play those games for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour – and never go back to them. I am always looking for that next ‘gem’ which has the right mix of gameplay, aesthetic, and challenge in order to hold my attention from start to finish. After reading some reviews on the main game sites (reviewers I typically agree with), I almost didn’t buy Rise & Shine. I kept watching the gameplay video on the Steam page, and I felt I needed to give it a try anyway (I’ve liked most Adult Swim published games so far). I’ll address the main criticisms – length, difficulty, and story/humor. Length will be any easy one – it took me about 4 hours to beat a $12 game. Not sure what the issue is there – that was with minimal searching for secrets and collectibles, as well as trying all the mini-games a few times each. I haven’t even touched Iron Man mode or gone back to find the rest of the secrets and get perfect scores on said mini-games. You’ve got some replay value right there. Difficulty – I’m a player with what I’d consider average skills. Let me define average – I usually fall in the bottom third of the points board in online matches, can’t usually get past the first ‘dungeon’ in most rogue-likes (but I’ll be damned if I don’t try), and can’t even tell you what happens after the first boss in any of the ‘Souls’ games. I can finish most games of high difficulty that offer a reasonable checkpoint system and some sort of pattern that you can learn from with each attempt. Rise & Shine falls into this category. Is it difficult? Yes. Can a player of average skill complete the game? Certainly. With a little trial & error (there’s your sequel Super Mega Team) and a bevy of patience, I think most gamers could finish this game – and feel rather proud of that accomplishment – it’s not walk in the park. There’s one area in particular toward the very end of the game which I had to retry about 500 times – but each time I noticed something new in the pattern, something the developers had included for a purpose – that helped me make a bit more progress. There are at least 10 variables to keep track of in that fight at any given time. I think that battle could use an extra checkpoint somewhere along the way. Story/Humor – what’s not to like? Great comic-book style cut-scenes with equally great artwork. An interesting overall setting – lots of references to classic game franchises both modern and games past. The humor could probably be hit-or-miss for some folks, but it doesn’t detract from enjoyment of the game. It’s an action-platformer, and you’re getting a story deeper than any early Mega Man or Mario game – nothing to complain about here. So back to my initial comment about the ‘mix’ that keeps me interested. Rise & Shine has it. I was compelled to keep coming back to this game (despite raging out during a few of the more challenging areas) until I finished it. The gameplay is a great blend of a bullet-hell shoot ‘em up, puzzle solving, and strategy. The graphics and sound are top notch, and the challenge is just right. Overall, it reminds me of an old-school game like Mega Man combined with something like Ikaruga – both short but difficult games in which the true reward is being able to say you finished them. Buy this, support the devs – it stands tall among the crowd of Indies we’ve already seen this year.