This is not the Yars you remember, but this is the Yars you want
Most people don’t remember the original Yars’ Revenge. It’s a game about a little bug ship trying to bash through a barrier to defeat a boss, over and over again. It’s old, it’s simple, but it was innovative for its time.
Yars Rising is not that. Yars Rising is a 2D Metroidvania that has a bold new art style and gameplay mechanic that dabbles in the Yars mythos and comes out successful as its completely own thing, and I really, really liked my time with it. WayForward, the developers of the game, have added so much Yars bullshit to this but they’ve done it with purpose; it doesn’t feel like they’ve taken an axe to the IP, but a scalpel.
In the game we take control of a hacker working for a sort of Google company, except that it’s evil (just kidding, Google is evil too). As a hacker we’re essentially working from the inside to bring down this megacorp, and do so by traversing throughout the company to bust through locations. We quickly find out that there’s far more to this company than just COMPANY stuff, as they’re clearly dabbling in alien technology. Hence, the tie to Yars. These are Yars aliens.
As we go along through the levels, we use a nibble technique to beat at barriers, and then shoot at it a bunch of times with the barriers down. Yars! Once we get to the end of an area we have to hack a console and play hacking minigames which are, yes, several different variations of Yars’ Revenge. These can be remixed around, too, so sometimes they’ll just throw Centipede into it.
Every time we get an upgrade, it’s rewriting our DNA to let us taste those new technologies. So we’re getting alien technology rewriting us and our hacker group team are just like, “are you OK? Because your vitals are going crazy right now.”
“I can shoot bullets now!”
“Uh, OK. Well, be careful, I guess.”
That’s the writing in this. Not great, sometimes weird, usually passable, but it serves its purpose in getting us the Metroidvania stuff integrated into it.
It’s not reinventing the wheel. It’s not particularly great by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a super solid Metroidvania with good controls and a good gimmick with the way they implemented Yars’ Revenge stuff. And it’s got a great soundtrack too, which I will I say, really, really love the weird lo-fi soundtrack that’s going on here.
But yeah, it’s really just a low-impact Metroidvania, with enough of Yars in it to make it almost important to the now franchise. Yars Rising in its individual aspects may not be groundbreaking, but the sum of its parts is cohesive and enjoyable — and will make fans of classic games happy with what the series could become.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest Live for September 11, 2024. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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