Kids are moody, especially when they get older. The little cherubs that once excitedly greeted you at the door with a gentle cuddle (girl) or charging rhino attack to the testicles (boy) are soon replaced by grunts and mild indifference. Unless it’s the run up to Christmas and an iPad is on the list, then they are golden for the proceeding few weeks.
My eight year old son wanted an entire arsenal of Nerf guns last Christmas. Although I only bought him four of them, including a semi automatic rifle that was almost as big as him, my Crown Jewels have regretted it ever since. It would appear that my boy has not quite mastered the idea of the traditional “headshot”
Now this game gives an overly hormonal 11 year old boy a gun. Of course this sounds like a great idea. Not any normal gun mind you, a talking gun. In essence it’s a version Metal Slug on the old Neo Geo, but with a pre-pubescent hoodie.
It’s full of “knowing nods ” to other, better games. One such nod at the start when you obtain the aforementioned chatty firearm from the kid from Zelda. Not sure of his actual name, never actually played those games. I think they named a network of cash machines after him though.
Controls are fairly straight forward; Move with the left stick, shoot with the trigger and the right stick. B to duck behind cover. You can jump, you can double jump and you can die numerous times. In fact, I met my maker more times than Sean Bean. The difficultly level is torture, not fun.
Size isn’t everything so my wife tells me, but this game is apparently only about three hours so I can’t recommend it for its length, or girth for that matter. I would say apparently as, although I only played it for four hours, rage-quiting numerous times getting only to the second stage.
Overall Rise and Shine very very pretty and polished. Apart from the humour, which misses the mark somewhat, it’s just OK with the gameplay being nothing exceptional. A game that is a challenge because it’s rather hard, but more frustrating than enjoyable. I felt like I died because the controls could do with being a more fluid and precise on the controller. This would work better with a mouse which was a was the probably case with the PC version. It often became an exercise a pattern for the enemies rather than skill. The level design can also be a bit confusing as I couldn’t tell the background to the foreground on occasion.
It started hard and remained hard. Don’t get me wrong, at my age that would be a blessing, but when it comes to games I prefer it to be a little softer at the beginning.
There are better games of this type like Metal Slug, which was released 21 years ago. That sort of says it all really.
At £11.99 its not expensive but I would still wait for it to be on sale.
It was OK (if you are a masochist)
Midlife Gamer Rating: 6/10 Format: Xbox One Release Date: 13th January 2017
Disclosure: Midlife Gamer were provided with a review copy of Rise and Shine for review purposes. The title was reviewed over the course of three days . For more information on what our scores mean, plus details of our reviews policy, click here.
Tags: difficult, hard, masochist, Platformer, rise and shine