It’s your final day at your megacorp coding job and even though you woke up late, you made it to work on time. Nobody there knows it’s your last day, but the job you accepted to hack the megacorp means likely termination. You check in with your hacker buddies and navigate labyrinthine corporate offices, basements, and hacking terminals with your YAR. Yars Rising seems like an easy win for Wayforward, the developer of Yars Rising, as the Metroidvania is firmly in their wheelhouse. But does it do anything new? Is there a level of shine on it that can’t be wiped off? Let’s find out.
Yars Rising
Developer: Wayforward
Price: $30
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PS5 code for review.
Yars Rising has you playing our young female protagonist, Emi “Yar” Kimura. Text boxes include the character’s full name, including their hacker alias, which is fun. Emi works for QoTech, a presumably evil megacorp, and has worked her way into being a cog in the lower rungs. However, she’s a hacker by trade, so this is all just part of a bigger job. Hacking, just like in real life, involves a lot of physical activity and coordinating with friends. Yars Rising has Emi navigating the QoTech offices to hack their systems for some reason and get a big payout. Unfortunately, the employees of Qotech might have other plans.
Yars Rising features fluid combat and unique abilities
QoTech’s Senior Operations Manager, Mrs. Davidson is intent on stopping Emi and locks her up in a room in the QoTech basement until the police show up. As an aside, if you’re familiar with Opus Number 1, Mrs. Davidson’s theme is a remix of that. I just about lost it when it first started playing. Inside her holding cell, Emi escapes and awakens a new power, the power of Zorlon Shot. She can shoot some kind of polychromatic bullets from her hands. The power has shifted and Emi is in control now. Navigating back to the terminal she was at when Mrs. Davidson stopped her, she enters into a boss fight and succeeds, forcing Mrs. Davidson to submit. Emi returns home only to discover the city has been invaded by aliens.
Focusing on the run and gun of Yars Rising is pretty satisfying. Enemies don’t take too many hits and drop trions, better known as missiles, as well as health beads. The movement also takes center stage, as it should in this genre of game, with lots of abilities to jump off walls, dodge through the air, and create platforms where there weren’t platforms before. Surprisingly, Yars Rising doesn’t have a double jump or anything that enhances running, something I thought was innate to the genre. Yars Rising manages to omit those obvious platforming techniques and focuses more on keeping its gameplay tight and compact.
Emi will encounter three types of terminals to hack on her travels, each type denoted by the colors illuminating them. The red terminal indicates that hacking it will open a door nearby. A blue terminal indicates that it’ll unlock a biohack for Emi. And finally, a larger, multicolored terminal will unlock a permanent augment for Emi. Augments range from offensive drones, cannons, and missiles to grasshopper legs that let her jump off walls or the pondskater boots that allow her to walk on water. Yars Rising feels like it was intentionally made with fewer options to allow more depth from those options but no puzzle managed to stump me and I’m not sure if that’s intentional. Overall though, it resulted in a very smooth playing experience. The boss combat and the navigation worked in tandem to create a very enjoyable experience.
Hacking, itself is a shoot ’em up style affair. Emi’s Yar does most of the work, sitting on one end of the screen trying to shoot, nibble, or access a Qolite on the other end of the screen. Often, you’ll be required to eat away at a shield to gain charge to take a shot. Once your rainbow fire gauge fills up, a kaleidoscopic missile will appear on the screen and track the Yar until fired. Typically, once fired you must move the Yar out of the way or face getting shocked by the terminal and having to start all over again. The terminal hacking offered variations on similar tasks but no two were the same. As I ventured further into Yars Rising, the hacking challenges became more complex. Eventually I found myself navigating the Yar through mine fields protected by an ion wave to collect a key that allowed me to kill a Qolite. After you beat the game, you’re treated to a new main menu item that allows you to replay all of the hacking challenges you’ve played and see which ones you’re missing.
Customize your YAR with biohacks and augments
The YAR itself is a 26 pixel bug, maybe? It’s cute either way and whenever Emi unlocks a biohack, she can attach the pixels to her Yar to improve something. The first biohack you receive is Emi’s Earbuds, which display the music track title and artist. Very grateful for this as the music rocks. But mostly what you’re improving is how many health pickups and trions enemies drop, how many trions you can hold, and things like that. Each biohack is a pack of pixels that must be slotted into the Yar like a Tetris piece. As simple as this is, I had a pretty good time modifying my playthrough using the biohacks, swapping them in and out, and figuring out how to cover for my deficiencies as a player. There’s customization here that isn’t necessarily cookie-cutter.
Emi, maybe surprisingly, doesn’t spend the entire game in the QoTech offices. I was pretty surprised when Yars Rising had me run back to Emi’s apartment and begin navigating the city. While the QoTech offices aren’t all a meandering, twisting set of hallways, navigating the city was a nice change of pace. Primarily, it was nice to have more wide-open spaces to let the level designers flex their open area puzzle muscles. The city isn’t the only area you get to explore other than the QoTech offices but, again, Yars Rising tries to keep its scope small. Though there are multiple areas to explore, none of them are so big that they’re incomprehensible.
The soundtrack in Yars Rising really caught me off guard. I kept Emi’s Earbuds in to keep checking out who was making and singing on the tracks that were playing throughout the game. The game’s soundtrack seems like it was a joint effort in composition with a large share done with Tommy Pedrini. However, the soundtrack has multiple composers credited and all of them do a phenomenal job of making an incredibly diverse and riveting set of songs. Moreover, even though there’s a solid throughline of futurism and hacking at the forefront of the compositions, each composer puts their spin on their track and it results in a truly amazing collaboration.
I had a really good time playing Yars Rising and importantly, it didn’t break the time bank. Having cruised through the main game in less than 10 hours, I managed to get over 80% of the collectibles while finishing the game in time for the embargo. Furthermore, if the game doesn’t feel hard enough for you, on game completion you unlock Professional mode giving a higher level of difficulty.
The Final Word
Yars Rising gives you a straightforward experience with enough side content to add layers to customization without giving the player too much power in the end. It was a great experience and I had a really great time playing Yars Rising.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
