by Omar ( @siegarettes )

• RIVE
• Developer- Two Tribes
• Publisher- Two Tribes Publishing
• PS4, PC, Xbox One, Wii U

RIVE is a bit of anachronism in 2016. Despite the current popularity and developments of the twin-stick shooter, RIVE feels like a game from the heyday of Xbox Live Arcade. Between the gruff, blue collar characterization of the protagonist, constant reference to retro arcade games, and fourth wall breaks, RIVE is particularly enamored with an idea of a retro throwback in a way that now feels like a throwback itself.

What does feels thoroughly modern about RIVE is the level of design on display. A combination twin-stick shooter and platformer, there’s a remarkable sense of feedback to each action, with well directed pacing and art direction to complement it. A strictly 2D game, RIVE puts to work Two Tribes’ experience with games like Toki Tori to build a strong atmosphere and avoid the common traps of 3D games. The simple act of firing your weapons feels satisfying, and you’ll never run into the problems with fuzzy collisions that sometimes make combat in games with 3D graphics feel ambiguous. RIVE might be a game whose concept has been proven many times before, but the level of craft here is exceptional.

RIVE is also, for the most part, content to let that craft carry you through. The meat of it takes place within solitary arenas, where arrangements of enemies are sent in waves to attack. Your machine guns provide your main source of firepower, and the entire game revolves around shooting them accurately while making good use of the variations in space around you.

Over the course of the story you’ll earn currency to buy new weapons, but you’ll only be able to hold a single use of any given weapon at a time, so you’ll never have a stockpiled arsenal to rely on. The weapons themselves are of limited utility as well. Homing missiles provide a good counter against waves of small enemies that are harder to target in chaos, and the shotgun provides a high dose of short range damage. The electric field and bouncing bombs are even lower utility and in almost every situation the shotgun or missiles will prove a better choice.

You’ll also earn the ability to hack various enemies along the way, recruiting them for extra firepower or to remove certain obstacles to open new areas. These are mostly set piece based, and highly telegraphed, so they’re more of a passive boon than anything. The hacking itself is enjoyable, though, with a slow motion effect that adds some drama. It’s used to good effect during some platforming sections, where you’ll hack switches in mid-air before falling safely away from dangers below.

The hacking and platforming are  interesting additions to the shooting, but they never feels more like something to break up the action, especially when you’re character fills every quiet moment with a snarky game reference or quip. It’s a shame, because at times RIVE is genuinely atmospheric. A few late game areas gave me vibes similar to The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human, and RIVE itself has an excellent soundtrack that deserves more attention. It’s not that there aren’t jokes that landed (some of the antagonistic interactions with the robot that keeps you company throughout the game gave me a chuckle), but they distract and almost make it feels as if the game isn’t confident it can hold your attention outside of the action.

In a way, this feels in line with the underlying machismo on display. Even beyond the snarky, bearded protagonist, RIVE is keen to demonstrate that it is a rough, old school game. The singular difficulty level is called HARD and only after starting the game, or dying several times, can you enable “soft mode”, which decreases your score and adds a teddy bear icon to the HUD to perpetually remind you that you took the easy way out. It doesn’t meaningfully detract from the game, as you can turn it on and off to get through particularly troublesome sections, but it feels worthy of an eye roll, and out of place, especially coming from the people who previously worked on the Toki Tori series. Aside from that, there’s a few awkward platforming sections in the last stretch of the game that don’t play to the strengths of the movement. The worst of these mixes water physics with instant death combat and a need for precision shooting, rendering even the generally on point combat laborious.

That combat, however, does prove to be a safe bet for the rest of the game. Even with all my criticisms, RIVE has ended up being one of my favorite shooters of recent memory, even with as many of them as I’ve gone played. If RIVE does, as they intend, end up becoming the final game that Two Tribes develops, it’s a fine send off. It’s a game that works entirely with old ideas, but it mixes them well enough to feel fresh. It’s clear that the team behind it has a lot of love both for the genre, and the game they’ve built, and it carries RIVE to success in many little ways.