Rise & Shine is a puzzle platformer with a tone issue and interesting but poorly framed mechanics. Playing a young boy named Rise, you go through an invasion by evil video game grunts by wielding the mythical gun Shine, shooting your way through difficult enemies, massive bosses and somewhat ill-conceived puzzle sections. I really couldn’t get into it and dropped the game fairly quickly, which is a shame, because there are good ideas in there!
I quickly got turned off by the game’s style; you are in a quite cute and playful world of video game references, with neat Easter Eggs wherever you look, but characters bleed out and die like a bad Newgrounds flash title. I wish the game had stuck with the video game land concept and didn’t go for the ultra-realistic over-dramatic “kid protagonist exploding in a gore of blood” approach. What’s wrong with exploding in a bunch of pixels like Megaman? I still decided to give the game a shot.
Most actions, like double jumping, are done using your gun. The gun is also very important for defeating enemies and solving puzzles. You can move it in any direction using the control stick and it gets very unprecise and finnicky quite fast. You can switch between different bullet types - some are more effective against robots, or can trigger certain switches - and you can have remote controlled bullets that you can move around in specific “radio circles”, which is also very useful for puzzles. The issue with those is that time does not stop when you use it. An enemy that lobs grenades at you from above might be a good puzzle to solve using remote controlled bullets but the fact that they’ll just keep shooting at you while you’re trying to navigate the puzzle changes the situation from a thing to solve to a platformer with mechanics that ask just a bit too much. It’s a shame because the puzzles themselves aren’t too bad.
Combat is also a bit rough, you die in one shot from most things and need to restart the whole screen, some enemies will rush you if you don’t manage to kill them immediately, others will bombard you with high number of bullets (some of which will kill you while others will just take a hit on your life bar). You can go in cover, but foes seemingly never stop shooting at you, so there is no good moment to get out of cover. Boss fights are about pattern recognition except sometimes you’ll still take some damage or die because you were too close from an attack even if you were sure you dodged. Since the shooting isn’t great; In panic situations (where you HAVE to shoot things or you’ll die for sure) even with the laser sight you might just fumble around and miss all your shots.
Rise & Shine wasn’t for me. I don’t really commend it; there are better platformers around.
