Yars Rising is Crafted With Lots of Love – gamescom 2024

WayForward Technologies is an American studio that has been around for more than three decades, and in this time, they released a good amount of critically and commercially successful games, cult classics, and anything in-between. For their latest game, they made a side-scrolling action Yars Rising, which we played at gamescom.

Yars Rising is set in the Yars universe. The first game in the series, Yars' Revenge, was released back in 1982 for the Atari 2600 – a futuristic fixed shooter about energy-devouring aliens. Then we had Yar's Revenge (2011) – a reboot of the original, and Yars: Recharged – a twin-stick shooter. Yars Rising is a massive departure from those, being a side-scrolling action with lots of platforming elements.

Instead of fighting an alien race called Qotech, it’s now an evil corporation our heroine, Yars, is tasked to hack. Predictably, it all goes wrong, and now we need to help her escape their clutches by solving puzzles, platforming, shooting robots… and changing her DNA to get upgrades.

You achieve that by finding the upgrade terminals, hacking them with a mini-game that’s a huge nod to the original Yars' Revenge. Big part of the game is actually finding these terminals, which involves backtracking through the changing locations.

There’s also combat, of course. At gamescom, I was being shown the ropes by James Montagna, the Creative Director at WayForward. He loaded up the boss battle for me, which was quite far in the game, and it was a great demonstration of how much the upgrades transform the gameplay – the game was a far cry from the careful hide-and-seek exploration of the first level: you get to blast for real.

I can’t help but mention James Montagna again – he was radiating passion for this game, got very happy each time I noticed a neat detail or performed a feat of extraordinary gaming skill, beating the game journalist allegations. It’s always cool to see the developers caring this much about their brainchild, and I can’t help but root for their success.

Yars Rising is coming out next week, and we'd recommend checking it out. The very beginning of the game may be slow, especially since this is the game that rewards patience and inquisitiveness!