At first glance, Rising Hell looks like it’s a blatant attempt to capitalize on the overwhelming success of probably one of the best indie games of all time: Dead Cells. We love it. You love it. Everyone on the face of this planet loves it, and that’s even factoring in those who haven’t played it yet. You may think I’m crazy for saying this, but it’s probably the best rogue-like that has, and ever will exist, but this comes from someone who has mastered every seed and unlocked literally every item available to date. Twice. The one lingering flaw for the game is the lack of cross-saving between my Xbox and PC. I could write for days expressing my love for Motion Twin’s stellar release and am praising it here, yet again, because I really want you to understand – I welcome any and all Dead Cells-esque games if they get it right. Rising Hell does, in its own way.

I started the game using the default character, since the others are locked from the get-go on the normal difficulty, and I honestly found it to be kind of easy. You might even say easier than a low-income, immoral single mother who really needs some Christmas presents for little Timmy easy. This remained a constant through most of the regular levels as I worked my way up through the pits of Hell, as the smaller, low-level enemies would fall with little resistance after just a few hits. The game was only presenting a challenge once the bosses came out to play. This essentially made everything book-ending the boss and mini-boss encounters quickly turn into a grind for the purple tokens that unlock permanent equipment options and red orbs, just like that other game about a Devil that cries, where you trade them in at the end of each floor for an upgrade that is lost at the end of your run. While there is a staggering variety of Hellish demons, bugs, and creatures to unleash your fury on, most of them pose the same challenge as the hanging corpses that adorn the scenery that can be destroyed for easy orbs. I wouldn’t say I hated my time here, as it was nice feeling like an overpowered badass as I zipped from demon to cancer bug to demon, executing them with ease; it just didn’t transition well when switching to the more taxing boss battles, and once I had run through the same randomly generated levels time and time again, I was ready to get to the meaty boss bits.

The boss battles are the main attraction, and they never cease to deliver a solid challenge that often felt uneven based on how easy the smaller enemies fall. It’s almost like training against the coach from Rocky in full contact, no holds barred combat only to go up against Iron Mike Tyson after one of his world-famous cocaine binges. The battles themselves are what you’d expect from this style of game – you must figure out the boss’s move set and attack or evade accordingly, all while taking massive amounts of damage at the slightest misstep. A lot of these require tackling multi-layered battles, leaving you with that sinking feeling when you just barely take out their health bar, only to see them evolve and fill that long-ass green bar all the way up again. It also delivers a true sense of accomplishment once you bend it over and shove your weapon right up its rear end and move on to the next floor. These are basically roller coaster rides where everything is on fire and you’re doused in gasoline.

There are some pretty drastic changes to Motion Twin’s formula in place here, with the biggest being the inclusion of multiple characters and the lack of proper equipment. There are three characters to choose from, each with their own unique playstyle, and they can equip one single item that in most cases adds a buff and a curse of some sort to the entire run. Once you’re within the gates of Hell, you can pick up small ammo based pickups that modify each characters standard attack. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses that add some variety, but in order to unlock all of them, you’re looking at a pretty heavy grind that’ll take at least a couple of hours saving all those precious purple orbs. There is the default character, who looks a lot like a stunt double for Gene Simmons in his Kiss attire and takes more damage than his kin, but is limited to melee attacks; a demon who channels his inner Mega Man, complete with grabbing his forearm when shooting; and finally, a ghostly looking lady… thing… that chucks sticky grenades at the target and is a little more agile at the cost of being pretty fragile in terms of damage resistance. This is probably the game’s greatest strength and the one facet where it actually exceeded my expectations.

If you happen to fall within the camp that struggles with these types of games, Rising Hell offers an easy mode that allows you to respawn twice at the cost of reduced XP gains and the inability to unlock the harder difficulties. After running from start to finish once on the harder difficulties, I found myself deterred from making further attempts, as it ramps up even the easier segments due to the massive health chunks that are lost from essentially pricking your thumb on a stray barb that is sticking out of the wall. I was also making little to no progress in unlocking anything that would aid me in proceeding further. When it came to Dead Cells, I would often plateau, and my skill would need to match the difficulty, be it from bigger and better items coming along, or simply my muscle memory and reaction time increasing. In this, it’s almost entirely based on me getting better at the game, giving me the carrot right from the start, followed by lighting the stick on fire and then beating me with it.

What really makes its minor shortcomings near unnoticeable is the overall presentation – from the slick, pixel-based Hellscape, complete with religious relics peeking out from behind flames and cancerous abscesses that grew from the landscapes to the truly grotesque enemies, this is a pretty accurate depiction of what I would imagine Hell to look like. If you take into account the tight, responsive controls, and pounding heavy metal soundtrack, this is a title that is a blast to play, even if it doesn’t have the staying power of similar rogue-likes.

Rising Hell is a far cry from being on the same level of digital crack like Dead Cells, but it has just enough going for it that the shortlist of cons almost becomes a non-issue, at least until the grind really sets in. If you’re a fan of this sub-genre, with its randomized levels, a huge cast of characters, and outstanding presentation – this is one hell of a time.

9 out of 10

Pros

• Grotesque, Pixelated Version of Hell
• Multiple Playable Characters
• Responsive Controls

Cons

• Uneven Difficulty
• Quite a Grind

Rising Hell was developed by Tahoe Games and published in association with Toge Productions, Chorus Worldwide, Neon Doctrine, and Another Indie. It launched on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The X1 copy of the game used for review was provided to us and reviewed on an XSX. If you’d like to see more of Rising Hell, check out the official site.

 

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