RIP 3: The Last Hero

Those of us old enough to remember arcade shooters probably don’t think about them often. They were a way station on the path to games with greater depth and less RSI. A good shooter was basically anything that had hordes of things to shoot at, powerful weapons, and the occasional power-up on the map. The idea was to let you get far enough to see new enemies and maps but not so far that you would finish on the first quarter. Insert coin to continue.

Though the bigshots have largely dropped the shooter as a genre, it’s alive and well on the indie scene and better than well in Elephant Games RiP3: The Last Hero. Both a very traditional arcade game and a very modern one, it updates the standard formula with experience points and leveling up with new powers and better armor.

The controls are simple but not necessarily clean. Using the mouse to target and standard keys to move works fine, but the directional keys are literally directional. Up Arrow moves you up. If you are used to Up Arrow meaning forward, you will run into enemies you meant to avoid. You collect power-ups and weapons by clicking them, but you can do this accidentally, setting off a grenade you meant to save or collecting a weapon you really don’t need.

Once you get the hang of things, though, RiP3 grabs you. You always know how many enemies you need to kill, and many of the maps boil down to finding a safe place to shoot from. Then come the boss monsters, who require a little bit of fancy key timing to kill. You get score bonuses for accuracy, but blasting away is a better plan.

You learn to recognize a pattern, beat the level and then prepare to learn a new pattern. When the machine gunning robots show up and kill you in twenty seconds, you change plans again. You can take cover behind plants or boxes, at least until they are destroyed, and then you need to find a safer hiding place.

There are no surprises (even with six characters to choose from) but arcade shooters aren’t in the surprise business. RiP3 is what it is and only rarely deviates from the shooter template. It loses points for originality, but compensates by having lots of things to kill and lots of ways to kill them.