Yars Rising review: An absurd Atari mashup that defies expectations

Yars' Revenge is and was a strange game, a sci-fi shooter that had players “nibble” away at enemy barriers, and then conjure a missile to shoot from behind that they’d have to dodge themselves first. But it was the best-selling first-party offering from Atari at the time, cementing its legacy alongside giants like Centipede and Missile Command. Obscure attempts to revive it over the years have come and gone, but it’s tough to make such a strange concept work.

Peanut butter and chocolate, but weirder

WayForward is a developer with a long history of charm and 1990s old school flavor, best known for working wonders with IP and using that momentum to launch homegrown bangers like Shantae. These folks are experts in anime-like vibes, platformers, puzzle games, beat ‘em ups, and especially Metroidvanias.

Yars Rising is what happens when you put these two things together. When I think about Atari games and what iterating on them looks like, WayForward is quite far down the list of collaborators I’d expect. And here we are, with a game that at first glance looks absolutely nothing like the original source material. Instead, it looks like one of the most self-indulgent, WayForward-ass WayForward games made to date, stomping the cutesy, anime-styled Metroidvania pedal so hard someone’s foot went through the floor.

Admittedly, the floor is about where my expectations were with Yars Rising. I’m all about games like River City Girls and Double Dragon Neon, and the similar vibes naturally drew me in. But such a misfire of a collab was a head-scratcher, and the game looked like it barely resembled Yars aside from some references. I thought, “Sure why not, it looks cute at least.” Then once Yars Rising was actually in my hands, I didn’t put it down until the credits rolled. If we get to the end of the year and this joint isn’t somewhere in my top ten, I’ll be shocked.

A silly, cyberpunk scooby gang

You play as Emi, the snarky lead of an intrepid group of hackers in a bubblegum-flavored cyberpunk world. The latest gig is to break into the inner workings of QoTech, which happens to be Emi’s day job. The hacking doesn’t go so well, but it blows the lid off a heck of an intergalactic conflict, one that Emi has no choice but to get drawn into. What ensues is a wild ride full of twists, cool powers, goofy as heck Atari references, and a shocking amount of thought and creativity around weaving Yars' Revenge into the whole shebang.

First of all, there’s just something special about contemporary WayForward’s vibe. The house style started around when Shantae hit the Game Boy Color back in the day, but the form it’s in today is the result of years of evolution and outside influence. I look back at Double Dragon Neon and Jake Kaufman’s musical imprint, and how that aesthetic blueprint further developed when Kaufman left and games like Shantae and the Seven Sirens and River City Girls and new voices took the reins.

I don’t talk about music much, but it’s hard not to with WayForward. The way the studio's games combine old school gaming tunes with vocalized pop music hits hard, and Yars Rising takes it to a whole new level. There are returning musicians from River City Girls such as Dale North and Megan McDuffee. But Atari and WayForward also crowdsourced the soundtrack in a way, bringing in artists like Tobokegao, Moe Shop, and milkyPRISM (among many others) to remix the in-house work and drop such a banger-laden mixtape of an OST that there’s an in-game earbud item you can equip to display each track name and artists on the screen when the track changes. They knew what they were doing, and what they were doing was cooking, folks.

For the new Yars Rising game, @atari and @WayForward have gone big on audio.

A host of superb artists, musicians, wordsmiths and creators are coming together to produce an amazing soundtrack. Talk about a community build!

Here they are in one thread. Enjoy... pic.twitter.com/VX6NrTK2GY

— Atari X (@AtariX) June 17, 2024

The music props up Yars Rising’s visual style, which is once again familiar when you line it up against WayForward’s library. It’s a unique mix between anime, especially from the 90s, and Saturday morning cartoons of the same era. It’s a style that sounds like a bad time on paper, almost like those cringey “How to Draw Manga” books you see polluting shelves at arts and crafts stores that look factory-designed to exploit children who discovered Dragon Ball or Naruto for the first time. But the artists at WayForward make it work, occupying a similar space as UDON, an art studio that works a lot with Capcom. The characters are brightly colored and silly, and as more and more of the Yars' Revenge-inspired lore kicks in, influences of superhero and mecha TV seep in too for additional flavor.

Hacking homage

We’re talking a lot about first impressions here, and Yars Rising doesn’t make an amazing one. It starts out as a fairly standard-feeling Metroidvania, with Emi running around a 2D map and hitting obstacles you know you’ll be slipping through later. There seems to be an early emphasis on stealth, and that’s the worst thing to lead with. Especially since stealth is the weakest part of this game throughout its runtime (and thankfully gets pushed further and further into the background). But when the hacking starts, the magic kicks in and Yars Rising reveals its hand.

Hacking is how you do everything, from unlocking doors and disabling traps to unlocking new powers and equippable, passive upgrades. Even some boss fight encounters involve hacking. Hacking minigames, which can be as fast as thirty seconds or up to a couple minutes long, are when you actually get to play Yars. And it isn’t just an Atari emulator, either. You’re playing Yars fed through a cheese grater and mixed up in a tumbler with a WarioWare cartridge and a canister of GFUEL. Each distinct minigame starts with Yars' Revenge and springboards into its own modified version with some kind of gimmick. Within the time limit you have to discern what the goal is, then complete it without taking a single hit. If you mess up, Emi takes damage and you have to go again.

With this hacking gimmick, WayForward hits an incredibly small sweet spot between creativity, challenge, homage, progression, and comedy. You never know what you’re going to get when you boot up a hacking panel, and how exhilarating, frustrating, or silly the task will be. And as you explore and unlock new powers, there can be cumulative, but optional variations within the minigames. There were times when a particular minigame had me screaming, but because the challenge was so tightly designed with such a small margin of error, it was not without respect for the game.

And the creativity isn’t just restrained within the hacking minigames. The powers you unlock are creative as well, and go further outside the box than what I’d call the regular Metroidvania kit. There’s no double jump, for example, rather a sort of vertical boost you have to carefully deploy during specified scenarios. The only familiar ability is a wall jump, but everything else is a slight variation on the usual suspects with equally creative applications. This is all to say that once Yars Rising gets moving from its slow start, the fun really doesn’t stop until the game forces you to stop and reflect. The final boss is kind of a pain though, but the encounter right before it rules. I’d say more but it’s the payoff of a gag you won’t see coming, and you’ll be laughing and cringing at the same time.

I’ve gone on too long at this point, but I kind of want to just keep gushing! Yars Rising looks like a bunch of wacky stuff that shouldn’t work. Yet when it comes together it’s a blast for nearly its entire runtime. It’s WayForward at its most self-indulgent, but that turns out to be a great gaming experience that extends into a sweet, clever, little love letter to Atari’s classic library in a way that feels fresh and unique. The way Yars' Revenge, as the core of this concept, is woven throughout what from the outside seems like a totally unrelated kind of game is a constant source of dopamine. And while the stealth is kind of a dud, the action and exploration on the Metroidvania side is top notch, especially with all the neat and unusual powers you get to play with. Yars Rising is a big surprise, and one of the most memorable games I’ve played in 2024.

Yars Rising is available on September 10, 2024 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Atari VCS. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.