Rive Reviews
RIVE is an incredibly well-designed game with wonderful characters, a good sense of humor, and fantastic art design.
Two Tribes promised RIVE would be their last and best game. It's certainly the best. Let's hope it won't be the last.
RIVE is a masterfully crafted game that can be easily recommended to hardcore shooter fans. It’s high difficulty level may scare away potential players, but those who stick with Two Tribes‘ final game until the end will not be disappointed.
It is not a complicated game and it’s easy to understand, so it would practically be for anyone. I do recommend it, if you would like to shoot massive amounts of robots and feel awesome doing it.
Any and all gripes related to RIVE are minor, and none should obscure the fact that it’s a solid game filled to the brim with high-impact action. The game’s high points are thrilling enough to melt its flaws into a glowing hunk of molten metal. It’s a great little reference to the arcade shooters of yesteryear, recalling what was great about those games while firmly establishing an identity of its own. RIVE is not a game to miss.
Rive wants to be special and challenging, but for all of its white-knuckled action, there’s little more than bombast. In the modern gaming lexicon, we tend to lump games into one of two categories: either they’re “awesome” or “awful.” Rive is neither. Instead, much like the majority of aging games it serves as a send up to, it’s completely and utterly average.
RIVE is a gorgeous game that borrows plenty from its blaster genre predecessors to good effect, but sadly a lack of anything particularly original, and some truly punishing sections make it all too easy to leave behind.
Rive is an insanely challenging yet satisfying game that is mostly shoot-'em-up, but tosses in a few genre wrinkles as well. It is an unapologeticlly brutal game however, and it could use a handful tweaks here and there, but the overall experience is still a fantastic one.
While it can be downright frustrating at times, it is very rewarding when you finally get past that difficult section.
Aside from the initial impressions of Rive it has never set a foot wrong, and never needed to fight its way into my good books.
Rive is a gorgeous looking game, which has taken two styles and fused them together pretty successfully. The blend of traditional twin joystick shooter and action platformer fits perfectly with what Two Tribes have done, but there are some caveats. The insane difficulty spikes destroy the pacing of the game at times, and sometimes the feeling when you get through an area that’s causing you trouble isn’t triumph, but relief. I suppose it’s to be expected from a game that starts off with its only playable mode being “Hard Mode”. Despite this, however, Rive proves itself to be more than competent, and is genuinely one of the better looking games of the year so far in terms of style. A game that fans of the genres should enjoy, Rive deserves your attention, but may well struggle to hold it all the way through.
Overall, Rive is a riveting romp throughout, and continues to impress, challenge and entertain even a few hours in; the world and challenge keep puling me back, and I believe that you'll find the same sense of daring danger infect you too.
While featuring beautiful art, the constant pop culture references and unnecessary punishing gameplay undermine what could've been a classic.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
RIVE blends twin-stick shooting and platforming exceptionally well. It's full of beautifully crafted levels and enjoyable one-liners. Unfortunately, brutal difficulty accompanies these elements, and it's not the kind of difficulty that makes you feel good about yourself.
Frust und Spielspaß lagen selten so nah beieinander, dazu kommen nervige Abstürze - aber wenn Rive funktioniert, dann richtig! Ein Patch könnte hier Wunder bewirken.
Review in German | Read full review
For me the proposition in Rive is pretty straight-forward, you either enjoy being challenged and wanting to throw your controller or you don’t. With repetition, experience, and some luck you can absolutely master the levels the game throws at you, it just isn’t a game you’ll be conquering too quickly as there are many sections that required some trial and error to understand and the action simply doesn’t often let up. Fortunately the checkpoints seem to be well placed and spaced, though in a few cases the way the checkpoints are essentially a snapshot of what was happening at the time you passed through it didn’t work out so well. All in all it’s very much a game with its own rules and style though and if you just haven’t been feeling pushed with your shooters it will happily fill that role for you.
I wanted Rive to be a good game.
RIVE is, without a doubt, one of the finer action games released this year. It strikes the right balance between focused, but also playful. The player will be thrust into a constant variety of intense scenarios, all more difficult than the last, but only rarely will they even think, "That was a little unfair." There are plenty of ways to approach each situation, and there's room to experiment with weapons or exploit the enemy AI. The difficulty is well balanced, and the campaign is fluff free. Even the water section is good, and those hardly ever work in video games.