Advent Rising

Advent Rising is a sci-fi action adventure from GlyphX Games in which the player, as pilot Gideon Wyeth, suddenly finds himself in the middle of an alien invasion and gradually gains telekinetic and other superhuman abilities, which he combines with third-person shooting. The ambitious story was meant to be the first part of a trilogy, whose screenplay was co-written by author Orson Scott Card, and the game boasted an extensive cosmic backstory, cinematically staged firefights and a combat system that freely combined telekinetic abilities with firearms so that the player could throw, crush and shoot enemies during a single fluid fight, and players still mention the game today for the grand, epically staged music that accompanied the plot.

The PC version came out the same year, 2005, as the Xbox original, but unlike the console release it struggled with a markedly worse technical side. The game was full of crashes, save-file bugs and stability issues on many setups at launch, which required a series of patches shortly after release, while the console version, thanks to uniform hardware, ran considerably more stably from the start and without similar problems. The controls remained conceptually the same as on a gamepad, that is, adapted more to console-style play than to the classic mouse-and-keyboard layout for shooters, which showed mainly in the camera, aiming and switching between telekinetic abilities.

In terms of content, the PC release is identical to the Xbox version - no missions, weapons or abilities were added or removed, the story leads to the same resolution on both platforms. Given the technical problems and the planned trilogy, which, due to commercial failure, never got a sequel, the PC version remained more of a curiosity for fans of an ambitious but unfinished sci-fi story rather than a technical showcase of what computers could do at the time - an irony of fate, since the game's ambitions aimed in exactly the opposite direction.

Why play it: Due to its technical ailments and a trilogy that was never finished, Advent Rising remains more of a curiosity for fans of an ambitious but unfinished sci-fi story than a technical showcase.