How’s everyone doing tonight? A couple things have been happening this past month. I’ve had a couple exams since my last post. I got a 100% on my first Genectics exam, a 96% on my Chem II exam, an 87% on my German II exam, and I’m waiting for my grade for my exam in my Macro Economics class. So besides school, I’ve been playing a couple games the past month too. I’m about 8 hours into Dragon Quest V, I managed to beat Uncharted 3 on Crushing difficulty (going for the plat), and I beat Kid Icarus uprsing. The rest of this blog is dedicated to my thoughts about Uprising.
Kid Icarus: Uprising is a mixed bag. The controls are fairly bad, and although they become manageable in time, I never was able to master them during my 8 hour playthrough. I’m talking specifically about the ground missions when I say they were bad. The on-rail flight sections were truly a joy, but the ground system and some of the vehicles you can hop into, the bike specifically, are horrid. The camera is moved around by flicking the stylus across the bottom screen, not moving the stylus toward the side, but flicking the stylus. With a little bit of trouble you get use to this system; however, Pit also has a problem with moving. There’s a dash/run system that speeds Pit up quite a bit, and this is done by flicking the control nub in the direction you want pit to dash. The only problem is sometimes you’ll go to just walk and you’ll end up dashing off a ledge. This is what caused the majority of deaths in my game. It wasn’t enemy difficulty that caused deaths; it was the clunky platforming (Pit can’t jump by the way) if you can even call it platforming, really it was just falling off platforms that were floating above bottomless pits.
Because I tallied up quite a bit of deaths due to this horrible control method, I realized another system that is rather odd in Kid Icarus, the difficulty system. You can change the difficulty in Kid Icarus at the start of every level. All you need is the games currency to bet that you can finish the level. You bet more and more hearts as you increase the difficulty level scale which has absurdly minute increments (Really what’s the difference between a difficulty level of 3.0 and 3.1?!). If you don’t have enough hearts you cannot raise the difficulty. Then if you die in the level, say do to falling off platforms to many times which will likely happen, the difficulty will be lowered by a whole point in some cases. I didn’t enjoy this system because enemies are fairly easy to beat and the boss at the end of every level only takes 2 minutes to beat. I started countless boss battles that were finished in under a minute which is a shame because the boss designs were pretty cool.
So those were the major faults I had with the game. What were the positives?
Well the game had an awesome musical score. It really was a cool playing through the on-rail flying sections and listening to this game with headphones on. Even the ground segments had good music. The voice acting is non-stop and although you may miss a couple quips here and there do to focusing on the screen and not listening, their are some good one liners, 4th wall breaks, and references in the game to make a couple mental laughs happen. I found it really funny when Pit came across a boss and had a little Rocky Horror Picture show moment.
One of the many spectacular places you visit in Uprising.
The atmosphere and level design/diversity were also awesome. There are 25 chapters and each one is unique and is a joy to look at. Once again the most credit has to be given to the flying sections as they are more controlled and give you a bunch of cool cinematics and awesome background and foreground scenes as you swoop and dodge enemies and environmental objects. Ground levels still look nice, but they are a little more generic.
There is also a cool weapon system where you can synthesis weapons and redeem hearts to buy more weapons. To be honest I didn’t dig too deep into this system, but I did find it to be a nice feature that added more depth to the game.
Anyway that’s about all I have to say for this game. It’s a good game, but it misses out on being truly great because of the subpar controls. I did however find the presentation to be wonderful. The title might be a little harsh. I’d give the game a 7.0/10.
I’ve been on the fence whether to buy the game due to the control setup in general. I’m somewhat aware of the difficulty curve based on some of my other friends’ in-and-out experiences with Uprising. I’ll eventually play the game when I get to it, and I’ll keep the ground levels in mind and see for myself.
Oh, and congrats on your exams.