Kid Icarus Uprising review

by Dr_Worm on Jun 14th, 2012

Hey look, another game in a series that hasn’t seen a new entry in over a decade. This time, it’s Kid Icarus Uprising, the third game of a franchise that hasn’t seen the light of day since 1991, and honestly, a part of me kind of wishes it stayed that way.

I don’t really know how far after Of Myths and Monsters that Uprising takes place. Considering how much the characters break the fourth wall in this game, I’m assuming the real-time amount of over 20 years. You play as Pit, a young boy that is apparently the last hope of the Goddess of Light, Palutena. Medusa, the villain of the original NES title, has returned to wreak underworld havoc (another Diablo similarity?) on what may or may not be Earth, which I’ve only seen referred to as the overworld. I would divulge into the story further, but I don’t have to. The characters in the game are constantly bickering back and forth with general disregard to the story like in an anime. If the characters in the game didn’t care about the story, then I don’t care, not that you need to in order to play Uprising anyway, or to be fair, the originals either.

I need to get one of the aesthetic problems of Kid Icarus Uprising out of the way right now – the characters. I already mentioned how their bickering is anime-like, but that’s an understatement. They break the forth wall constantly, communicate comically with everyone, including villains and bosses, and their voice acting is grading to say the least. It greatly takes you out of the game when characters speak this way; doing it all the time prevented me from being immersed in this game in any form. You can essentially disable dialog by muting speech and turning off subtitles, but it doesn’t stop the characters from popping up on the touch screen whenever they speak. Seriously, they take up just about the whole damn screen, which I found distracting. Don’t take what I say too critically though, I’ve heard a lot of people say they like this kind of back-and-forth character dialog. Personally, I don’t care for it, and I was hoping for a little more subtlety from a sequel to games in the NES era.

Uprising has two forms of gameplay in the single player campaign, neither of which being the two-dimensional side-scrolling (that’s so last millennium). The first is an on-rails shooter not unlike StarFox. Unlike StarFox, however, these segments are devoid of any fun. The level designs, aside from visual differences and the occasional enemy variation that’s few and far between, do little to add to the game’s depth or replay value. Every level feels the same – shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge. You can get different weapons, but they don’t change the shooter gameplay as much as they do Uprising’s second gameplay form.

After 5 minutes of on-rail flight, which I know is 5 minutes because the characters never shut up about it being 5 minutes, you move on to on-foot combat. Thankfully, on-foot combat is more tactile and visceral than in the on-rail shooter segments, however that’s still not saying much. As with the on-rails parts, the on-foot enemies lack variations. Tactics for defeating these enemies don’t go far beyond the same ol’ dodge, shoot, dodge, shoot. Occasionally there are enemies that trick you or ones you have to melee, but that’s about it. It makes just about all the powers you can use, set-up like a customized utility belt, feel absolutely useless. You can also get random item drops (there’s that Diablo again), but they don’t add much depth to the gameplay either. At the very least, the weapons you get are different enough to change up the gameplay to some extent, but when most of the enemies can be defeated by just shooting them normally, all that really matters is upgrading damage, so what’s even the point? It also doesn’t help that some of the on-foot levels have parts that are similar to platform games, for which the third-person shooter design clearly isn’t suited.

Each of the game’s 25 chapters is practically the same: 5-minute rail shooter, on-foot combat, on-foot boss. I will say at least that the bosses do mostly have their own strategies that keep you on your toes and have you thinking tactically. However, since most chapters tend to last anywhere between 20-30 minutes, you might not find trudging to every boss battle to be worth it. One nice thing is that any items you happen to find, be they weapons or powers, you can use them in the game’s multiplayer mode. I don’t know why you’d want to though, because multiplayer is not very good. There are only two modes, team deathmatch and free-for-all, and both modes I can describe with one word, for lack of anything better: Clusterfuck. Aside from in team deathmatch when one player is assigned to play as either or Pit or Dark Pit (how creative), a lot of the multiplayer gameplay is the archaic “shoot other players until they die” formula. Weapons only make a difference to the player using them, defending players won’t do anything but dodge fire, so what’s the point?

The biggest problem with Kid Icarus boils down to one defining factor – a “controversial” subject brought up by every game’s critique, be it good or bad. You know what I’m talking about… the controls. Uprising’s controls are a mess. Simply undeniable, they’re a damn mess. The default control scheme has you aiming with the touchscreen via stylus, which is fine for the flight segments, but the on-foot segments suffer from not having a single comfortable control scheme. Fortunately one of the things Uprising does right, which I actually commend it for, is the amount of customization in control configuration. Seriously, more games, specifically non-PC games, need to have the same amount of control customization found in games like Uprising. You can choose between moving Pit with the circle-pad or the ABXY buttons, follow up with how you want to aim the reticle, then customize the rest of the buttons to your heart’s content. Sadly, I never found a control scheme that felt just right. The best I could do was moving Pit with ABXY and aiming with the circle pad, similar to common N64 FPS games like Goldeneye, but it still felt off. Honestly, I think the game would have been better on the Wii with the remote-nunchuck setup, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a remake or follow-up of the game on either the Wii or Wii-U in the not-too-distant future.

Ultimately I found Kid Icarus Uprising difficult to enjoy, which is unfortunate considering there are things about it that I like. The graphics look great for a 3DS title, with lots of varying, colorful scenery. I liked that you can change the difficulty before each chapter, and that having it higher gives you better rewards, and I appreciate that the campaign is fairly long for a handheld game, 25 chapters doesn’t seem like a lot, but given how repetitive the campaign is, it definitely feels like it. And obviously as a Diablo fan, I enjoy getting new items to keep the game fresh, even though the game’s overall lack of gameplay depth didn’t compliment that aspect much. Kid Icarus Uprising is a great game to rent to see if you’d enjoy it, but the game’s numerous problems drag its few redeeming qualities down considerably.

2 out of 5

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