Kid Icarus Uprising Review

Despite the frustrating control issues - which might have been avoided with a dual analog stick control option - Uprising remains addicting. It's a testament to Sakurai's vision and execution that this is an experience worth visiting over and over again, even if there's no decent way to comfortably play it. Not only is the core gameplay remarkable in its nuanced, intuitive complexity, but it finds a way to consistently surprise players, despite strictly adhering (perhaps to a fault) to a basic formula of air and land-based combat that it rarely strays from. Even the characters and plot, with their bizarre twists and incessant prattling, remain charming and humorous. That's the best way to describe Uprising as a whole - it's great despite and because of its excesses, which also lead to its flaws.

Masahiro Sakurai could have simply crafted a single-player experience worthy of time and money and been done with it. But Uprising also features a difficulty scale that players can manually adjust between missions (from mind-numbingly easy to mercilessly challenging), going so far as to wager in-game currency for the potential to gain the better loot that is dropped by tougher bad guys.

Players can approach this idea in any number of ways, pushing their comfort levels immediately or slowly upgrading Pit's arsenal (the game features more than 100 weapons that can then have any number of perks and boosts, effectively offering limitless variations) in order to return to beaten levels and scale up the challenge. Not only do levels feature areas only accessible on tougher difficulty levels, not only do they feature different rewards when more challenging, but Uprising features its own achievement system, which bestows all sorts of perks upon players who acquire them. And there are 360 of them to unlock. Stunning doesn't even begin to describe the amount of depth packed into this game.

That's just the single player mode, which then directly ties into multi-player, as all weapons and almost all powers earned in the campaign are accessible when fighting with or against friends. Up to six can fire up their copies of Uprising, locally or online, for two distinct modes - a basic free-for-all or a team-based 'Light vs. Dark' concept. The latter operates in two phases - a more typical 3-on-3 match (albeit with a shared team health bar) which then transitions to a sort of 'VIP protection' mode at its end. A number of options allow time limits, item frequency and handicaps to be adjusted, as well as the difficulty of the AI, which can fill in as desired.


There are a few drawbacks to the multiplayer concept. First, the dynamic of multi-player combat tends to be far more chaotic and manic than the single-player game. The controls struggle to accommodate this type of play. Second, many of the stages weren't all that impressive. A few, however, did stand out, including one which managed to create an environment (and level of entertainment) that felt like a 3D representation of Super Smash Bros. on the Final Destination level. Lastly, Uprising's framerate does struggle under the weight of multiplayer. Get six players, including some AI, on a stage with lots of items and some intense action and things will start getting choppier. Latency did not seem to be an issue in test sessions, though the weight of a publicly available game could change that considerably.

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