Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012)

First Impressions - Kid Icarus: Uprising

5 Chapters in, it's really great. It doesn't exactly seem to be my aesthetic, but the charm and writing of the game is slowly winning me over. There's a strong energy permeating through the whole game in terms of like how every joke is delivered and going from encounter to encounter causing the next quip or musical sting to play. The gameplay itself is very good although I'm still not really used to the controls. Sometimes there's certain parts where dodging with the stylus while keeping track of enemies on screen while shooting with your left hand on the L button gets really left brain right brain. The adjustable difficulty is super cool and an absolute godsend. So far it's situated me around 6.1 at the "try it here" so i guess i'm decent at the game. It's great so far, I plan on finishing it by week's end.

Sorry Pit

Do you like rail shooters or Star Fox 64 like flight sims? How about brawler combat? How about cute little cartoon characters? And collecting a bunch of weapons? It has all of that my friend and it fails at everything in totality.

Most levels in this game are 1/2 flying section with Star Fox like play and 1/2 ground section that's basically a brawler. The flight sections suck because the enemy fire patterns are chaotic nonsense, where it seems like you just move in a circle pattern and hope for the best. The DS touchscreen was also not designed for intense twitch aiming making it mildly painful to play. The ground sections suck because the camera is so busted you can't even see infront of Pit half the time: in order to make the ground sections not impossible they just throw hardly any enemies at you and make them very unaggressive, which does make the stages beatable, just very boring.

As for all the weapons you get. Since most enemies move very fast but have little health, the slower weapons are not needed (and the melee weapons are a just bad joke since you have to bring them into the flying levels where they are considerably less effective). So the list of good weapons gets limited to a handful of ultra fast firing weapons and the homing ones. You can get passive bonuses to the weapons, which consist of incredibly bizarre stats like "more damage while dashing left" or something stupid.

And I don't care how much you like the characters. Having them constantly talk during the stages gets annoying, especially when you replay the stages.

My last bit of tolerance for the game ended with how it handles difficulty. Rather than creating a well balanced difficulty or a handful of well-balanced difficulty settings it just gives you a difficulty slider and asks you to figure the damn thing out. The idea is you're supposed be on a loot treadmill where you to get better weapons for attempting harder difficulties but when 'better weapons' means 'the exact same weapon you are already using but with more damage' it has no appeal to me.