Star Wars: Uprising

Calling All Hives of Scum & Villainy!

Welcome to another edition of The Geek Beat. Most of my writing these days is over at

www.denofgeek.com but I'm back this week with a little nugget of goodness for you. Here we go with a review of Star Wars: Uprising, the new mobile free-to-play Star Wars title:

In its early stages at least, Star Wars: Uprising doesn't feature a great deal of the Rebel Alliance. (Apart from the same image of Tam Bastion, the fearless rebel leader that infuriatingly pops up on every loading screen for the game's first few hours, that is.)  In fact, it's because of the absence of Luke Skywalker and company from the game that the smugglers, pirates and bounty hunters of the Anoat sector have to band together to form the Uprising alluded to in the title. That being said then, it's quite ironic then that the game itself resembles the plucky young rebel upstarts in more ways than one. Like everyone's favourite fledgling freedom fighters, Star Wars: Uprising is clearly punching above its weight: launching on iOS and Android devices whilst making grand feature-laden promises, Uprising may be relatively limited by the power of  its launch platforms but that hasn't stifled the developer's ambitions. Promising a true RPG experience that allows players to 'create the kind of Star Wars hero they want to be' alongside 'large-scale, staged sector battles' that involve the entire Uprising player base, the game isn't short on endeavour. With the console and PC launch of Star Wars: Battlefront rumbling slowly into view, filling our thoughts like that Imperial Star Destroyer dominated the screen in the saga's first iconic shot, one wonders if there's any room for a small developer like Kabam to put their own stamp on the post-Jedi Star Wars universe.  

So how does the game fare? After all, if the Star Wars saga has taught us anything, it's that the little guy can score big: the Rebel Alliance were short on resources but big on ideas and they took out not one Death Star, but two. Sadly though, Star Wars: Uprising won't be painting a giant space-station on its fuselage anytime soon. Whilst ambitious in its design, Uprising fails to deliver on its promise and instead offers a lack of depth in almost every area. Whilst the central conceit of taking a fully customisable protagonist and developing them into a fully-realised rogue within the Star Wars universe is an admirable goal, the game doesn't really offer enough tools to differentiate your character from the next shady cantina-dweller. Differences in playable species are merely cosmetic and the ease with which most missions can be completed means that the few skill trees that are available are mainly redundant. Den of Geek often found itself spamming the first skill we acquired, a limited scatter-spray of blaster fire that was more than capable of dealing with almost every enemy encountered. Even bosses offer little challenge with the only difference being that running and gunning would become a necessity instead of aimlessly standing and trading fire with opponents.

Frustratingly, the game does offer higher levels of difficulty that presumably pose a greater challenge to the player but these options seem to be locked behind a paywall. Because they offer better gear and other rewards for completion, these higher difficulty missions require a higher player rating to access them. One improves their player rating simply by equipping better gear but when accessing the higher level-kit is only accessible by having higher-level kit you begin to see the paradox within the system. The developers would probably argue that this is where players need to embrace the grind and complete mission after mission to slowly inch their way towards better gear and perhaps this is true; the sense of achievement that I gained from finally upgrading our BlasTech DL-44 blaster pistol (as favoured by Han Solo) from its 'Polished' Level 3 state to its 'Rechambered' Level 4 status was substantial: slowly amassing the XP and the materials and the credits to see the gun's appearance change from its original Episode IV aesthetic into something resembling its look in Jedi was satisfying... but the gameplay journey to achieve this? Not so much.

Ultimately, that's where Star Wars: Uprising (or indeed any game that asks you to spend countless hours replaying the same missions over and over for slowly-improving loot) lives or dies: the gameplay. Unfortunately, Uprising doesn't offer enough challenge or diversity to make the grind worthwhile. Whilst firing your little pew-pew cannon at foes is initially engaging, eventually the repetitive levels and enemies, not to mention the lack of challenge begin to slowly grate upon you. This isn't to say the game isn't without its charms: the soundtrack is both atmospheric and dynamic and the graphics aren't bad but the plot, certainly across the opening stages is paper-thin. The game's chief antagonist, Governor Adelhard, the Imperial dictator who rules with an iron fist, brutally suppresses the growing rumour of Emperor Palpatine's death and orders a sector-wide blockade, preventing the Rebel Alliance from gaining a foothold in the region. However, despite slight allusions to this (such as being asked to run a mission past the blockade at one point) the plot seems to serve more as a background to simply set the scene instead of driving any semblance of a story. This is particularly evident with Governor Adelhard whose supposedly dictatorial regime is undermined by his total absence from the game's opening stages. My first visit to the icy wastes of Hoth was similarly unimpressive; the former rebel base is an iconic location from the original trilogy and returning to an Echo Base that had fallen into ruin seemed like an intriguing proposition, but once more was better in promise than in execution. Even the loading screens that offer simple opportunities to increase the game's lore seem very limited; as mentioned previously, our first few hours with the game offered only one!

The same can be said of the vaunted sector-wide battles that will allow the titular uprising to reclaim the Anoat region through co-operative play. Whilst this is certainly a cool prospect in theory, the reality is simply more of the same. Although the rewards on offer during these segments can be more promising, the intensity of the grind needed to attain them spikes considerably. In this sense, the game is reminiscent of another sci-fi shooter: Destiny, Activision's RPG-shooter promised much but ultimately fell foul of its own ambitions, launching as a well-polished, entertaining shooter that was terribly repetitive with an unforgiving loot grind and a non-existent storyline. Coming from a much smaller developer with an infinitely smaller budget, Star Wars: Uprising can be forgiven perhaps for falling short of its lofty aspirations. With its recent game expansion, The Taken King, Destiny has begun to address some of the criticisms fired at it and it's quite possible that Kabam will do the same but with the fickle nature of mobile gamers being a constant challenge for developers and Battlefront looming on the horizon, one wonders if being a servicable yet uninspiring shooter will be enough. With larger titles on the way, it's possible that many of the game's initial fanbase may soon be seeking their Star Wars fix somewhere Far, Far Away.

That's all from The Geek Beat this week folks. This has been a Vertigo production.

Head back this way next week (or maybe in a couple!) for something else... maybe even an update on the fabled ANA Project.

Until then be sure to follow me @VertigoDC but remember... Man, I won but I didn't beat him! 

Later 'Gators.