Kid Icarus: Uprising Member Review for the 3DS

The Good: Beautiful graphics, great 3D effects, fun flying sections, lots of content, crazy enemies

The Bad: Repetitious level layout, boring story, sketchy voice acting, needs three hands to play right

The original game was created for the NES 20 years ago. The only people who remember that game are probably in their 30's right now. For the new kids Uprising is a great 3DS game with length, lots of items to collect, and a few modes to keep you busy. The game looks great and seems on par with Resident Evil: Revelations graphics wise. The 3D effects are good as well, but the game doesn't come without issues.

The game consists of two part: Flying and ground combat. Flying is the best part of the game because each level is different and rushing around canyons, clouds, caverns, and other locales is exhilarating and exciting. You move Kid around while shooting and can use various power-ups. Once you start playing you will notice one of the major problems - you need three hands to play the game. You control the reticle with the stylus and either the circle pad or the face buttons to move Kid around. The ground combat is more problematic because the game just needs dual sticks to really work. My hands cramped up from having to use the shoulder buttons to shoot so I could only play in short bursts.

Ground combat is longer than the flying which is disappointing. Moving around and shooting just isn't as fun as flying, but each of the 22 levels has a boss fight at the end. Thankfully the game is as hard as you make it because before each level you can increase or decrease the difficulty to earn more hearts. Hearts are used to buy weapons and upgrade them. Of course there are hidden areas in each level that has new weapons or healing items. Be careful though, you get three recovery spheres at the start of the level and that's it so higher difficulties are extremely tough.

There's a co-op mode which is fun, but gathering the items and replaying the levels is really for hardcore fans only. There's a lot of rewards for finding items and completing certain objectives like number of enemies killed, so there's enough content here for any type of gamer. I just feel the game gets too repetitive after a while because the levels follow the same pattern of flying, ground combat, boss. Sure they are all different, but I would have liked to see some mini-games or levels that are all flying, all ground combat, or just one big boss level.

Overall, Kid Icarus: Uprising is a beautiful game with lots of content, but has a repetitious pattern. The voice acting is sketchy at best, and even the story is pretty much yawn worthy. The 3D effects are great, but the biggest problem here is the controls. We either need three hands or dual sticks so expect some hand cramping often.