So I had gotten Konami’s latest game Hard Corps: Uprising when it came out with the intention of reviewing it. However upon playing it I had very mixed reactions to it. On the one hand, yo it’s Contra! It plays just like contra, with the same great side-scrolling shooter control scheme plus some nifty additions like Running, double jumping, air dashing, and special abilities that you can unlock. That sound awesome right? Well yeah, it is! In fact when I say it plays like Contra, what I mean to say is that when you first press start at the menu it plays the Contra music, pressing up up down down left right left right B A while the first stage is loading you get a metal remix of the first stage music. Hell even if you don’t use the code you get a different redone version of the first stage anyway. Right off the bat this game looks and feels great!
Then you start noticing things. Nothing big, in fact a lot of things I’d complained about sound petty, but they add up. So let’s get into it. *Holds breath* The first level is way too long, with one mini boss and three boss battles where the last two are back to back. The chekpointing is messed up, if you die on the last boss from the first level then you go back two bosses and twice there’s an out of nowhere quick time event that never happens again for the rest of the game, where if you mess up you die. And again, if you die on the last QTE then you go back and fight the last two bosses. There are two game modes, arcade and Rising mode. Arcade mode is the standard way you’d play a Contra title, start from the beginning with a set amount of live and play till you die. Then there is Rising mode, which is the same thing except you get points after each stage that you can spend on upgrading your character.
Now I’m going to stop right here and just talk about the problems with Rising mode for a bit. Where to begin? Like I said before, Rising mode has everything arcade mode has plus upgrades. So there is no reason to play the arcade mode other than to get achievements that are only obtainable in that mode. You get too few points for each level also. Even perfecting a level, getting an “S” rank, and never getting hit, you still don’t get quite that much. There is only 8 levels so you’ll wind up playing around each stage 10 times or more before you max out your character. And while I’m on that subject, you can only upgrade the stats of one character at a time, so because it takes so long to upgrade your guy it once more means there is no reason to play any other character. There is one exception, with the character of Sayuri who is DLC and only uses a sword. She is different enough to justify playing as another character. This brings me to my next point.
On the day of Hard Corps: Uprising’s release there where two DLC characters, Sayuri and Harley Daniels. Now I don’t mind having day one DLC. A game gets made and there is the submission period which takes a while, plus HC:U was a part of the Xbox live house party promotion, so undoubtedly that had to be finished and submitted well in advance. So they had time to work on some DLC in between the game being finished and the game coming out. But these weren’t extra levels; these weren’t bonus characters that they added in after the fact. When you start up the game the first thing you see is a lengthy anime intro showcasing the four main characters. Two of those main characters are DLC. Keyword “MAIN CHARACTERS.” That would be like if they released Super Mario Bros. 2 but you had to buy Toad and Peach for $2.50 each right off the bat.
When I first started writing this I had intended it to be a review of HC:U, but it was when I got near to the end of my review when I typed something that caught my own eye. I wrote “Hard corps: Uprising, even though it has solid fun gameplay, is unfortunately deeply flawed. HC:U may be filled with really great ideas that work on paper, but the execution of those ideas all seem archaic and in the end ultimately fall flat.” As soon as I wrote that I realized that I could have copied those sentences and pasted them on other Konami games; specifically last year’s Castlevania harmony of despair.
The core mechanics of both games is fun, but it requires far too much level grinding and map memorization. Another problem shared between these games is the lack of explanation of vital gameplay systems. Both games have a hidden depth that is not explained whatsoever. I could write paragraphs just about all the things these games expect you to know, but don’t bother to explain. There is yet another problem these game encounter, overpriced DLC. Konami seemed to wise up a bit after the first few DLC’s for Castlevania HD because at first they were (and still are) selling a single map for $5, then as they released more maps and characters they started lowering the price to $4 then $3 and the latest character packs are now $2 each. There is even more to complain about with shoddy online options and how in HC:U the second player doesn’t receive any achievement points.
*Finally releases breath from earlier* Yet even after all the crap I just talked about these games, there is still something that I love about them. Something just snaps into place after a while. After failing over and over and using continue after continue on a boss near the end of HC:U (the final one on the Train) I said “screw this!” and started from the first stage, only to find that I had become such a badass that I didn’t die once until after I had gotten back to the same boss. If you spend enough time with these games you will eventually snap into it. You just get in the zone where you’re doing everything right and it feels like magic. But unfortunately it takes way too much time and effort to upgrade your weapons and abilities for these games to really start to feel truly fun.
I’m not trying to hate on Konami, I just want to point out some of the design flaws that bog down so many of Konami’s games. So what have we learned?
Konami has been creating high quality games for decades now, and for every Castlevania we get a Simons Quest. For every Contra we get a Buck O’Hare. Konami has a long running history of producing some of the best and some of the worst games out there. Often times these bad games show potential, but fail do to fatal oversight of key gameplay aspects. So I just have to ask. Konami… what’s up?
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