Uprising 2: Lead and Destroy (Windows)

Upraisin

Originality - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing - or at least that's what you'd think given the number of uninspiring cloned games floating around the shelves of most software stores. It seems that few software companies are willing to risk being original, preferring instead to rip off other people's games - a typical example of this is the glut of top-down real-time strategy games that flooded the market after the release of Command and Conquer, and have continued to trickle onto store shelves ever since. It's quite disturbing to see such a blatant lack of original ideas in the industry. No game is safe from this blatant plagiarism, either - only a year or so after the highly playable and pretty original 3D strategy game Uprising was released by Cyclone Studios and 3DO, someone has decided that it'd be fun to blatantly copyUprising, creating a game that is clearly a rip off of that game. The name of these unoriginal, unimaginative, idea-thieves? Hang on - I'll check the back of the box - it's '3DO and Cyclone Studios and it's called Uprising 2. Whoops - my mistake.

Unoriginality

But it's an easy mistake to make, given that Uprising 2 is almost identical in every respect to the original Uprising - indeed, it looks like Cyclone have taken the original Uprising code, bolted on a slightly nicer looking graphics engine and just put it out on store shelves - which, as far as I can see, they may just have done. Not that Uprising 1 was a bad game - it was flipping brilliant, and was the very first first-person perspective real time strategy game to be released, if you discount more tactical tank sims, and it was followed soon after by Battlezone. The game was vaguely similar in concept to Command and Conquer but was revolutionary in that it placed you slap bang in the middle of combat, rather than having you float astral-projection style above the battlefield . The premise behind the game was that there was some Star Wars style conflict (only without the presence of a fluorescent tube wielding inbred farmhand and an asthmatic bloke with a bucket on his head) going on throughout the galaxy. You played one of the 'goodies' who had been given command of a new prototype tank and mobile command centre called 'The Wraith'. Using this vehicle, you had to conquer various planets filled with Imperial troops and craft, and generally save the known universe. And you did - or someone did - since in the sequel, all is fluffy and happy and peaceful, with the New Alliance now ruling the universe (obviously completely different from having the Imperium rule the universe). Until, that is, the Trich come along.

Hat-Trich

The Trich, pronounced 'Generic alieny-evil-baddies' are bent on conquering the galaxy, and so it's up to you to hop in your tank again and kick their non-human arses back to wherever they came from. This you do once again by conquering the planets that they have taken over, through the use of your Wraith. However, despite the fact that you have a large missile throwing and laser firing tank at your disposal, Uprising 2 is not a shoot-em-up - it's a real-time strategy game, like its predecessor. Because you're not going it alone - in Uprising 2 you can set up bases around the map, call in buildings, manufacture aircraft, tanks, soldiers and even nukes - and so, with all these units at your disposal, defeating the Trich should be easy going. But it isn't, for a few reasons.

First of all, you can only build your bases in certain areas - on top of citadel pads, which can be found at certain pre-set locations on each map. These citadel pads must be claimed and to do this you drive your tank onto the target pad within each citadel area, and press 'F' to call in a Citadel. At this point, a dropship will zoom in, and drop a large Citadel turret. After about thirty seconds or so, during which time it is vulnerable, the Citadel becomes active and the citadel pad is yours. You can place up to three turrets around your Citadel to protect it - although it does come equipped with its own giant guns too. Once your Citadel is in place, you can call in other buildings to occupy any of the one, two, three, or more empty pads attached to the Citadel. These buildings can be used to manufacture light tanks, heavy tanks, air fighters, bombers, and other vehicles. The power to construct buildings and units comes from a hidden power source below each Citadel pad which can be tapped by constructing a Power Building, which will drain all the power below the Citadel, turning it into an energy form which can be used to construct units and buildings. You get the idea.

Clones

Unfortunately, and here's the second reason Uprising 2 isn't always easy going, the Trich have got the idea as well, and are able to occupy the citadel pads as well, constructing their own Citadels, building their own buildings, and launching assaults on your Citadels. While some of the Citadel pads you come across in the game are unoccupied and can be claimed immediately, others will need to be taken from the Trich. The latter is accomplished by destroying the enemy Citadel, then blowing up their buildings, and heading into the centre of their Citadel pad and claiming the pad, then laughing maniacally, resulting in your friends and family subsequently giving you a wide berth and forcing you to live as a hermit, catching your lunch by decapitating rabbits, deer, and other animals Oddjob style, using the Uprising 2 CD as a kind of lethal frisbee. Or alternately, moving on to destroy the other citadels, eventually freeing the planet of Trich influence and being moved onto the next planet where you have to do the same again.

That may not sound too difficult, but there's a catch, catch number three in fact, which you have to take into consideration. Unlike other real time strategy games like Command and Conquer or Total Annihilation, you can't just manufacture a load of units and send them out there while you sit in your tank, back at your base, protected by a load of turrets. Why not? Because units in Uprising 2 aren't launched into battle by conventional means - instead, you have to teleport them into a specific area, by driving into the battlefield, and beaming the units in - therefore you have to be in the thick of the action, beaming in your units, in order to stand a chance of taking down the enemy citadels. This tends to leave you vulnerable to attack but, unlike Battlezone, in Uprising 2, your tank is equipped with strong armour and shields, as well as an assortment of missiles, making it stronger than any other vehicle in the game - in fact, getting stuck into the enemy is the simplest way to ensure victory in the game, by adding your firepower to that of your units, taking down any turrets that may damage your units, before letting your craft do their stuff.

Copy

You have at your disposal the aforementioned light tanks, heavy tanks, AAVs, bombers, and infantry units, all of whom do exactly what it says on the tin. Tanks are handy for taking out ground troops, buildings, and other tanks, AAVs are best at taking down turrets and tanks, bombers are good at taking out buildings, although they need aerial protection, and finally, the infantry are good at taking out buildings and other infantry although they need protecting from practically everything else in existence, including squirrels. You can only beam a unit in once it's been constructed inside an appropriate construction building at your base, and then you can beam in one unit per building at a time - if you build more units then you can beam in more units at once, although you do have to wait for the buildings to construct the appropriate vehicle, which they do as soon as one vehicle has been beamed out, taking them anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes to complete a vehicle.

There have been a couple of changes to the whole procedure since Uprising - you can now move vehicles about by highlighting them with the F key, pointing them at a target, and hitting space, a substitute for just beaming them back to base and beaming new units in when you need them, although this is only really any good if you want to move units short distances, since you can't direct units from the overhead radar map, and it isn't exactly a massive deviation from Uprising's original formula. Also, and this is something of a negative point, there's a level number cap in place, which means that you can only have a certain number of vehicles on the map at one time - being told 'maximum command points in use' if you try to bring more in. The number of vehicles you can bring in increases as you progress through the game, according to the manual, because 'communications are getting better'. Uprising featured no such unit limit, and it feels like this is an artificial attempt to increase the difficulty of the game, something Uprising 2 could do without.

Artificial

As far as 'Artificial Intelligence' goes, the intelligence of Uprising 2's A.I. is er, hard to fathom. This is mainly because the A.I. has a huge advantage over you in that it can beam its units anywhere on the map, and because there are no enemy Wraiths or command units, I've yet to see the computer claim a Citadel, although if you do destroy any of its citadel buildings, it will try to drop new ones in - it seems that the placement of the Trich buildings and the other Trich-allied forces bases are all pre-scripted. This doesn't mean the A.I. won't give you a run for your money though - it will try to take out your bases - although this tends to involve sending a mixture of tanks and infantry in, rather than adopting 'rush' tactics where it throws everything it's got at you.

Things do get harder as you progress through the game, though fortunately for you, you can upgrade your vehicles between missions, as although there are only six basic unit types in the game, you can spend the bonus points you earn on completing a mission on buying a new improved version of the vehicle, perhaps with better armour or weapons, which replaces the old vehicle. Also available in the same range is nuclear technology - the ability to chuck a shed load of missiles at your foe, along with a Patriot missile launchers to counteract nuclear attack should he try to do the same to you. These technologies aren't all available from the word go - more can be selected as you progress through the game and its somewhat not particularly brilliant plot.

Same as before

The original Uprising received a much-deserved Gold Award, for being not only groundbreaking, but a lot of fun to play too. Uprising 2 is still entertaining, but it's actually not as good as the original, despite the fact that it is pretty similar to the first Uprising. Why? Well, for a start, while it looks better graphically than the original did, the handling of the Wraith feels all wrong. It feels less solid than the Wraith in Uprising and the tanks in Battlezone did, and just doesn't feel right at all. Also, the way you summon units in Uprising 2 is by pressing the function keys, the F1-F6 keys corresponding to a particular unit type - this was made easy in Uprising because below the 'unit available' bars at the top of the tank view, which you spend most of the game looking at, had the F numbers displayed below them. But in Uprising 2, the F keys are not displayed for some reason, meaning you have to think about which key to press, counting along from the left to the right, in order to summon a unit, or look in the manual - it's a small but irritating thing that can cost you valuable seconds in combat.

And thirdly, Uprising 2 has to be the most unoriginal sequel I have seen in ages - Cyclone Studios have - split the tanks up into heavy and light tanks, replaced the KSAT satellite weapon with a nuclear silo, added the ability to move units short range, changed the graphics a bit - and that's all. Even Eidos, the makers of the highly-similar-to-every-other-tomb-raider-game Tomb Raider III wouldn't expect to get away with this. Some games feel not so much like sequels as mission packs - Tomb Raider II felt more like Tomb Raider 1 1/2. Uprising 2, however, feels like Uprising 1.000000000000001. Oh, and it also doesn't support non-3DFX cards which doesn't do much for people who bought Direct 3D compatible cards like the Riva TNT. That's not to say that it isn't worth playing, if you can find it at a bargain price, say £15, then it's worth buying and it is still fun to play, although you may find the inability to move units all over the map a bit constraining at first. But given that Uprising 2 is actually inferior to it's highly playable prequel, I find it hard to recommend this to people who haven't played the original Uprising. If 3D real time strategy is your thing, you'd be better off with Uprising or Battlezone, rather than this uninspiring, unoriginal and particularly disappointing excuse for a sequel.

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Review By GamesDomain