Whether you were stuck at home watching this year’s E3 coverage on G4 or were lucky enough to go to the event, there were many new exciting and innovative products that caught people’s attention. While there was much to see, one game in particular stood out from the rest at the Nintendo booth. Yes, I’m talking about the new game from an old favorite: Kid Icarus: Uprising which is set to release with the Nintendo 3DS currently in development. In order to sate our appetites for more, Nintendo has released plenty of eye candy for us to digest while they get all their ducks in order. No confirmed release date as of yet. My estimates would put the release at very least by next year’s holiday season but I’m not crossing my fingers.
The Greek mythological story that this game series seems to stem from is the story of Icarus. The story goes that Icarus attempted to escape the island of Crete by using wings made of wax that his father, Daedalus, had crafted. His father warned him not to fly too close to the sun, as his wings would melt. Of course, Icarus did not heed his father’s warning and plummeted to his death. The premise for this game is that the “Queen of Darkness,” aka Medusa, has returned to the world and is causing lots of terror and destruction as queens of darkness tend to do. So the Queen of Light sends Pit, her trusty angel, to fight the forces of darkness to save the world. Pit, a fresh, modernized version of the original Kid Icarus, is lone warrior to bring down the forces of darkness. While the seemingly much more cheerful Pit doesn’t suffer from the same fate as Icarus did, he is only given a limited flight time much like his flight move in Super Smash Bros. Brawl before he must return to solid ground to continue his quest until he earns more flight time.
Now, as far as handheld games go, Kid Icarus: Uprising is definitely a very pretty game with lots of vibrant colors, decent texturing, and of course glowing, shiny wings. As I have yet to play the game, its hard to tell what the game play is like but from what I can gather from the video the game consists of two different types of game sequences. You have the flying shooter sequences that seem to play much like StarFox 64 did and you have the ground battles. Again this is just from my gathering from the video but the ground battles didn’t seem to be all that challenging or interesting because most of the enemies were cutesy round bouncy things that simply exploded when you shot them. And while this seems like they put a new face on what was Starfox Assault, hopefully by the time they release the game it will satisfy those of us over the age of 10 and actually seek some level of challenge in the games we play.
All in all the game itself doesn’t seem to disappoint those fans who have been waiting for over 20 years for Nintendo to release a sequel. I myself will be looking forward to playing it. However, the true test will come when the game is released and you can expect a full review in the future.