It’s a trap!
Star Wars: Uprising doesn’t shy away from the fact it’s designed to keep you playing for as long as possible. It’s an endless jaunt of character progression, mostly through gear upgrades, that’s tied together with simple, straightforward action-RPG gameplay.
A bland, small-scale story begins following the events of Return of the Jedi, as an Imperial governor blockades your character’s star system to prevent news of the rebels’ victory from reaching the people. Though there are some canonical ties to the new Star Wars movies here, they’re superficial at best.
As a lowly Han Solo-wannabe on a backwater planet, you work your way up through the ranks by performing rinse-repeat missions for various generic crime bosses. Choosing from four races, and either sex, allows for some character personalization, but it’s all just visual.
While these excursions are at first engaging, dozens and dozens of repetitions later reveal them as anything but. They’re ultimately the same linear environments hosting various enemies to be dispatched by blaster, rifle, or sword. The simplistic combat consists of tapping on an enemy in the spawning wave that rushes toward you, which your character then begins attacking automatically with their equipped weapon, striking or shooting the target until it’s dead or you select a new target.
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While there are a variety of abilities to mix and match, they only ever feel truly like a life-or-death necessity against the occasional boss.
Fortunately, the upgradeable character abilities are the saving grace here, allowing you to exercise some kind of basic skill in combat. For example, you could charge a group of enemies, then activate the Scatter Shot ability that works like a shotgun blast, damaging and knocking back enemies so you can clean them up with blaster fire at range. And while there are a variety of abilities to mix and match, and they’re much more engaging than the tap-and-wait basic combat, abilities only ever feel truly like a life-or-death necessity against the occasional boss.
These special encounters scarcely populate missions but range from minor annoyance to challenging — like a metallic snake-like droid that lobs a barrage of missiles in your direction when not charging at you with twin swords. They elevate the action beyond spamming attacks, requiring you to dodge telegraphed area-of-effect attacks and keep moving or suffer serious damage. But though these specialized enemies do become regular henchmen down the road as your power accumulates through more and more missions — which livens things up somewhat — they’re never more threatening than the first time they cross your path.
Missions are framed by a traditional free-to-play MMORPG structure where you’ll perform your daily missions for gear and materials and credits.
Missions are framed by a traditional free-to-play MMORPG structure. You’ll perform your daily missions for gear and materials and credits, your daily Assault missions to further the overarching Sector Battle meta game, and story missions to advance your character and push the lukewarm narrative along. Grouping with other players for co-op or forming a Cartel – Uprising’s version of a guild – are all options that add to the experience, and allow for better rewards during missions, but never fundamentally change the basic structure.
Even though none of it stands out as overtly good, I have to give Uprising credit: it’s an impressively well-designed system that requires you to keep at it daily for the best stuff. And it’s all about the stuff. I’m grinding faction reputation and spending resources to upgrade my gear so I can upgrade my Player Rating so I can go on harder missions so I can maybe find better gear that I can upgrade so I can upgrade my Player Rating… and so on and so forth. After over 20 hours I’m not sure if I’m still having fun or if Uprising just has its hooks in me, though I’m happy I haven’t ever felt the need to dip into the obligatory microtransactions to continue making progress.
Star Wars: Uprising delivers on a promise of a simple action-game fix for an hour or so a day without paying a dime, but it’s far from a memorable Star Wars game.
