Star Wars Uprising was officially released on September 10th. I refrained from downloading it until September 12th. I maxed out my XP and the storyline 11 days later. This is weird.
Unless it says KOTOR on the box, I’m not much of a gamer. I enjoy playing video games when I have the opportunity but I rarely lose an entire weekend to a new game and I don’t even have a system besides my laptop. So you can see why I was so surprised that I was able to go through the game so fast even with my obsessive and competitive personality.
Uprising is addicting and not what I expected. On the game play front, it’s fairly simple once you get the hang of it and doesn’t require much skill. Essentially, you select which opponent you want to attack and then your character does so. Things get a little more interesting once you can train in skills that take your attacks up a notch. I’m a fan of the dodge and roll and the spray of blaster fire for efficiency. The only planet that keeps giving me trouble is Anoat thanks to the poison and the never-ending onslaught of nek dogs.
At a certain point, the game does tell you in a not so subtle way to chill the hell out and take a break. The main story missions are locked depending on your character level; something that comes into play once you’re closer around level 18 and it’s harder to level up. Every day, you’re offered a Daily Opportunity mission, 5 Assault Missions (that eventually trigger a Sector Battle which is basically a day long free for all that makes you gape at the Victory Points totals some people rack up), and a Daily Credits mission for each planet that you’ve completed the story for. While you can play repeatable missions as often as possible, they don’t offer nearly as much in terms of gear and nothing for XP. Granted, the XP part doesn’t really matter once you hit Level 40 and don’t get XP anymore… (No, I’m not bitter. Why do you ask?)
It’s another issue of Kanan but there’s no puppy dog padawan in sight. We’ve jumped forward in time again to rejoin the crew of the Ghost as they land on Kaller—the first time Kanan’s been back in over a decade. Overall, the issue is a fun read and a nice way to tie things back to the rest of the Rebels crew that we all know and love but I often found myself missing the Clone Wars era story about Kanan. There’s still so much that we don’t know about how Caleb really ended up becoming the Kanan that we met in A New Dawn.
At its core, the young reader retellings of the Original Trilogy sounded like they were unnecessary. After all, hasn’t the target audience seen the movies? Doesn’t Lucasfilm have enough of our money? Thankfully, the folks over in Lucasfilm’s publishing office found a way to put a fun spin on each of the three books and definitely caught our attention with the released excerpts. All three are out today but first, obviously, is The Princess, The Scoundrel, and The Farm Boy by Alexandra Bracken. The concept is simple: tell a third of the story from the point of view of each of our three main heroes. Leia gets the first third, Han the middle, and Luke the finale and this is where the fun begins.
Things aren’t looking up for Han, Leia, or Luke this week as they find themselves betrayed and in the Empire’s crosshairs and chasing after a lightsaber respectively. Star Wars is back this week with Issue #9 from Jason Aaron and Stuart Immonen and, well, we’ve still got a lot of questions.
Okay, that’s it. From now on, Lando’s real surname will always be Draper in my mind. Lando Calrissian-Draper. Lando #4 by Charles Soule and Alex Maleev is out today and boy oh boy is our favorite charming scoundrel in over his head.