Uprising 2, like its predecessor, is one of the RTS/FPS hybrid games that came out at the end of the last millennium. The Battlezone series and Urban Assault are the other two that come to mind right now. You drive your one-of-a-kind hovertank into battle, fighting directly and building bases to both control territory and to produce units and resources. Unit production is done by teleport, meaning that you can sprint past the defences of an enemy base and call in slow, vulnerable footsoldiers behind their turret lines. Important, because only soldiers, bombers and the long-range missile artillery can destroy buildings. Soldiers are the cheapest way of doing it, something which becomes important when your resources are running low. Comparing to the other FPS/RTS hybrids, Uprising is more limited in terms of base placement than Battlezone, but freer than Urban Assault. Likewise, the scale of the battles is between Battlezone at the small scale and Urban Assault at the large scale. Comparing to its predecessor, Uprising 1 has nicer laser sounds - the turret for U1's Citadel (the central structure of every base you make) is the most beautiful energy weapon noise I've ever heard. U2's game is perhaps a little better balanced - the superweapon in U1 was a killsat against which you had no defence. In U2, it's a missile barrage and you can build interceptor turrets to counter it. But the best part of the game? The music. I love this game's music so much. It's electronic metal or hard rock (genres aren't my strong point) and has been on my playlist ever since I first got this game a quarter of a century ago.
I should say something about the game itself, but I can't actually get past the first level. The "prelude" works fine, then the next mission is something in a construction site. In there, you need to activate some speakers... but nothing happens afterwards. I've tried restarting the mission again and again, but it still doesn't progress. So I can't actually complete the game. Others have had that error on replaying the mission using different characters (which is the whole point of free play, how was that not caught?), but that's not my situation. This is story mode with the default characters. And then there's the issue that there aren't any options in the main menu. You can only change video settings after you're in-game. No other Lego game does this (in fact, no other game full stop does this). It's obvious to me that this was a blindly ported console game which the devs didn't even pretend to test before shipping. Don't waste your money on it.
At its heart, this game is a metroidvania. You're in a large interconnected map of passages and collect abilities which allow you to progress further (missiles, wall jump, double jump). And it's a pretty competent one. However, it's missing a tag. That of "souls-like". There's a stamina bar. I hate those things. It's got a currency which is both XP and shop money and you lose that currency on death. Your character needs to be levelled up and this can only be done at special "bonfires", with an escalating cost. In Metroid, enemies drop health pickups, allowing you to live off the land. Here, you can only heal from "estus flasks" of which you have a finite quantity (yes, there's a powerup that lets you heal from melee attacks, but you only get that at the end of the game) and which can only be refilled at "bonfires" (which respawn all the enemies). And finally, you could equip all the powerups in Metroid at once (except the first game, where the wave and ice beams were exclusive, and in the third game where the wave beam and spazer were exclusive). Here, most powerups take up a set amount of capacity, where your total capacity is equal to your level. Yes, you can in theory have enough to fit everything, but that requires an insane amount of grinding. However, Ghost Song makes one nice improvement on the Metroidvania formula: secondary weapons (such as missiles) are fed by an automatically refilling energy pool. For someone who suffers from Giant Robotic Crab syndrome, that's a huge bonus because there's no longer a concern about "wasting ammunition". But did I enjoy the game? Yes. While it has been infected with Souls-like elements, it is at least not a serious infection. They're annoying, but not enough to put me off the game entirely like Hollow Knight did. There's enough Metroid in here (gunplay is a viable strategy) that I can manage despite being a Souls hater.
First up: Linux compatibility. It's not officially supported, but it works perfectly under Linux when using Wine. Always good. Performance: my system is a Ryzen 5600 and a Radeon 6500XT. The game runs pretty well at 1920x1080 with all the options set to max (except annoyances like depth of field and motion blur, those are disabled for the sake of my sanity). It chugs a bit during some in-game cutscenes, but oddly enough runs perfectly during gameplay. Is it fun? Yes. It really is Homeworld in 2D - there's no fixed base and your "mothership" produces all your units. The difficulty level is about right - not a cakewalk, but not a punishing nightmare either. Combat feels satisfying and punchy, the music is pretty good and the plot kept me engaged. But it's not perfect. I'll say it up front - I've been spoiled by Supreme Commander. That, to me, is the absolute pinnacle of RTS gameplay. You can zoom in and out in Deserts of Kharak, but only so far. You can zoom out further to get a bigger overview of the map, but that's a separate mode which you need to toggle. SC let you go smoothly from being right up in the face of your smallest unit to seeing the entire battlefield. Not being able to smoothly zoom in and out is a bigger annoyance than it seems. Many other RTS games have a minimap, but not DoK. It wasn't present in Homeworld because the 3D nature and very large scale precluded it, but that's not an issue here and it would have been very useful. And there's no way to pause the game while still being able to look around, let alone issue orders when paused. It's also a very short game, even more so when you don't know what the level triggers are (which might end a mission earlier than you want). But all that said, I don't regret my purchase. I enjoyed playing it and I'd recommend it to any fan of the RTS genre.
First off, yes. I know. The game isn't listed as running under Linux. So there's no reasonable expectation that you can. However, the base game runs perfectly through Wine. This addon (not part of the actual game, it's a separate program in its own directory) does not. All you get is a featureless white window. It doesn't even have any of the window border things (close, minimise, menu buttons). It just sits there doing absolutely nothing. So if you play your games on Linux, don't bother buying this. It's useless to you.
What I have to say is a contrast to the other reviews. I don't see this as the peak of the Lego games, instead what I see is an awkward middle ground between the pinnacle of the "first generation" games, Lego Harry Potter 5-7 (which came out 6 months before this), and the perhaps a little bloated but quite refined DC Super Villains (which came out in 2018). The interface is just clunky - selecting abilities is an exercise in pain. Especially when you're under attack. The game does not pause when you're in the selection wheel, nor when you're holding down the button waiting for the timer to fill up so that it can present you with the menu. Using craftable abilities is even worse. Earlier games just gave them to you from a red brick, here you have to scroll through a 12x7 grid to find the one single item which you need (no mouse, you're using arrow keys or a joystick). And there are so many of them. Platforming? There are some incredibly obnoxious sections in the overworld (a new thing) and also in missions, worse than the other Lego games that I've played. It now has actual voiced dialogue (clips from the movies, you can hear background noise), which I don't like. Maybe I'm a minority, but I preferred the old pantomiming and humming. It gave the games a very unique and endearing quality. The most unpleasant addition for me is game crashes. Harry Potter 1-4 and 5-7, DC Super Villains, Star Wars, Clone Wars - all of them ran perfectly for me (on my Linux system). Here, I had two crashes and I haven't even finished the campaign yet. Fixed one by disabling FSAA, maybe the other one might work if I disable dynamic lighting (something which supposedly made earlier games panic as well). All that said, the gameplay itself is still decent. If you can withstand the bloat of unpolished extra functions and the obnoxious platforming, and if the game doesn't crash on you. Then perhaps you might like it if you liked the other Lego games.
I love this game. I don't know what else I can possibly say. It *is* Descent 4, made by all the same people and polished to a gleaming shine. Ship movement, weapon balance, level design, enemy behaviour, the music, the story and the graphics. All are perfect. It runs near-perfectly at maximum detail on my system (Ryzen 5600X, Radeon 6500XT), has an option to configure pretty much anything you might want and works with all sorts of weird and wonderful input devices. And to put the cherry on the cake, it has day-one Linux support. No mucking about with Wine here, it's native and runs perfectly. No problems with my joystick setup, which a lot of later (Unity engine) games choke on. It just works. Parallax got back together and made something truly beautiful here. If you have even the slightest appreciation for 6DoF shooters, get this game immediately. You'll be gleefully lasering killer robots in no time flat.
