We’d prefer if the difficulty focused on the enemies, not on depriving you of the fun toys to use.The most important aspect of Hard Corps: Uprising is that it has the potential to appeal to the ultra-skilled gamers as well as the rest of us.Ĭasual players could have fun if they can be patient and earn experience to make the game easier, but the game is rock hard from the first level onward, so patience is critical. There were also much fewer weapons available, and combined with a really annoying tendency to put the weapons in places where almost every time some enemy would ambush you as you picked it up (forcing you to drop it immediately) we spent the majority of the last half of the game with just the basic rifle, which is the most boring way to play any Contra game. In the early levels there are a lot of hidden items that can be picked up in out of the way corners, but in later levels we found almost none of these, making the levels feel emptier and giving the sense we were just supposed to rush through them. We even discovered some “cheap” techniques for exploiting certain bosses, but these were clearly designed into the game intentionally, which is a nice old-school throwback of design.One aspect of the overall design we didn’t enjoy was how the later levels were less fun for us than the earlier ones, and for multiple reasons. However, patience pays off big time: every boss in the game that made us at first say “Oh come on, how the hell can I avoid that!” eventually went down when we learned the patterns. A lot of the time, it gives you generous warnings if something is going to come flying at you from off screen, but later in the game a lot of the attacks become so difficult to predict that it gets annoying.

Sure, these demands are staples of the scrolling shooter genre, but we’d say that Uprising ratchets up the difficulty just a bit too much into the “unfair” category.

Download hard corps uprising xbox 360