Future Tactics: The Uprising

The Good
I thought the soundtrack was pretty sweet in this game, you got a calm tone when you are playing, but when the enemies get to shoot you up it turns into something a lot more strong and active. If anything it proves the game had at least one person with a brain working on it.

The Bad
The game is a lot like Worms, you got a few units on the field and must walk them across the map in order to hunt down enemies, but Worms was mostly focused on insane humor while Future Tactics tries to put up a dramatic storyline. Because of this the turn-based combat starts to feel rather stiff because you don't want to stop your turn and let them shoot at one of the characters, in Worms the soldiers were funny, but ultimately copies of each other. People who push further into the game may end up liking the characters and then hating it when they have to watch as they get blown to smithereens because their turn ended.

The enemy AI is very weak, but also very unfair. There were times when enemies would try to shoot me, but ended up shooting the wall right in front of their face, these enemies are also completely blind to tactics and will all gang up on whatever enemy they desire even if you are flanking them. The part that I considered unfair was already obvious in the first two levels, you would have to take down a priority target while the game endlessly spawns in suicide-bombers and sometimes there could be four of these spawning in one turn and you can only shoot two. This got doubly unfair in the second episode where you could move freely around the map with no movement limitations, so the AI would just spawn four enemies every turn and have all four of them walk over to me and attack.

The graphics are unlike anything I have ever seen before, it looks like Final Fantasy 7 took some steroids, it's horrible. This leads me to believe they tried to make the Wind Waker lightning strike twice by having an animated game contain a deep storyline, but just like in the combat mechanics, it simply didn't work out very well. I am not even sure if characters move when they talk, they just stand stiff and try to figure out what accents they are supposed to speak in.

It was somewhere in the third episode that I was confronted with one of the worst ideas in a video game ever: If you lose a single soldier, you will instantly have to restart the ENTIRE mission. This would be okay if you always fought against weaker enemies, but that is not the case, you mostly fight enemies that are on par with you and sometimes even stronger. This got doubly unfair in that same episode when a new character ran into my battle and placed himself on a big open field with no cover and in front of four enemies I had been flanking. Fantastic.

You have to unlock pretty much every part of the multiplayer by playing through the singleplayer, but that is just a dick move because I purchased this game for the sole reason of playing the multiplayer with a friend. Half the time I don't even have the slightest clue of what I am supposed to be unlocking, but every after episode there is another batch of pop-up messages waiting for me to read them.

The targeting system is needlessly complex, instead of just aligning a cross-hair with an enemy you have to first do that, than a horizontal and vertical line jump across the screen and you have to align those as well. The damage is then calculated depending on how well you aligned those cross-hairs, but sometimes a perfect headshot would only yield me 80% damage while a shot at somebodies leg would give me a 99%. There is also another targeting system which works a lot like a radar, but this is horrible for when you want to take out the scenery beneath or behind an enemy because you can't aim at anything.

I loved it in Red Faction and Worms how you could destroy scenery because if you did that enough you would be able to dig a tunnel and manipulate a map's tactical options. Naturally, since this game is ripping off Worms there is destructible scenery here as well, but it is so poorly implemented that it brings nothing but trouble. Every single weapon I have encountered creates an explosion, even guns that look perfectly normal have exploding rounds, but then there scenery only damages to a certain degree. You can blow a hole in the ground, but it isn't going to grow very deep and once it's there you can't really do anything with it because the bland 3D areas have no tactical options beyond hiding from bullets. There are also objects that don't really get damaged and instead just fly all over the map. Also, finally and fatally, there are some arbitrary areas that can't be destroyed, such as the ground under a catapult early on.

Enemies have needlessly long health bars, possibly to make up for the AI been only slightly more tactical than a used sponge. I would often find myself falling in a routine where I just go out of cover, fire all my rounds at the nearest target, go back into cover and wait for the next turn. There is never a moment where I felt genuinely challenged and the satisfaction runs out very soon because all the monsters are copies of one another. There was also this plot twist where a guy told me that aliens never die and just revive a few days after you kill them, just to sap the last sense of satisfaction out of the game.

The Bottom Line
It is rare to see a game this appalling in every possible way; the gameplay is poor, the story tries to be dramatic (imagine Lord of the Rings been performed by muppets) and the graphics look like something the Nintendo 64 would produce if it was feeling sick. Shortly, no, I did not have fun with this game, but maybe you would if you were crazy and had too much money to spend.