Gameplay

Kid Icarus: Uprising sees you using a grand total of one button throughout its entire campaign, with its sole purpose being to shoot your enemies. Movement is controlled with the circle pad, while aiming is controlled one hundred percent with the stylus. There are times where the game will choose your path forward leaving you simply dodging projectiles, and times where you'll have to move about all by yourself. At first this sounds like a horrendous control setup, and it does indeed have many flaws. This game will murder your wrists, hands, and eyes. But the resulting gameplay makes them all worthy sacrifices. Aiming in video games had never before been and likely never again will be as perfectly accurate as the stylus controls in this game. It's amazing how the cursor is always pixel perfect exactly where you want it to be no matter how hectic your screen becomes. In no other game can you adjust your gaze so incredibly quickly, not even in games that use motion pointer controls.

Kid Icarus Uprising is one of the few 3DS games that takes full advantage of being on the 3DS. Every level in this game feels hugely vast and expansive, despite having fixed paths for the player at nearly all times and being on the tiniest worst screen ever. It wouldn't be possible on any other system. Aside from aesthetics, the 3D also significantly improves the gameplay. Being able to constantly tell exactly what distance your enemies are at from you at all times eliminates a ton of frustration that I could imagine myself otherwise having with this game. The 3DS effect does have varying effects on different people, but for me personally it immensely strains my eyes. Despite this I couldn't help but play this entire game with that 3D slider pushed all the way up due to how much it improves the experience.

Story

Having characters screaming in your ear for an entire game sounds like it would be a bad idea, but it is so extremely charming here. Every character is bursting with personality and their constant quips bring a special humorous energy into an already extremely solid arcade shooter. The actual plot does have some nice surprising plot twists, but is mostly carried by the characters constant dialogue. In other words, it's really good. Hades is really good. Go play this game.

Other notes

Kid Icarus: Uprising is probably the most gorgeous 3DS game ever made.

Make sure to play this on a 3DS XL or New 3DS/2DS XL model unless you want to actually permanently lose functionality in your hands.

The Dynamic difficulty system is really cool.

You can FEEL that this game was made by Masahiro Sakurai. It Oozes smash energy out of every corner.

The soundtrack is amazing

Conclusion

Go play this game right now. Sacrifice your wrists.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is one of the finest 2D platformers I've ever experienced. It's an example of how Nintendo has completely mastered the art of making video games that are simply fun to play. It's really unfortunate for this game that Celeste exists because otherwise I would be able to call it the best 2D platformer I’ve ever played.

First off, Donkey Kong feels REALLY good to control. Despite all his movements being visibly completely physically impossible, he controls as if he were a real object with actual weight. I never felt like I had to get used to any weird video game physics for a single moment during my playthrough of this game. The controls are so responsive that I wasn't even bothered by this game's frequent use of forced motion controls, something that would have instantly turned me away from most other games. The gameplay, animations, and screen effects are all so perfectly tuned to make every single action feel substantial and fun that I actually enjoyed them.

Where Donkey Kong Country Returns really shines brightest is in its level design and visual design. This game can be very tough at times. In the later stages of the game I found myself frequently losing 10-15 lives or more for each level/Boss fight. Despite this, slowly learning from your mistakes after each death and incrementally making more and more progress on each attempt is extremely satisfying. This might be the only game I have ever played that comes close to Celeste in that regard. One thing however that this game does do better than even the very best 2D games I've ever played is in its visual design. Though cartoony, every single level feels like a real and functional piece of the game's world. There is not a single floating platform in this entire game that isn't built into the level in some sort of clever and creative way. Depth is also used very well to make the game feel alive. The game will frequently have you switch layers in the world in a manner similar to something you might find on the Virtual Boy. These depth changes are not only an interesting gameplay feature, but also a way to showcase the vast amount of detail put into the background of each level. It's wild how Nintendo put their very own New Super Mario Bros. series to shame 13 years prior to the release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

As I mentioned before this is the only 2D platformer I’ve ever played that has almost matched celeste in terms of quality. I can’t emphasize enough how much you're missing out on great Nintendo Platformers if you've only played the mainline Mario series and not this. It even makes Mario Bros. Wonder look like child's play.