Testosterone Engaged
Welcome to the LOAD LAST SAVE MAN CAVE, where we review games for MEN. Today, we’re reviewing UPPERS, a game that’s rippling with testosterone. This is man time, when a bunch of men get together, get shirtless and sweaty doing combat. Just some bros fisting it out. If you’re a woman, we’ve prepared a special chair where you can watch from a safe distance while the men get it on.
If you came here expecting a good game, then you should get out now. Good games are for women and communists. Real men play games that SUCK, and Uppers is a game for the MANLIEST of men. Join us as we take a look at the most aggressively heterosexual game ever made, a game that will put hair on your chest and make you appreciate the subtle beauty of your bro’s well-developed muscles.
So well developed…
Gameplay
Uppers is a 3D brawler where you go through levels pummeling thugs to impress girls. You can do light and heavy attacks, which don’t differ much. If your homie doesn’t want to open up to your attacks, you can go for a throw. You can guard and dodge, to avoid getting punched, and you can dash. The dash is used to chase after enemies that have been sent flying, because it sure as hell doesn’t work for anything else. You can also run up walls and fly off them with a kick, or use different environmental hazards like exploding barrels and cars to harm your enemies. This meager tool set is here for you to beat the tar out of generic delinquents, but most importantly, to show off of for the ladies.
All throughout the levels there are groups of adoring fan girls cheering you on. They ask you to do special tasks for them, like using environmental attacks or beating enemies with throws. This is an interesting system, at first, but it gets old real quick thanks to its quirks, like how close you have to stand to the girls for the requests to count. If you knock a guy into the girls, they might give you a random buff. How? We’ll get to that in a bit.
When you’re not fighting you can go to your home base where you can buy clothes, increase your stats and ogle some babes. Does this mean the game has cool customization and deep, RPG features? No. Absolutely not. It couldn’t be further from that. By “buying clothes”, I mean you can get a few different colors, and “increase your stats” is code for just increasing your health and attack damage. By how much? I don’t know. It doesn’t give you any real data or numbers, it just raises those stats. Each increase is hardly noticeable. The only thing I hate more than useless stat increases in games is terrible movement.
Combat
Fighting in Uppers is like fighting under water. Or in a dream. Or molasses. Pick your preferred analogy. Every hit stays out longer than it should, and you can’t do anything while it’s out other than wait. You can’t move, either, which makes the game feel even more drowsy.
Your basic punches are just that: basic. You press a button and your character swings a limb out. It’s an auto combo, like in old beat-em-ups. Unlike those games, your combo isn’t a quick series of attacks that knocks enemies down, it’s a long chain of strikes that eventually ends with a knockdown. By the time the combo finishes you’ll get interrupted by twenty different guys. You’d have a better chance of reciting the entirety of The Odyssey during a fight than one of these combos.
If light attacks aren’t working, you can go for the heavy attacks. Heavy attacks are like lights, but shorter, and the combo has a lot fewer hits and ends in a knockdown much quicker. They also do a lot more damage than the lights. There are no combos from light to heavy. Light and heavy combos are completely separate.
Now, knowing this, why would you ever use the light attacks? Well, they’re faster, but this is Uppers, where every attack takes around one second to complete, so there’s not much difference there. Your lights take forever to come out and your heavies take forever and five minutes. Why would there be two different attacks if they’re useless? There would be a trade-off for one or the other, with each having their pros and cons and niche uses, if this were a competently made game, but this is Uppers we’re talking about. Any shred of competence was replaced with pure, throbbing testosterone.
The worst part about the combat is the complete lack of movement. Whenever you engage an enemy, you lock in on him and can barely look away, like you’re lost in each other’s eyes. Trying to move away from an enemy is impossible, which makes every fight take place on a single tile. It doesn’t help that you can’t move for a long time after every attack.
You can dash cancel out of your attacks, but the aforementioned loving gaze comes into play here, too. Whenever you dash, your character does so in relation to who you’re currently locked onto. If you dodge to the side, you’ll try to spin around your current love interest. This dodge is so jank that if you’re too close to your target when you activate it, you’ll do a complete 360 degree spin around them, admiring them from every possible angle, and end up right where you started the dodge, completely negating the use for it in the first place. I understand, though. When you’re in love, everything you do seems to revolve around that special person.
This terrible movement makes interacting with the environment a complete nightmare. Sure, there are dozens of ways to maim your opponent with stuff laying around; you can uppercut them into a neon sign and electrocute them, knock them into a car, kick an explosive barrel at them or shove them into women, which gives them cooties. Trying to line any of these up is like trying to herd cats. You can’t move around your enemies easily, if at all. You can try to get yourself into position by dashing, but that just leads you to spin around your target and you land in a random direction. Then when you do get them in position, you knock them away only for the game’s jank to send them in the wrong direction.
Don’t worry, this complete lack of movement and inability to reposition is taken into consideration. You don’t avoid attacks by weaving in and out of an opponent’s range or avoiding them, you do it by pressing the dodge button. Not the dash button. The dash button is different from the dodge button. Why can’t you dash out of the way of attacks? Well, let me answer that with some dumbbell curls.
Every now and then, the enemies’ eyes will flash yellow with pure, uncontrolled lust, and they’ll launch an attack on you. You respond to this by tapping the dodge button to dodge. Then you press an attack button to counter-attack. That’s it. Most fights devolve into punch/dodge sequences where you alternate the two buttons with no real thought. It’s like the developers took a look at Punch Out and decided dodging left and right was too complicated.
I mentioned the dash button but I don’t think I’ve heaped enough hate on it. This thing is beyond useless. When you dodge left or right, it seems to pick the direction randomly. I still don’t know if the direction is based on your character’s left or right or the camera’s. Sometimes I dodge to the right and the guy goes right. Sometimes the camera goes crazy and I’m looking at him from the front, so left and right are switched, and the dodge comes out on the same side. Most of the time, it makes my guy dash to some unknown location.
This is especially frustrating when you try to wall run. To wall run, you simply dash at a wall. Easy in theory, but in practice it’s another nightmare. Since the dodge seems to go wherever it pleases, you dodge in the direction of a wall and your meathead character hops over somewhere else. I’ve had moments where I dash four or five times in a row, holding down the direction of a wall, and my dude just keeps hitting the griddy in every direction except where I want him to go.
The best way I could summarize this game’s combat, other than jank, is that it’s sticky. You can’t really control what you want to do because your character is infatuated with whomever they’re locked onto. You can try to hit other people, but you’ll have a heavy bias towards your original target. Since you can’t really move anywhere, your best bet is to stand in one spot, with your shoes stapled to the ground, throwing punches and dodging. I’ve completed several boss fights in this game with one hand, tapping heavy attack and dodge, without needing to move or interact with any other mechanic. The sign of an excellent game.
Enemies
There are two halves to this game’s equation: The one doing the punching (you) and the guys receiving the punches (the enemies). Both halves are terrible. It shouldn’t be a surprise.
Every enemy in this game is exactly the same. They don’t behave in any unique way, they just look slightly different. Random, generic thugs that don’t leave any sort of impression. I’m struggling to remember any of their designs, and I just closed the game. They come at you in packs of around five or six at a time, and you pummel them. They don’t make any sounds, or have any interesting poses or anything. They’re just one generic guy per level, recolored, sometimes they give them a hoodie or a mask, and that’s it. You can find more personality in a head of lettuce.
Their AI can best be described as idiotic. They walk up to you and, depending on the difficulty, they will either punch you or stare at you with longing. They surround you, but it’s not on purpose. There is no real logic to their behavior. They just path find their way to you and stand in a random spot. They don’t try to get tricky, they don’t stand just outside your range, and just like you, they have superglue on the bottom of their shoes, so they don’t move around much. They just saunter up to you, within punching range, and exist.
There aren’t any variations in their roles, either. This is something even “basic” and “primitive” games like Final Fight got right back in 1989. You’re supposed to give each enemy a reason for being. Some guys that attack from far away, some that jump and attack from the air, or big guys that take more hits to kill. They’re supposed to present a varied challenge that makes the player think about every fight, but in Uppers, every enemy does the same thing. Some of them have weapons, like a baton, but it’s purely cosmetic. They don’t have more range or deal more damage, even though they’re armed, they just walk up to you and do the same punch everyone else does. When your game has less enemy variety than a Dynasty Warriors game, you should go back to the drawing board. These guys are so dull, it’s not even fun to punch them.
Difficulty
This game’s difficulty was balanced by a one-legged drunk on a unicycle. You have Normal and Hard. They’re about as different as night and day. The gap between the two is so extreme it makes the political divide in the US look cozy by comparison. On the one side you have a mode that’s so easy you might as well not bother, and the other is so hard you also might as well not bother. In fact, don’t bother with this game at all.
Normal should be renamed to easy. In fact, that’s an understatement. In normal, enemies don’t do anything. They run up to you and stand there staring at you like they forgot what they were going to tell you. Every few minutes one of them will swing at you and then just stand there, like they felt bad for trying to hurt you and needed a minute to process the guilt. Their health is also ridiculously low, meaning they die from one or two hits. It’s a waste of time.
Hard, on the other hand, is a new layer of Hell. Enemies will attack you on sight with the intensity of a war criminal. They spend their days hating you and their nights studying necromacy so they can learn ways to kill you more than once. In this mode, their damage and health numbers are multiplied by 500, meaning you die in a few hits and it takes an entire month to beat anyone. Every attack you do takes off 1/60000th of their total health. You’d have better luck trying to knock down a wall using a toothpick. You’ll be beating dudes until your wrists get sore.
This makes this already awful game somehow even less enjoyable. There is no difficulty that provides an okay challenge. It’s either too much or too little, and in both instances it’s frustrating for different reasons.
Girls
That’s right today on Load Last Save we’re reviewing women!
Not really. When you go out to pound some dudes, you do it for one reason and one reason alone: for the ladies. In Uppers, you are constantly surrounded by crowds of cheering girls who want nothing more than to see you inflict pain on your opponent in creative ways. Some girls want you to throw your enemies, others want you to kick them in the face. Completing these tasks give you point rewards and love letters which are used to get a good rating at the end of each stage.
At first, this seems like a neat concept. It perfectly fits the theme of being a macho man showing off for the ladies and it gives you little goals to go for in the level that change up how you approach each fight (because the enemies sure won’t do that). In practice, it’s a slog that highlights the game’s many, many shortcomings.
First off, you have to be near the cheerleaders for your mission to count. If you stray too far, they won’t see you, because apparently girls in this world have horrible eyesight. “Too far” is defined by the game as “out of arm’s reach”, which makes completing some challenges a real pain. Sometimes you have to hit your enemy with environmental attacks, like throwing bikes at them, which are limited. You miss and you go somewhere else to grab another bike, only to realize you’re too far away from the girls and it doesn’t count. Another annoyance that happens is that sometimes there are multiple groups of girls close to each other, and you accidentally do one mission in front of a group who wants another task, wasting your time.
Speaking of wasting your time, there are plenty of tasks that are a complete waste of everyone’s time. Some might ask you to counter-attack a certain number of strikes. That means walking up to the girls, standing perfectly still, and waiting for your enemies to take a swing at you. Repeat up to ten times until the girls are satisfied. Other times you have to do things like hit enemies with a specific attack which knocks them down, so you have to do it, then wait around 5 seconds for your opponent to get back up to try again. A lot of the times you knock them away from the girls, so you have to wait for them to get up, then come to you so you can try again. Here are some ideas for more girl tasks: Watch paint dry, recite the entire alphabet and stand in one spot for two minutes. Riveting stuff. The kind of high-octane gameplay I expect from Uppers.
This whole system falls apart even further thanks to this game’s horrible controls. It’s really hard to be precise when the game is so imprecise. Like I mentioned earlier, simply moving around is a test of patience, so when you have to do things in specific spots, things go from annoying to genuinely frustrating real quick. I can’t count the amount of times I had to throw someone at a wall for a challenge, only because they were a pixel off, and couldn’t get them to where they needed to be. It’s like trying to type while wearing boxing gloves.
The girls are also there to give you their panties.
Not to wear, of course. That’d be weird. Instead, you collect them and they give you temporary buffs, like more damage or more health. To do this you have to knock an enemy into a group of girls, in very precise, finnicky spots, which blows up their skirt and they will activate the “Panty Roulette”, where there’s a chance that, if all 3 panties line up, you get a buff. If not, you wasted your time, but hey, if you’re hunting for panties in a game, you’re already past wasting your time.
These panties are also collectibles you keep in your apartment. Like trophies.
I’m probably on a list after typing all of that.
Presentation
The game looks alright. I like the shaders the game uses on the models. It makes the characters look like illustrations a bit, even if the actual illustrations in the game are better than the models. They look and animate fine, nothing too spectacular or too offensive. All the men look like roided up body builders and the girls look surprisingly normal. I thought they’d give them more insane proportions or something, but they look more like people than the men, which is weird since you have these He-Man ogres interacting with regular girls. It also makes the panty thing a lot weirder, since they’re not cartoonish awooga girls.
The environments look atrocious. They’re bland, empty and completely devoid of any life. Flat shading, zero atmosphere. The most generic, bland, cookie-cutter anime backgrounds you can think of. If I say “stock anime classroom”, you think of something really boring and basic, right? Well, take that and make it more boring and basic. Keep going. Nope, you’re still giving it too much pizzazz. Alright stop! There. That’s what it looks like.
The hits sound great, at least. Each hit lands with an authoritative smack that really sells the impact. It’s all very crunchy and satisfying. Good job, sound designers.
On the subject of sound, the voice acting is decent. Everyone sounds like anime guys, kind of generic. The one that stands out the most is Michiru, who’s voiced by Noboyuki Hiyama, better known as the voice of Joe Higashi in the original King of Fighters games and the voice of Link. He sounds really loud and hyped up as always, and it fits the game’s fiery, manly atmosphere. He does a great job, but it’s a shame his talent is wasted in this crappy game.
The game has music. That’s all I can say about the soundtrack. It’s there. There are rhythmic noises.
Suffices to say that, much like the rest of the game, the presentation is lackluster and forgettable. It’s the better part of this awful package, but it’s still bad.
Conclusion
Why did I even bother with this game in the first place? Well, it’s a PS Vita game. The Vita had a huge library of weird, niche weeb games. The kind of thing that has zero mainstream appeal but has a ton of soul. Things like Stranger of Sword City, Zanki Zero and Tokyo Xanadu. All great, videogame-ass games that scratch a very specific itch in my brain. The kind of love it or hate it AA games that don’t seem to get made much. Uppers seemed to fit the bill.
To add to this, Uppers is also a beat-em-up, and I’m always down to try those. A lot of newer ones are complete disappointments, but even after playing my fifth stinker, I don’t learn my lesson. There’s a tiny little voice in my head, a needlessly optimistic little gremlin that lives in my brain and says “Hey, that game might be a huge piece of shit, but there’s a small chance it could be alright”. I listened to it and picked this game up for $5. I feel robbed.
It’s weird since this is from the same developer that made the Senran Kagura series, another series of inexplicably horny, low-budget beat-em-ups. Those games aren’t the best, and, much like Uppers, they bring shame on your bloodline, but the combat in Senran Kagura is at least functional, and even fun. You can do cool stuff and move around, and it feels like you’re in control of your character, and not like you’re sending your commands to your character via telegraph. It’s like they took everything they learned working on Senran Kagura, forgot all of it, and made the crappiest game imaginable. Okay, I can’t say it’s the crappiest when Final Fight: Streetwise exists.
This game falls short of every single standard set by other beat-em-ups. Games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage, which are old enough to be in a nursing home, are way better representations of the genre. These games have been evolving backwards, in ways that should be foolproof.
The basics of combat in Uppers are completely missing. There’s no use for movement, like I mentioned. You can barely move out of your opponent’s range thanks to how slow everything is, and your opponents can always catch up to you matter what. The levels are incredibly small and cramped, which makes repositioning a moot point, since you can’t really get out of arm’s reach of your opponents.
Crowd control is pretty much non-existent. You can’t really manage the enemies in any fun way other than by slamming them away or throwing stuff at them, which is tough to do and these throwables are limited.
There really isn’t a need for crowd control, since the enemies are all the same. There aren’t any that require your immediate attention or any special consideration to take down. You never have to be wary of the chargers or keep any ranged enemies in check. They’re all some guy who walks up to you and attacks with no real plan or purpose.
The game becomes repetitive and tedious since all fights boil down to standing in one spot and dodging when the enemies’ eyes glow and counterattacking. There’s no thought or finesse to it. It’s the same thing you’ll be doing from the start of the game, all the way up to the end. The end which, by the way, takes forever to get to since this game is padded to hell and back and back to hell.
At least you have hot babes to look at, right? I’m not a prude, and I don’t mind when games try to get spicy, but there’s something about this game that is completely unappealing to me in that sense. You get rewarded with different girls who can accompany you into battle and give you unnoticeable buffs, and they’re all presented as if they were these bombshells you’re supposed to fight for, but I feel nothing. The mismatch makes the game’s constant sexiness even more off-putting.
I don’t recommend Uppers. It’s a terrible game with horrible controls, tedious gameplay, bad balancing and weird panty shenanigans that bring shame on your bloodline. It’s a complete waste of time that offers no fun for anyone with a working brain. If you really want to experience the most brain dead combat imaginable with padded levels and dumb enemies, give this a shot. If you really want to insult your own intelligence like that, I suggest you save yourself the money and go watch grass grow or count grains of sand. At least you’ll be outside.
You can get it on Steam, where it has mostly positive reviews somehow.
Remember to kiss your homies goodnight.
Ah, I see you increased your Queen Effect. A feat only the manliest of men can accomplish.
*Tim Allen grunting in manly approval*
“On the one side you have a mode that’s so easy you might as well not bother, and the other is so hard you also might as well not bother. In fact, don’t bother with this game at all.”