By Jin Lovelace; HSM team writer & filmmaker

We all love Lockwood. No denying how awesome they are, especially when it comes to fashion. Talented individuals, they are.

During the heyday of Home, Lockwood ventured into territory that was sound on paper, would’ve had potential, but fell flat on its buns. Creating freemium games for a social network isn’t anything new. In fact, Candy Crush Saga can be accessed on Facebook, where your high scores and leveling process can be gauged by your status. But creating a Home game is an exceedingly difficult challenge.

Home’s most enticing games are its meta-games: estate decoration, fashion, glitching, anything that makes use of the Home platform itself. Formal games, generally speaking, haven’t always done particularly well in Home — which is one of the many reasons  why we don’t see any new ones today.

Lockwood’s Uproar just happens to be one of those games: if I was really bored in Home and really that bored with my gaming collection, then I would muster up some form of motivation to download the space, step on the teleporter, and whisk myself away into a session already in progress to rack up a positive kill-death ratio.

And no, I’m not good at shooters at all.

Well let me take that back: I’m fairly decent in them. Put me in front of Battlefield 3 or 4 and watch me turn my “try hard” mode on. But generally speaking, it’s not my thing.

My time spent in Uproar leaves me feeling mixed. To sum up: Uproar is a 3rd person shooter with a twist of “The Warriors”, some gangster-theme and a mixture of “The Purge” meets anarchy. If any of that made sense to you, them I’m dumber than Lloyd Christmas for even making such references.

But that’s to give you the big picture here about this game: I don’t know why I’m enthralled to play this game, even knowing how…well, bad it is. Granted, I did have a purpose: to obtain some of the free fashion items. And even those came off to me as cliche. In fact, I think that’s the word I’ve been looking for to describe my mixed feelings about this game and how much of an impact it made on me in regards to accessibility and overall value.

For starters, there is nothing to gain except points and tokens. Anything you obtain can be put towards weapons, special items and boosters to help gain more experience as you level. You can also allocate your points towards items to contrast from the typical default avatars that are running around as confused as you are, spraying and praying in hopes they hit something, even if it means themselves.

One of the maps from Uproar

Though grinding for those weapons is every bit of your usual chore when it comes to F2P models, you can easily forego this and just spend your dough to access the weapons early on. Though you can obtain them pretty easily, it becomes an unnecessary disadvantage if you’re facing off against other players that are equipped with better weaponry than you.

And when you’re done with the stage, well…there’s no real objective in this game: you rack up as many kills as you can and move on to the next map. Simply put: you move around, aim, and shoot. Wash, rinse, repeat. No real strategy involved except to camp a bit, sticking and moving, and a complex way to throw your grenades and approaching your opponents for melee kills. So if you’re a run ‘n gunner, then you’re in the right place.

The problem with Uproar? Very simple: my avatar looks downright clunky. The there’s no depth to the gameplay whatsoever; I find the innovation in this game is as lackluster as the diamond-encrusted drawls you can obtain from the x7 Club for free; absolutely no substance whatsoever. Look, I know this is a Home game and nowhere near the budget of a AAA game, but anyone developing a shooter has to realize they’re up against a mental benchmark that’s extremely high, no matter what. We’re in the golden age of shooters right now, and they’re often used to showcase hardware performance capabilities. Home, frankly, needs to stay very far away from such comparisons.

I played against decent to good players in this game, and there was no challenge. I’m not speaking in terms of narcissism, but of fact. If you’re looking for a worthy challenge in this game, you’re not getting it here. Uproar strips out the total aspects of an in-depth 3rd-person game and really places you in a dumbed-down world of frantic matches with clunky animations, questionable controls, and at best decent visuals. Why would I desire to go onto Home just to play this title when I can choose to just play games that I own and are of better quality?

Uproar is a stripped version of Metal Gear Online (MGO), in my opinion.

Overall, I don’t mind the mindless fun. The artwork for this game is decent enough, if you choose to play. IF you wish to invest time and a bit of cash to play Uproar, then be advised that you’re not going to get a big crowd in this. In fact, VEEMEE’s No Man’s Land would be the optimum choice if you’re looking for a deeper shooter experience that feels like it’s bespoke for Home. But if you just want to play a Lockwood game, there are better choices, such as Mercia, Salt Shooter, and Sodium2. These are all games which feel like they belong in Home, and you don’t feel bad about investing a lot of time into them.

When it comes to Uproar, though, just enter at your own risk. It’s not a bad game — it’s just not a particularly memorable game, either. Lockwood is Home’s most dominant third-party developer, and we’ve all been enriched by their creative works; this simply just isn’t going to be part of the highlight reel.

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One Response to “Second Opinions: Uproar”

1. Jayson says:

   August 9, 2014 at 8:41 am

   Looking back….true. It wasn’t in Asia PS Home to start with. Lockwood should stick to making outfits, items and LMOs. However SODIUM (also by Lockwood) is still dangerously addictive IMO once you started playing it. Same goes for SODIUM 2, play at your own risk.

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