Future Tactics: The Uprising is a poorly developed turn based strategy RPG with one of the worst stories ever.
----------Battle System----------
Future Tactics is a turn-based strategy RPG. The turns move in rounds, so the game will either start with your team or the enemies first depending on the chapter. Once it's your turn you can move which ever character you want in any order. At the start of your move you get to pick between Run, Attack or End Turn. If you choose to Run you get to run in a full 3D area with a green barrier showing your limits. You can jump on rocks or just about anything aslong as your character can jump high enough to gain ground on an enemy. After you find your spot you can then choose to Attack. Attacking is different depending on the character, you can even get new attacks by getting the power up tablets. Most characters though have the "scope" attack, this attack turns you into a sniper, then you have to line up horizontal bar with a vertical bar to form a cross. If you get the cross inside of the middle of the scope, then the more powerful your attack will be. If you hit the enemy with a headshot, then you get an even more powerful attack. The other attack in the game is a rocket style attack, you go into a "radar" mode. Your goal in this attack is to stop a circle that is going in and out of the "radar" screen to stop on an enemy, then stop a spinning dial on the enemy again to hit your target. This move can attack more enemies at once, but it's weak. The only other attack is a melee attack everyone has, if you are close enough to an enemy, then you can run up to hit and smack him. This is useful if you're on a bridge or near water and you can knock the enemy off of the map.
When you're done running and attacking, you then have to "End Turn". When you select this you get to choose from three options, Rest, Shield or Heal. Shield will protect you from attacks in the next rounds, Heal will heal your HP by a small margin, but both of these are limited. Rest just ends your turn.
Hidden inside the stages are power up tablets. These things will give your characters new abilities. You can max out a character to 6 power ups, but you can't use them until you get to a certain level (and leveling up takes forever in this game). Power Ups can be very important, for instance, you can get one that makes your character attack twice within one turn, or a power booster. You gain experience for every successful hit, but if you attack lower level enemies you won't gain much experience. Gaining levels is extremely important and needed to beat this game, however, it takes way to long to gain levels in this game so it's completely frustrating. The game offers different goals for each chapter atleast. Some stages you have to kill the boss, others you have to get all your characters from point a to point b. You have to protect things in babysitting missions, and so on. The game has an extreme difficulty level with no ability to change it. The enemies are very intelligent, so they'll directly pick on one character and kill him within a couple hits. If one of your teammates die during battle then you have to start the level over again (although down the line you'll gain "Immortality" for some stages). The developers counter this by allowing you to keep the power ups, experience and levels you gain during the last battle. Even with this added to the game, it's still way to hard and frustrating for anyone to play to enjoy.
----------Characters / Story----------
The character's are lame, the story is even lamer (is that a word?). There really wasn't a bunch of thought put into this game, and you can mostly tell in the storylines. The story felt rushed and poorly edited into short jump cutscenes before and after a battle. Sometimes during battle you'll get a few dialog scenes and that's nice, but it doesn't really make me care about any of the characters at all. Most of the story just doesn't make sense at all. ----------Graphics----------
The graphics are a few years behind the curve, but I enjoyed the look of the character and enemy models. The characters are slightly better looking (graphically, not artistically) than Timesplitters 2. The environments aren't very big and there's only 19 chapters, so it's not a big game at all. The explosions are pretty weak and there's really nothing to exciting about attacks. You can destroy just about anything in the game though. Not the most exciting game in terms of graphics.
----------Sound----------
The character's are all voiced out in dialog scenes and even have a few lines in battle. The voice actors are all English and takes a bit of time to get use to. The biggest problem I had with the voices is they're poorly acted. The production quality of the voices are substandard, because you can't even hear them have of the time, either the actor mummbles the lines or the sound is quiet to the point of mute. The music is generic "heavy metal" guitar riffs and otehr wise boring generic sounding tracks scattered across the game. The music changes when the enemies have their turns, so I guess that's about the best thing I can say about that. Otherwise, the music is pretty bad.
----------World Map----------
The game flows in chapters in a linear fashion, there's no turning back or anything at all, so go with the flow. The chapters just feature one stage and that's it (with one exception). The stages start your characters in a pre-determined part of the map, with the enemies on the other side of it then you duke it out. ----------Time to Complete Game----------
There's no time given after completion or during the game. My guess is about a 20-30 hour game.