Star Wars: Uprising is a new mobile MMORPG that has ambitiously tried to bring a massive multiplayer game experience to mobile devices, while progressing the Star Wars universe story beyond Episode 6, Return Of The Jedi.

Star Wars: Uprising is published by Disney and Lucasfilm, and developed by Kabam. In the spirit of moving the series forward, Star Wars: Uprising’s story takes place after the Emperor’s death, a planetary blockage has been put up so that the surrounding planets won’t know of the Emperor’s fall in an attempt to keep control and reduce chaos. The player starts on the planet Burnin Konn, running smuggling missions for the local crime lord to earn a few credits to make ends meet until the blockade is removed.

Players can create their own character by first choosing a race, ranging from Miralan, Human, Twilek, and Zabrak, each with male and female options. You can change your hair color and style, skin color, face and tattoos, as well as choose a first and last name for your character that is separate from your account name. Speaking of accounts, you can connect through Google Play’s account options or Kabam’s sign in options to save your data server side so that it doesn’t get lost. After you get in game you can also change small features, such as hair or tattoos, to customize your character in game for free in case there is something you weren’t happy with before.

One thing that got my attention is that there are no class options in this game, instead you complete quests or buy skills to build the class you want. The latest update that has just recently come out has now added Force powers as well as Lightsabers for you to unlock and use in battle by completing the new quest series. You can watch the new trailer for the new Force Powers that I linked down below.

Star Wars Uprising also has a story with lots of dialogue that reminds me a lot of Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars The Clone Wars 3D cartoons. It can be cheesy at times, but it wouldn’t be Star Wars if it wasn’t.

The combat is simple, but it all works. All the battles happen in real time, there are no turns, loading screens, or battle stages, it all happens right then and there. You tap the screen to move around and interact with NPCs and objects like a point and click game, clicking on an enemy will attack them. Your character will continue to stand there and attack unless you tell them otherwise.

You can double tap anywhere on the screen to roll in that direction, again this applies anywhere at anytime since the game is in real time. You can use other abilities by performing different swipe motions, such as dragging your finger from your character and moving it away to use special abilities, as well as double tapping your character or an ability icon to activate other skills. You can then go into your character window to swap out your moves and gear to become more powerful, or adjust your items to match your playstyle. You can then team up with other players to complete missions, gain rewards, and progress further into the story.

Although the combat plays a lot like Star Wars The Old Republic and Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic, it also has something about it that is unique from the other two games that makes it oddly fun to play. Yes, the game and combat does get a bit repetitive after awhile and the quests are normally the same “Kill and gather” type of thing from one mission to the next, which normally take place in special instance areas, but for a mobile game that can be expected.

I linked the gameplay video trailer for the Smuggler class that you can watch down below.

I should quickly point out that all the videos in this article can be found on Kabam and Star Wars: Uprising’s official website if you would like to see more.

Graphically, the game looks a bit like Rune Scape. For mobile devices it looks nice enough to pass, but it isn’t anything that will blow your mind. The art style matches the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon, as the male characters have the classic Disney appearance with large muscular upper bodies with small skinny legs, while the female characters are more or less proportioned correctly. The music of course, is mostly John William’s Star Wars score, with a few little original songs to fill in the gap.

The items you equip onto your character all show up, ranging from hats, to weapons, to gloves, pants and shirts, so as you get stronger you can customize your character to look a bit more unique. You can also swap your Gear Set to have different loadouts for different occasions that you can switch to by the tap of a button on your character loadout screen.

A few things that I like about Star Wars: Uprising is the free to play cash shop model. The game is still new so it could go down hill quickly, but I want to mention that I played EA’s free version of Star Wars The Old Republic, and things like the chat system was locked out for players under level 10. If you wanted to chat in SWTOR you had to be a premium member and dish out money, a lot of the core gameplay options in that game were locked behind a cash shop wall, which made the game a bit frustrating since you were so limited in what you could do.

Star Wars: Uprising may not have a perfect system, but a lot of the common sense core gameplay mechanics are free. The chat is free and accessible from level one, the story mode is free, and you get one free character slot with all the races to choose from without having to buy each one.

The cash shop has items like being able to buy more credits (this could break the game, we’ll see), or buying more Chromium, which is the digital currency you obtain after you spend real life money. You will use Chromium to unlock premium content, like more character slots, which costs about 150 Chromium per slot. The game however starts you off with about 300 Chromium, so you actually can spend it to gain a total of 3 characters before you run out. You can also use your Chromium for more common gameplay elements, such as expanding your inventory bag to hold more items.

Furthermore, as a free to play MMO for mobile devices, this is probably one of the best I have played for this year. I went into this with really low expectations and was expecting an Old Republic clone with a massive cash shop wall, but I was pleasantly surprised that Star Wars: Uprising turned out to be different.

A few of the other bigger reviews for the game were a bit harsh and gave it some flack for not being original and being a bit of a let down with its repetitive quests, but you must remember that this is a mobile game. With the swarm of copy and pasted mobile card and strategy game clones that fill the app store, this was a breath of fresh air for not going down the path of a card battle system. The story, although nothing to get excited about, has just enough dialogue to give you the feel for the story, but they don’t talk and ramble on to the point you just want to click through it all because it became annoying. For the most part, I read all the dialogue as it was presented.

Most importantly, I think it captured the feel of Star Wars to keep the theme of the franchise universe without making it feel like something else. If you are a fan of Star Wars The Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels, I think you would enjoy this game a lot. I could easily see the storyline for this game fitting into both TV shows perfectly. If you are on the fence, I would say to go ahead and download it since it is free to play and there is nothing to lose except for a bit of bandwidth, but I think most Star Wars fans will enjoy it as much as I did to casually play an MMORPG on your mobile device to pass the time.

For more information you can visit the official Star Wars: Uprising website, or download the game for Android from the Google Play Store, or iTunes store for Apple iOS users.