Often I will try to do a comparison if I have a game that is cross-platform. I didn’t even know this was cross-platform until I went to look up the date this game was released. I had bought this as part of a bulk lot from a friend back in 2016 and only just this past January did I get around to playing it. I wasn’t missing anything.
The Story
You play as one clone trooper out of a set of twins. The twins were specially cloned, and while that part is explained we don’t learn why they were given to the Old Republic’s military rather than kept at the cloning facility. We follow one twin and his relation with his brother through the Star Wars timeline starting just before Episode III and ending just after Episode VI.
The Game
You play either as your trooper on foot, in a vehicle on a locked linear course, in a vehicle where you have free maneuverability in the X and Y axis, manning the cannons of a moving ship, or manning a series of stationary cannons. On foot you can change between four character classes with different strengths and weaknesses, but you have to unlock them by progressing through the game. Your missions are usually to destroy every enemy, but also get from point A to point B along mostly linear courses while doing so and sometimes collect a certain item. You travel across multiple maps that all somehow feel like the same map and fight different enemies that all feel like the same enemy (except the bosses and AT-STs). It took me a little less than 5 hours to complete it, and when you’re done you can restart with the all the player classes still unlocked. In fact, you restart as the last player class you played as. But there isn’t much replay value here.
You may be wondering how this fits into Star Wars Battlefront, a series whose gameplay is normally multiplayer-centric and based on destroying more of your enemy’s forces than they have destroyed of yours while running around a large map. Well, that comes into play for multiplayer. This game’s multiplayer mode, which you can play solo against the computer or with friends, is more in line with the gameplay you’d expect from Star Wars Battlefront.
The graphics are somewhere between the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, and sometimes seem to exceed that slightly. I think it looks pretty good. The controls are ok, but I have some complaints (like how you aim the minigun). The sound is great, very Star Warsy. The music is awful. It’s like the same three 15 second clips repeating over and over and over and over for four hours or however long it takes you to beat the game.
My Opinion
The story mode is ok, but like all Star Wars Battlefront games multiplayer is the big draw. It was only $10-$15 when I looked while writing this, so if you and a friend or two or three have your own DS’s then it’d be fun for each of you to snatch a copy and play. Unless your graphics snobs and won’t play anything that doesn’t look like CGI from a Marvel movie, then you can forget it because despite fun gameplay the graphics are like late 90s consoles.
C-Gaymer 