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Star Wars Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles Review
Gavin Frankle
00/12/0000
Star Wars Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles promises two player arcade action, but does it deliver.
Do or do not. There is no try". If only LucasArts would heed the words of their most famous creation. Numerous games based on the Star Wars license have been created, and only a few like Jedi Knight have been really good. After the fairly poor initial batch of Episode 1 games, everybody had high hopes for Jedi Power Battles. Hailed as a return to the action-style gameplay of Return of the Jedi, JPB seems to give gamers exactly what they want. Fast-paced action, with plenty of Force powers and lightsabers thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, the game is sub-par in too many areas, and as such is relegated to the "just average" pile of Star Wars games.
The first thing you notice when starting the game is the fantastic musical score. Hardly suprising, seeing as how the music and sound effects are taken straight from the movie upon which it is based. John Williams' score compliments the action perfectly, and sadly, is the only part of the game that really pulls you in. The sound-effects do their job well. Each effect stays true to the movie, from lasers rebounding of a well-placed Lightsaber strike to the standard Lightsaber "swish", everything fits into it's place.
The graphics, while certainly not on par with the sound, are decent. The Jedi animations are well-done and you'll be hard-pressed not to immediately recognise every character from the movie. In all fairness, the designers obviously opted to keep the graphical flash down to a minimum in order to keep the framerates and action up, but the graphics should have been better. Backgrounds are blocky and pixelated and in the swamps of Naboo, the plant-life looks like a horrible mash of green and brown. Playstation trademarks such as blocky characters and jagged polygonal edges abound and like it or not, there were several instances of clipping in the game.
The worst part of the game is undoubtedly the control. The game requires you to fight a number of enemies on many occassions, but the sloppy, akward controls make these battles, for the most part an exercise in frustration. For starters, you cannot change direction while your character is in the middle of a combo. So if you miss your intended target, you character continues to flail wildly until the combo is finished, usually giving the enemy the chance to get a few cheap shots in. In order to remedy this problem, LucasArts included a lock-on feature, but this is unwieldly and difficult to use when faced with a group of enemies. These faults, while serious, may have been forgiven were it not for the poor collision-detection and abismal level-design. For an action game, this title features far too many jumping sequences for it's own good. These scenes, coupled with the abovementioned control and collision-detection issues make the game an exercise in frustration. Every time you die, you're transported back to your last save point. Where upon you have to fight all the enemies you just dispatched, only to die at the exact same jump you did last time. After doing one particular sequence in the game more times than I care to admit, I become so frustrated that I had to stop playing the game for fear of turning my Playstation into an UFO.
The sad part is there are sequences and touches in the game that show the designers really know what they're doing, but poor execution has left this title far behind the pack. For instance, at the end of a level you are given the opportunity to upgrade your character's health or force bar, force powers and even learn new combos(my favourite being Plo Koon's uppercut where he smacks a hapless enemy into the air). But there's just too much wrong with this game to justify anything more than a rental.
Sadly, as much as I tried to like the game, I just couldn't. I played and played and played, and everytime, just as I thought I was getting used to the akward control and frustratingly bad collision-detection, the game would do something to annoy me all over again. Admittedly, there are some cool moments in the game, but these are few and far between and unless you and a buddy(it's two-players ya know) are feeling particulary brave or masochistic, I suggest you stay in a galaxy far, far away from this one.
