STAR WARS – Jedi Power Battles

Playstation Action Game

Review by Jonathan Hicks

Level 1. Hack and slash. Hack and slash. Force attack! Leap! Oh, hang on, let’s do it again with a friend! That’s that level over, what’s next?

Level 2. Hack and slash. Hack and... hold on a second, I’ve just been doing this in the first level. The backdrops are different, but... nah, something has to change soon.

Hack and slash. Hack and slash. I’ll give it a few more minutes.

Hack and slash. Oh, for freck’s sake...

The game does exactly what it says on the cover of the disc. Jedi Power Battles. You’re a Jedi, you have a special Power and you get into Battles. There can be no denying that the title is an accurate depiction of the game.

Unfortunately, that’s just about it. But I’m not going to be totally negative about it, it does have plenty of nice features. For one, it’s very easy on the eye. The graphics are well rendered and are very functional. The sound is, as with most Lucasfilm games, excellent and the music well placed. You can play as Obi-wan, Qui-gon, Mace Windu, Plo Kloon and other Jedis from the council (I would have loved to have played Yoda!) and you can multiplay so that you can defeat the enemy with friends in tow. There’s no doubt that the look and feel of the game is very Star Wars.

It’s just the fact that the game is so fundamentally limited that makes it an uninteresting experience. I’m sure that most Star Wars Jedi fans will get a real buzz out of jumping about with a blade but, unfortunately, I expect something a little less narrow than that. The good thing about the Episode 1 adventure game was that you could do other things than simply beat the hell out of everything around you. The good thing about the fighter games is that you have more or less complete control over your environment but this is just a simple case of pressing the attack button and heading for the nearest foe, defeating them with a chop, a slash or a deflection. There is very little tactical or exploratory gameplay. It looks good, to be sure, and the locations are well laid out and pretty but simply playing the game for this reason can’t be a good thing.

Maybe I’ve missed the point. Maybe there is another angle to this game that makes it a wonderful experience and I approached it in the wrong frame of mind. Nevertheless, I can’t figure out why I wasn’t impressed when there was so much telling me that I should be.