Combat Tactics

Combat in Revenge of the Sith is a mostly lightsaber-based affair, with a few Force powers thrown in to spice matters up a bit. Still, though, it's live by the sword, die by the sword, so far as most of the more difficult fights go, especially the lightsaber duels. You're going to need to get to know your combos and special moves if you want to succeed in the game. This chapter is intended to give you a few basic tips for succeeding in the game, but keep in mind that there's no real substitute for practice; if you want to be a master duelist, then you'll probably just have to keep trying to beat some of the Jedi opponents that you'll face. You can repeat missions as often as you like, so feel free to try missions as many times as you like until you get good at your appointed task.

Exploiting Your Skill Meter

If you want to increase your Force skills quickly, then you'll need to take advantage of the skill meter and attempt to kill as many enemies as possible while maintaining a high level of skill. Your skill meter (located near the portrait of your character in the lower-left corner of the screen) will rise as you land more blows on enemies, and drop as you take hits, or over time if you stay out of combat. Getting it up and keeping it up can be difficult, but doing so will net you much more experience than you normally would.

The number one key to getting your skill meter up is to block. In most cases, you're going to want to just keep your block up at all times. This will make it easier for you to deflect blaster shots, although enemies that fire rapidly, such as super battle droids, droidekas, and turrets, will still penetrate your block and sap your skill meter anyway; there's generally not much you can really do about this, save attempt to guard and rotate your right analog stick to reflect their shots back at them, if you have enough Force to do so. Some enemies also have attacks that penetrate your block, such as flame troopers, missile troopers, and Grapple Droids, so you'll need to adapt your strategy to the situation. We found that when dealing with these guys, it's best to just lay up off the block and go crazy with attacks.

You can get Masterful and higher-skill kills on Jedi opponents, if you're good; you will gain extra experience from doing so.

Note that the kind of attack you perform will affect how much skill you gain when it hits. It seems like strong attacks are noticeably more skillful than light attacks; we didn't use critical attacks often enough to really get a sense for how much they added to your meter. Even if your attack doesn't deal damage - for instance, if it reflects off your opponent's lightsaber or electrical shield - you'll still gain the benefits of the skill you would've gained for it. For this reason, using strong attacks against enemies that can block your lightsaber blows, like Grapple Droids, is a great way to get your skill meter up. Unfortunately, even if you block an incoming lightsaber blow, it still registers as a hit, so you'll take a penalty to your skill meter when this occurs.

There are four zones on the skill meter. The first is the Fair zone; when you kill an enemy while you're in this zone, you'll get 100% of the experience from the kill. The second zone is the Good zone; kills here yield 150% experience. Third is the Impressive zone, which gets you 200% experience. Lastly, we have the Masterful rank, which nets you 300% experience for each kill. Unfortunately, your Masterful rank will only last for around 20 seconds, at the end of which you'll be wiped of your entire skill meter and will have to work your way back up from the bottom. This leads to some strange gameplay choices at times, when you want to save your Masterful kill for an upcoming powerful enemy; you may have to let people hit you when you're at the Impressive rank to prevent yourself from going into Masterful too early.

Rasheed Wallace, Jedi Master

Undoubtedly your most powerful ability in the game is your blocking ability. While Anakin looks as though he's about to join a contortionist's guild when he blocks, your ability to repel incoming blaster fire and lightsaber blows is going to be critical to your success. Even when you do block, you'll still take damage from blows that come from behind or from an abundance of firepower, but blocking will mitigate the damage taken somewhat. It's especially important to block during Jedi Duels, when your foes will usually be quite fast and furious with their attacks. You can still attack with the block button depressed, mind you; you just won't be able to perform certain kind of attacks, such as dashes.

Beyond just blocking, though, we'll be honest and say that we managed to get through the entire game by just mashing on the light and strong attack buttons in random patterns. There are a number of bona fide combinations you can put together, if you want to learn them, and you may find it useful to do so when dealing with enemy Jedi, but you can still succeed in the game with nothing but the block button and a minimum amount of skill.

Force Powers

Force Stun

Force Stun allows you to lock enemies in place at low levels; if you depress the button longer, then you'll be able to either stun an enemy temporarily, until a few seconds pass or until you hit him with a weapon, or use a Jedi mind trick on them, which will force them to fight for you for a few seconds. The former is mostly used on strong-minded opponents, i.e. Jedi, and enemies without brains, like droids, while the latter ability will only be usable on weak-minded opponents like clone Troopers. After Anakin falls to the Dark Side, his Stun ability will be replaced with Force Lightning, which does direct damage to opponents.

Speaking personally, we rarely used either Force Stun or Lightning. The benefits of converting enemies to your side are marginal when compared to actually killing them, and Lightning drains your Force rather quickly, when you can usually just as easily kill an enemy with your lightsaber. Both abilities are usually blocked by your opponents in lightsaber duels, so although pure stunning them can be useful, especially to make yourself some time to heal, it's not a critical skill to have.

Saber Throw

Saber throwing is only a marginally useful technique in Episode III, and one that you probably won't need to upgrade at all unless you really want to. The main problem with it is that you can't defend yourself from incoming blaster fire while your saber's out, meaning that you'll take more damage from nearby enemies, and therefore lose some of your Skill meter. It takes a while for your saber to travel to your enemies and back to you, as well, so any enemy that decides he wants to shoot you will have a free shot.

When you've got to slice a distant conduit, there's nothing as handy as Saber Throw.

Saber Throw will still be useful for slicing conduits that you can't reach, but most enemies can be attacked at close range with your saber if you just run up to them, making your saber throw a somewhat useless ability in those situations. It'll also be blocked almost 100% of the time when facing off against Jedi.

Force Grasp

Force Grasp allows you to pick up enemies and objects and throw them at each other. This is a fairly full-featured power, even at level one, but upgrading it seems to make it harder for living creatures to resist your Grasp power. You'll still have a hard time flinging around Jedi, but you'll have a lot of fun picking up droids and troopers and flinging them off into the void or the lava or the cliffside, or what have you.

Perhaps a better use for Force Grasp is to pick up the many haphazardly-placed explosives around the game's levels and throwing them into enemies. You can often pick off one or two enemies with these barrels, and you'll often find a few of them, or some kind of rocks or other manipulable objects scattered throughout the dueling levels, as well, which you can likewise use to pound through enemy blocks.

Force Push

Push is a useful form of crowd control. When you use a Push attack, you'll send out a blue bolt of force that will knock over any enemies in its path. At higher levels, this can easily knock down multiple foes at once; it's also useful for throwing enemies off of cliffs and railings when they're between you and the edge of a platform, resulting in multiple quick kills. It isn't quite as useful when used against Jedi foes, unless you can hit them with it while they're attacking, but even then, just knocking them down isn't going to be a good use of your Force energy in duels, as they'll usually be able to pop right back up and get back on your case.

Push does do a bit of damage, but not enough to really hurt anything above the level of a normal trooper or battle droid.

Force Heal

This should probably be the first skill you want to upgrade and max out, as it's by far the one you'll need the most during most Jedi duels, which are going to be the most challenging parts of the game. Increasing your Force Heal power will let you heal yourself more quickly and more efficiently, which is drastically important in duels, where you'll have to work in quick heals while also attempting to fend off an aggressive opponent. Since you'll only have a couple seconds at a time to heal yourself in duels, the speed at which you can perform this move will greatly affect your survivability in mano-a-mano fights, at least if you play hard and fast like we do.