Nice enough, but frantic tapping does not make something great.
On the positive side of things, the story and graphics are great, as is the sound design. I wouldn't say it's super compelling or anything and it's surely not going to give you any new insights or information about the series, but it's an interesting idea and I enjoyed the cutscenes. The music and sound effects are your typical SW fare and they sound as good as anywhere else. All the voice actors from the show voice the characters in the game, which is always a welcome touch, and while the graphics are nothing mind-boggling, they are quite good for the DS and probably pushing that hardware about as far as it can go.
There is a very nice selection of characters (with Yoda surprisingly absent), and you get to pick your team prior to most missions. While the combat itself stays the same regardless of the Jedi (Jedis?) you choose, you'll get different team attacks based on your choice (think MvsC or Rival Schools). It manages to make the game a lot more interesting and replayable, as some minor changes occur depending on your selection; you'll get some dialogue variations and some small changes to the action (QTE) scenes, which is nice.
The game itself is broken into three different types of play. There are insanely easy "puzzles" that either ask you to draw a basic shape on the screen, or tap on a spinning symbol to stop it at certain intervals and "line it up". These sequences feel tacked on to me and the game could have really done well to just dump them all together. I'm sort of ok with them when they are used to break up light saber action, but on the levels where you're controlling a droid and 90% of the gameplay is clunking around and doing puzzles, they are simply a chore I'm trying to get over with as quickly as possible. Whoever thought I wanted to control C3PO in a Jedi action title should really have his or her head examined...
There are also QTEs, which I normally loathe with a passion, but they are actually kind of fun here, albeit extremely frustrating at times. Rather than just have you click a button, it shows a path on the screen that you must draw with the stylus to get the Jedi to perform a certain action. It looks cool and it's a fun little diversion from the regular battles, although it moves pretty quickly and at times seems unresponsive. Couple that with the fact that some of these sequences can take 5 minutes or so to play through and they start over if you miss one, and they can get pretty frustrating at times.
Last is the light saber battling which is typically the meat/bulk of the gameplay. This works pretty well, but it has a couple of glaring flaws. For one thing, this entire game is controlled using the stylus, which is all well and good, except that all of the visuals are also on that bottom screen. The top screen is relegated to your useless HUD and boring still photos of stars, while all the action and control is on the (smaller and typically more scratched) bottom screen.
Using this method you are obviously obscuring your view every time you interact with the game, and it goes as far as making you hold the stylus on the screen just to walk (slowly) around, often covering the entire screen with your fingers unless your go out of your way not to. These things really could have been mapped to the control pad with no issues, and the light saber battling would be great on the bottom screen if the action was on the top one.
Add to this that the battling itself is done by tapping the stylus on the screen, which seems like a blown opportunity if ever I've seen one. How about, oh I don't know, sliding the stylus in sweeping arcs, like the swings of a blade?! The "tapping" works well enough, but this could have been so much more fun if it was though out a little more.
The main problem here is that the engine is based on attacking high, medium and low, which you accomplish by tapping on the enemies head, torso or feet, respectively. Now realize, we're often talking about models that are less than an inch high at best, and often WAY smaller than that. So, the game rapidly devolves into just frantically tapping on the screen and hoping for the best. There are some marginally cool team-up attacks and such, but none of it is particularly well done or exciting. There are also "clashes" that you'll get locked into on occasion that require more frantic tapping; this isn't fun or tense, it just makes my fingers hurt. I do enjoy the light saber battles; I just wish they were executed a little better.
Now I have to bring up my biggest complaint about this game, and it's one that drives me absolutely batty. This game is just NOT a portable title. Each level probably takes a good 15 minutes or more to play through, and there are no save points of any kind. This of course means that every time you play, you must finish the level, or dump your progress and start all over again next time. Now, I don't know about the regular user of the DS, but I typically use mine in 5-10 minute stints while I'm waiting for someone or taking a smoke break or something. Taking away the ability for me to play in short bursts effectively ruins the game from my point of view. The amount of times where I'm going to sit and devote an hour of gaming to a DS title are very few and far between…
You couple the length of the levels with the load-times (some of the worst I've seen on DS), intros and exit cut-scenes (which are not skippable), and I am simply going to stop playing this game until a day where I'm stuck in bed or at the in-laws or something… Lame.