A bizarre but solid Star Wars offering with just a couple minor problems.
User Rating: 7.5 | Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles PS
Jedi Power Battles for Playstation 1? What a bizarre little offering! This game, I thought, was actually really well done for the most part. The premise of the game is that you take one of the 5 playable characters (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Mace Windu, Adi Gallia & Plo Koon) through 10 levels that span the events of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Some of the levels are right out of the movie, some are made new for the game. As you progress through the levels you earn points that you can use to upgrade your Health & Force abilities. The gameplay was bang on, there was only one little thing I thought was poor, which was the lightsaber blocking technique. Blocking blaster bolts is really fun and easy once you master the technique, but when the block button is held down the character can’t move, he/she is stuck in place! So, if a bunch of enemies have you pinned down with blaster fire, you are stuck and there is nothing you can do! You have to try to jump or run to get out of it, but most of the time you are going to take some damage. That was frustrating but it wasn’t a deal breaker. The only other problems I found with this game was that it was a bit choppy in some spots, but not too often, and sometimes the camera operation was way off! For the most part the camera was great, always giving you the best view and making things obvious. However, during a lot of the jumping sequences (and there were a LOT of jumping sequences, very HARD jumping sequences) the camera would set to some bizarre angle where you wouldn’t know to what or where you were jumping! But, with experience and experimentation the levels become clear and progress does happen. As for the levels themselves, for the most part it’s just your character running and jumping his/her way through a few different environments while taking out boat loads of enemies. However, they really throw in some wonderful curveballs here and there! In one of the earlier levels you have to rescue at least 7 handmaidens during the level, which was a nice little side bar. Near the end of another level you get to hop in to an AAT and blow the living crap out of any droid that moves! On another level you have to rescue 5 pilots as one of the main objectives. But the best one is the level that consists entirely of your character riding a STAP through the streets of Theed, nuking all droids that choose to get in the way! As I said, this was a really weird but cool game. As you beat the game, each character you beat it with unlocks certain things, either a special bonus level or bonus character. However, there are a couple levels in the game, specifically levels 6 & 10, that make you never want to play this game again! Not because it’s bad, but because those levels are so incredibly hard, especially level 6. This level took place on the rooftops of Coruscant. It was so unbelievably long and hard, with an INSANE amount of jumping, I felt blessed to beat it. I think it may have happened out of sheer luck, I don’t know if I could go back and do it again. For this level alone I will probably never beat this game with another character. But don’t let that dissuade you! Jedi Power Battles is a solid offering with just a couple little glitches. I would recommend this game to any Star Wars fan.
