The game that marks the beginning of the clone wars. It all starts at the end of Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.
There are 16 missions in the game and has 3 difficulty settings. Planets you'll be on include Geonosis, Kashyyk, Hoth, and other planets spread across the galaxy. Mace Windu, Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi are auto assigned in each of the levels.
However, only occasionally you'll actually play as a Jedi on foot with a lightsaber. Only Windu and Skywalker will be playable on foot. This is actually for the better since the way the Jedi are shown here are absolutely terrible. Neither of them look good. The running is so cheesy it's funny. All they have is force push and saber throw. The movement is so clunky and the controls are played just like tanks. The Jedi can't even jump. From what I've seen, the abilities of the Jedi here are more clunky and lousy than other Star Wars game I've ever come across. It's a good thing there are only a few levels with brief amount of time on foot.
The large majority of the game is about vehicle infantry. A variety of ground vehicles will be available and you'll be in them in every level. There are plenty of enemy vehicles, turrets, spider walkers, tanks and star ships to destroy along the way. Some missions have end of the level bosses, and they are rather challenging and require strategy. Aside there is a space vehicle called the landing cruiser. This is my favorite vehicle. It has rockets and can fire four laser turrets all at the same time.
For a while, your shield will protect you. Afterwards, you'll take damage and will explode if you don't collect health packs found in each of the levels. Most vehicles contain rockets to blow up the baddies. They're more powerful than lasers, which by the way have infinite fire power and don't ever overheat, and may take some thinking of when you want to use them. One walker has a temporary invincible shield with no rockets but has more fire power than a tank. A couple missions even have speeder bikes to race around with.
While these vehicles are fun to cruise around in and enemies are in every direction, there is a large problem. The physics of the vehicles are very inaccurate and unrealistic . You could ram into several things at once at full speed and not take any damage while your shields are down. Even the strafing feels awkward. With both Jedi and vehicles you can invert 1st person and 3rd person point of view.
The graphics aren't anything spectacular but do look good. Some of the video footage looks great. Some frame rate issues are encountered every now and then, and the textures are average. The Jedi do not look that good unless in video footage. Explosions are forgettable, but there sure are a lot of them.
Every Star Wars game has at least one thing in common: John Williams music. It never gets old and always appropriate for battle scenes. The constant laser fire can get really annoying and it even banged in my head a couple times. The voices casted are clearly not the same as from the movies.
16 missions are in the game. There are three modes of difficulty. Each mission has 3-4 side quest missions that can be achieved. My first time playing through on Normal difficulty and ignoring the bonus mission objectives took me under 10 hours to beat. Accomplishing these objectives will earn you bonus stages and characters for its multiplayer mode. You'll most likely want to go back and complete these side quests.
Star Wars Clone Wars offers four different modes of gameplay. There's regular 4 player/team battle mode in which everyone duels it out. Control mode is not much fun. You have to remain inside the circle alone for a certain amount of time and try to knock off the other players. Academy can be played with tanks or with Jedi. Enemies will spawn in all different directions and you fight them all to get to the next round.
My most favorite mode is Conquest. In Conquest, each side will have a base and a few outposts. You can build up to 4 towers and spawn 2 ally vehicles with each outpost. Both sides of the map will have 3-5 outposts. So to win you have to penetrate the towers and the tanks firing at you to attempt to capture each other's outposts and going for the base. A player who is equally as good as you can make this really intense and require strong strategic ideas to win. So overall, your left with some good multiplayer and multiple options.
This is overall good game that made a good attempt to reach excellence (besides the Jedi part) for the fun factor. Star Wars fans should own this game unless you happen to have no interest in the beginning of the clone wars.