Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes

Cloned

The Star Wars franchise is very interested in your wallet, and with the approaching holiday season comes a deep annual scraping of its lucrative barrels. This year's fare is the lengthily titled Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes, which has Krome Studios translating the poorly-received 3D animated children's series into a lukewarm 3D action platformer.

The game is ostentatiously aimed at children, but this feels like an excuse for cutting corners. As is the trend with licensed games, Republic Heroes is coarse around the edges. The engine can't ever quite manage what's being asked of it, and the game clearly has great difficulty in displaying seamless transitions. Gameplay gets away with it, whooshing from scene to scene with obtuse Lucas-esque wipes, but the game's many cut-scenes stumble on-screen after noticeably awkward pauses. There's even occasional flicker of the game's many characters, unposed, hanging with their arms outstretched like the lifeless CG constructs they are. Another run through QA wouldn't have hurt.

If Krome had tested the game some more, they'd probably have also realised that their platforming sections are made aggravating by fiddly, clunky controls. Yoda - who else? - instructs the player through the tutorial that a Jedi will land firm on any surface, as if the entire world were midichlorian-soaked patches of Velcro. But his point feels a bit hollow after falling off the four-hundredth platform. There's an indefinable inconsistency to the game, with some platforms requiring a single jump and other, identical platforms, requiring the use of a double jump - pick wrong and plummet to your death. Then there are the bits where you'll fail to make a jump from earlier despite pressing the exact same buttons. You're always fighting against the game.

Taking inspiration from the beloved Lego series of videogames, death simply causes characters to re-materialise a couple of seconds later. Presumably this is intended for the kids, but ultimately the function becomes the only way to temper frustrations after falling down yet another bottomless pit. It also makes the game so easy that trudging through its forty levels feels like a homogenous chore. LEGO Star Wars gets away with it by charmingly recreating iconic movie moments with an inimitable twang of British humour, but Republic Heroes falls flat.

Some desperately needed variety comes from playing as both Jedi and Clone Troopers. There are plenty of familiar faces to control, such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu etc. Jedi controls are simplistic, but that's presumably because the fighting system lacks any depth. Pressing X swings the lightsaber, with accompanying vroom, vwooosh and sshwing noises, and attacks can be turned into combos with casual mashing. The deadly glowsticks can be thrown by holding the left trigger before attacking, which nicely dispatches pretty much anything nearby. But that's about it. The limited combat options are further simplified by the game's greatest offensive move: Force Push. Hold down Y and watch as a concentrated blast of the force usually causes every droid on the screen to explode. If anything survives, a second blast will likely finish them off. Repeat until end credits.

Jedi's can, if they fancy it, jack droids by double jumping near them, and are then able to dispatch even the most menacing of droids with a single tap of Y. This makes long, drawn-out lightsaber confrontations with enemies wholly unnecessary, and puts supposedly menacing enemies on the same level as common fodder. It's also possible to control the droids and turn their offensive capabilities back on the enemy - often useful but rarely necessary, unless the game demands it to clear an obstruction. Finally, because everyone loves a bit of atmosphere-destroying whimsy, pressing B will cause any droids on screen to burst into a fit of disco fever. 70s lighting and all.

Clone Troopers, however, generally offer a bit more excitement. Here the game becomes akin to a twin-stick shooter (although a more rigid, pull-the-right-trigger-to-fire mode is available) where you manoeuvre to and from dug-in cover spots to blast droids, the only forms of enemy in the game, and assist the Jedi squad in their desperately important plans to save the universe from Count Dooku and whatever Doomsday weapon he's cooked up this year. Firing into the screen is as fiddly as you'd expect, but the game tends to take over and guide the laser zaps to the correct target. Scattered around levels are also a typical assortment of secondary weapons - grenades, rocket launchers and mini guns - that can be used when in a pinch. Which is pretty much never: even the weak, flimsy Clone Troopers are more than capable of killing everything in sight.

Spanning forty levels, at least there's plenty to do. Scattered around the mass are even some decent bits, such as when an army of droids march over a distant hillside or scaling a cliff-face by jumping across vehicles. The majority, however, is navigating over gray pipes, thin bits of rock and laser-projected floors. It's apparent that the game was developed with limited resources and a strict time frame. Krome seem to be trying their best to inject life into a dreary project, but they rarely manage it in ways less blatant than having a chirping R2-D2 lead a procession in celebration of finishing a level. It's R2-D2, everyone! Celebrate!

There's support for local co-op, useful for parents playing along with their little ones, including some 'friendly competition' mini-games interspersed in each level, which are usually about killing as many droids as you can within a time limit. There's also plenty of unlockables, including masks of cult characters such as Admiral Ackbar and Greedo. Darth Vader's there, provided you collect all of the vaguely-hidden artefacts hidden within the game, but almost everything else is unlocked by exchanging points gathered from stages and killing droids.

Quibbles and gripes aside it's safe to say Star Wars fans have had to often put up with worse, with last year's abysmal Lightsaber Duels immediately springing to mind. The biggest flaw of Republic Heroes, other than its generally unlikable source material, is that it feels unfinished. As a result, poor execution mars what could have been a likable child-orientated platformer. The kids, and their parents, will be more than happy to stick with Lego Star Wars.

55%

By Martin Gaston