Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter

"A simply terrible "flight" game"

As a Star Wars game I was really hoping for the best, but was incredibly disapointed.

GRAPHICS
The graphics are mundane, bland have few textures and are generally just boring. The game is clean however; and the ships are modeled decently. It's not the objects themselves that are so bad it's that the environment is just empty. One of the land based mission consists of a uniformly brown surface, 6 identical shield bunkers a few turrets and then the shield generator--that's it. Then there are the space missions. These are naturally emptier, but in a game like Colony Wars there's asteroids, stars, wormholes, and dust particles flying by. Here we have a generic starmap pasted in the background. Overall, the graphics aren't ugly but they are certainly unimpressive.

GAMEPLAY
Of course the meat of the game lies in gameplay. Unfortunately that is the game's weakest point. From the title or perhaps screenshots I made the assumption that this was a flight game. Silly me. Actually the game is a very simple point the cursor and shoot type of affair. The game has a zoom button that allows you to zoom in on enemy craft. This is a cool feature, but one that in any flight game would have limited uses since flying is oh, fairly important to dogfighting. In this game however a good 90% of the time you're firing you have zoomed in on the craft. This is essential since both ships (and the bonus ships as well) move about as well as an elephant in a lake of molasses. Throw into the mix that accelerating cause the ship to quake making aiming impossible (think sniping in MGS) and you can see why the zoom feature is a necessity. Finally there are the missions. These usually consist of protecting something. This is necessary because the flight characteristics of your ship make avoiding fire impossible. To compensate for that the enemy AI is horrible and there need to be 10-15 fighters coming specifically after you before you're in danger. This makes most ''destroy'' missions painfully easy. However, this game is not actually that easy. For one thing capital ships can make mincemeat out of you in a matter of seconds. (Solution: stay back a little bit and hold the fire button for oh a good 30 seconds without moving *yawn*) Then if you have been trying to complete mission objectives and have been ignoring fighters they will build up to the point of actually causing danger. At this point it's over since even if you're near full strength it is impossible to avoid them and picking them off one by one at this point isn't fast enough. Finally there are the special weapons. One of the ships has force powers and the other simply has physical special weapons. The weapons are rather varied and add to (perhaps are) the ''gameplay.'' Though it annoys me that the jedi can slow down time, cause huge explosions etc. since we never see Vader do that. But of course with all the books and games, comics etc. (oh yeah, and movies) on SW there is hardly any continuity in the universe. The controls themselves are pretty simple (point, shoot), but the targeting system is a bit unwieldy since it targets the last craft to attack you when you're generally looking for a craft related to the mission objective not a fighter or gun turret.

STORY
I would like to be able to comment on the story, but frankly after the intro and the first mission I was so bored I skipped past the rest of the cutscenes.

OVERALL
Lucusarts has managed to develop some of the better licensed games in the past. However, this game takes such a good concept as controlling starfighters and utterly ruins it. It's enough to make one break down in tears.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/19/02, Updated 03/19/02