Star Wars: Demolition

"Lucas Arts is getting better..."

-Visuals 7/10-

Think Twisted Metal, and that’s what you get with Star Wars Demolition. Putting you in control of several different Star Wars characters, the vehicle designs are straight from the movies in terms of detail, and how they would move and react. Each stage is detailed based on different locations from the books and the movies and with great color quality. Special weapons are well designed, and they give off a wonderful visual display, but with all of these visual additions, you’re still left with image break up, and some stage graphical glitches that you just can’t miss.

-Audio 7/10-

Your standard Star Wars fare, you’re left with some music that seems like it’s made an appearance in every Star Wars game on the market these days. Each stage has a different music set that is tries to match the movie, but falls just shy of what it should be: Up-beat, blow up your opponent music. Sound effects match that from the movie, with laser cannon blasts, special weapon explosions and the drone of ships whizzing past you. Other sound effects are minimal, and really aren’t all that memorable to remember.

-Control 7/10-

Your basic vehicular-demolition style control. Anyone familiar with the Twisted Metal series will have no problem with the control scheme, and you’re pretty much limited to an accelerate, a firing button, and a special weapon button. Other buttons control the weapons switching and targeting systems. The main problem with the control here, is how slow the turning is while you play. While playing, you’ll find that focusing on an enemy and then trying to turn with them is exceptionally hard to do, so be prepared to lose a few times before you get the point that you have to take them out from a distance.

-Gameplay 7/10-

Again, it’s your basic vehicular-demolition far, only this time, it transplants cars for Star Wars vehicles. Fans of the Star Wars Galaxy will be pleased to find that Boba Fett makes an appearance in the game as a playable character, but when you break down the actual mechanics of the game, you’ll see that all of the characters are mismatched no matter what or who you play. Strategy is key here, in terms of finding out who is the best for certain situation and how you should use your character.

Different modes greet you here, with a Tournament mode, which is the main part of the game. This mode puts you in a tournament to the end, to try and defeat several different opponents, and ultimately unlock other characters in the process. There are terminals in this mode, which allow you to repair your ship, or re-charge your weapons bar. Droid Hunting mode is pretty fun, in where you have to take out droids that are floating around a stage in a limited amount of time, using only your laser cannons. Other modes include a Versus Death Match and a Battle feature. Both of the last two modes are two player, and can be co-operative, or one on one.

Replay value is only set with the characters you can unlock and the stages that you can uncover. Finding secret areas is near non-existant, as the game centers around blowing each other up, not so much trying to find special items. Special weapons range from the useless to the insane, and the computer AI is totally mismatched, in which the first couple of stages are easy, and the last few stages are near impossible.

-Overall 7/10-

While attempting to make this game, Lucas Arts made a small error. They used the Vigilante 8 engine which causes the game to freeze up from time to time. This can be exceptionally grim for those that are on their way to unlocking a character and only have the game freeze up on them. Other than that, and the mismatch in gameplay mechanics, you’ll see that Demolition is a Star Wars fans dream if they’re looking for a decent vehicle-demolition game to play. Anyone else looking for a game of this type, should stick with the Twisted Metal series….it’s more enjoyable.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/00, Updated 12/21/00