"The music of this game is great."

After watching the Star Wars saga, being given the chance to take a lightsaber and fight the Federation's droids in Naboo is everyone's dream. Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles was that, a great opportunity of becoming part of the movie.

Lies. All lies. This game's quality is so disappointing that any promotion from its creators should have been considered misinformation. The title of this review mentions the only good aspect of this game, the music. I like to only name positive things in my titles, and I really had to stick to the current title.
I'll pass to explain why this game is so disappointing, following the order one would find when playing.

When the game loads, everything starts well. The music from the movie starts playing, the menus have a futuristic design, you can choose from five apparently charismatic characters...
When the first level begins with a scrolling text and the Star Wars theme, I thought ''Oh my God, I'm so in the movie!''.

The nice experiences end there. After all the nice introduction, the player has to face the tough moment of looking at the game's graphics. About the characters, I have to say that you can't see a single polygon in them. Because they are so small, static and pixelated that not only there is no polygon visible, but I still suspect that they might be sprites.
The sceneries aren't that bad, Naboo's city and palace are beautiful to look at and the first level is well done... But, playing through this game always gives me the feeling of looking at cardboard locations. Everything seems strongly attached to the ground, entirely solid and completely undestroyable. While one would expect buildings and airships to have these characteristics, things like sand, bushes, water or grass are supposed to experience some kind of molecular reaction when said airships or say, an army of droids walk over them. Or, in this particular game, into or through them.

The second thing that greets the player is the sound. I really think that the sound effects in this game are very good. The three of them. These three noises are the laser shot, and the lightsaber's buzzing and swinging. Curiously enough, these effects are the same found in the movie. Which, initially, is a good thing, a nice detail. Later, though, it's clear that they took them from the movie for the sake of your sanity: the rest of the sound effects (hardly ever heard, sometimes because they're too low or short, sometimes because there are none) are very artificial, so at least what you are constantly hearing is good. When I hear a noise that I don't identify as one of the aforementioned three, I can't help imagining a guy doing that sound effect in his house with a vacuum cleaner, while recording it on a cassette. But don't worry -when your ears are given a change, you'll be so delighted by the surprise that you probably won't mind the quality.

This is the surface. Then it's the gameplay, when the already hesitating player has located his character's sprite and starts trying his/her controller. There are two kind of attacks: horizontal and vertical; a button for jumping, another one for blocking and then the Force button.

This is a fighting game, basically, so let's go with the fighting thing. There are several combos that you can perform... maybe I should say combos that you can try to perform, because the game requires that you press the buttons one by one, only once each and in a paused pace. Maybe it's because I don't have the peace of mind of a Jedi, but I definitely can't do things with such cold-blood in the middle of a fight. I can concentrate in more calm situations, but then what's the need of it?
Another rather irritating thing about the fighting in Jedi Power Battles is that your lightsaber is not such. Maybe because it's made by two crossed sprites, it seems to have lost 90% of its power. We are shown in the movies that these weapons can cut through anything, while in this game even the fat, soft and green aliens are able to block it with their bare hands. And, mind you, getting to weild a lightsaber only to see regular droids resist even four hits of it is highly frustrating. Have you seen Episode I? I could beat a droid throwing one of my shoes! They really can't expect me to stay nice after seeing a flaccid-headed alien standing alive after half a dozen blows...
What I did like was the blocking system, that allows you to deflect lasers shot at you back to the enemy. This is by far the best movie-game parallelism, and killing an enemy sending back his own shot IS as satisfying as it may seem.
The Force is nothing special, really. Each character has three Force attacks: one is useful, one is good looking and the third one is a waste of time. The exception could be Adi Gallia, whose Force abilities are less useful than staring menacingly at the enemy.

Another completely different part of this game is jumping. I really can't imagine why, but half of this game is fighting and the other half is jumping. I guess they took it from the different Star Wars movies, where the characters are a little fond on falling through endless tubes... Because that's what your character will do almost as often as fighting and jumping: falling to his/her death. While watching a character fall into the darkness is a good effect in a movie (and can be considered symbolic) it is not that pleasant in a videogame. Please don't think I'm too trivial, but I HAVE to comment the priceless sound effect that can be heard when you fall to your death: it sounds like a small balloon suddenly deflating after dropping a bag of flour over it (note that I am just figuring the sound, I don't have empirical evidence about this last case I mentioned). In what could it resemble a falling corpse, I do not know, but it's a very charismatic noise. On one hand, it's annoying and is contaminated by the fury one experiences when dying; on the other hand, though, it is heard so frequently, though, that the player ends up developing some sort of obscene attraction towards it, similar to the fascination towards the python that points its fangs to you. The difference would be, again, the frequency.
Really, it is that bad. The jedis can always jump the needed distance, but the camera (so obviously corrupted by the Dark Side) will always find the way to confuse distances. A platform apparently 5 feet away will happen to be 30 feet further. The camera will show you the true distance -when following your character's vertical descending trajectory. Also, being hit in the middle of a jump makes your character fall down in a straight line, invalidating any impulse you may have. I don't often jump ledges (much less be shot in the process) but I think the shot body should keep its impulse... If you have played the game -how many times did you die in Tatooine? (if you haven't -don't).

Let's imagine that, even with all these problems, the player does beat some levels. Then, in another screen and according to the number of points he/she has obtained, it's possible to get new combos, a longer lifebar, etc. The problem is that these upgrades ask for a HUGE number of points. I would also underline that word if I could. There are three possible upgrades in each level. Well, just beating the level (the aim being surviving it) you might get one of the three. Killing everything with combos, destroying all the environments (note: destroying the sceneries do give points, quite a few. To prove that the designers did make them interactive? To show that jedis do enjoy chaos after all? Who knows...), etc. you will probably get also the second one. Getting all upgrades can only be possible through some kind of mind-body-console connection that I am yet to discover. This, of course, results in the funny situation of not improving your character enough, while the levels' difficulty increases.

The player (who is beating the levels just to see if they exist, to make sure the difficulty of the game isn't there to hide lack of levels) will probably make it to level 6, Coruscant, the big city. The player will probably leave the game via destroying the console, the TV and the living room now.
A constant succession of enemies and jumps make this level almost impossible. When you manage not to fall, the enemies take you down. When you manage to avoid enemies, you end up falling in one of the hundreds of treacherous gaps of this level. I only managed to pass this level with Adi Gallia (the quick and agile but weak jedi) running from the beginning to the end. I managed to beat it at the 14th time (I started to count them after a while), but of course I got no points.

IF the player manages to beat Coruscant, he/she will be awarded with a really fun (but terribly short -life's hard and developers don't want you to get used to good things) driving level, other normal levels and then, the fight with Darth Maul.
Darth Maul... he is so cheaply hard that it's even funny. Playing this game I hated him much more than watching the movie. He has infinite Force attacks, his speed is ridiculously high (he literally moves quicker than the eye, almost teleporting I would say) and blocks everything. Yes, everything. When I managed to hit him once before dying it was a big success and probably a matter of luck. This hit-immunity doesn't work the other way though: thanks to his absurd speed and the handy block-limit the makers of the game threw in (which disables blocking after reaching the top of the bar) it is impossible to block his attacks.

That's the progress through the game; I think I was accurate enough. Now I only have to comment the co-op mode, which is identical to the single player mode but with a friend controlling a second jedi. That's why it's even worse than the single player mode: because it's identical. That means having to share the credits AND the camera -a camera that will (so cleverly!) stay between the two players instead of focusing on one. This has proven to be efficient, as it harms both players equally. When I think about the danger of making a simple jump in two player mode, I tell myself to take the lift and leave the stairs.

I hope you enjoyed this review. Even if you didn't, I'm satisfied: I managed to keep you off this game for some minutes, which I consider a good action.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/03, Updated 04/24/03