Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

"Use the force, but only to get your parents to drive you to rent this game"

When I bought this game, I thought it was going to be another great side scrolling Star Wars Game, such as the original trilogy games for SNES, but it didn't live up to my expectations. Sure, it was fun, but it could have been better....

Overview

There are 11 levels that basically take you through the Movie (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, obviously), 8 side-scrolling levels and 3 Vehicle levels. There are 3 levels of difficulty: Padawan, Knight, and Master. There's no character selection. You play as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Mace Windu, depending on the level. The vehicle levels are first person, and aren't as good as the SNES vehicle levels. You control the Corusant Speeder in a chase with Zam Wesell, the Jedi Starfighter controlled by Obi-Wan as he pursues the Slave I, or a Republic Gunship in hot pursuit of Count Dooku. Too much chasing if you ask me. I thought that the vehicle levels were pretty bad. They had really fuzzy graphics, and I know the GBA could pull off better, and you could hardly see what you were doing. At least there was a password system, unlike Super Star Wars Episode 4 (SNES), where you HAD to play the game over and over again to get to the last level, but that didn't make it terrible. But, that's not the game I'm talking about right now.

Controls

The controls are pretty straight forward. Jump, Block, Attack, and of course, the Force. The limitations to the force are jump, push, and super push, but on vehicle levels you can slow down, auto-target, or become temporarily invulnerable. Your force bar will recharge if it ''runs dry'', but only enough to do a force jump. If you want to do force pushes and such, you have to collect force pick-ups. After the first level you will know the controls and have a good feel for them, unless if you change them around or something.

Graphics

As for the side-scrolling levels, the graphics follow the SNES star wars games. The character are distinguishable, and the backgrounds are three-dimensional. But, as I said before, the Vehicle levels have poor graphics. They are pixilated, they have bad coloring (mainly the Speeder Chase level), and are hard for the eyes to process. But overall the graphics weren't too bad, there were clear pictures from the movie that looked pretty good on the GBA.

Fun stuff in the game

It was short, around 1-2 hours to beat the game in one sitting, but I had some fun with it. The fun parts were the bosses, which were only Jango Fett!! and Count Dooku. In the Jango battle you have to knock him out of the sky a bunch of times while dodging gunfire from the Slave I's double cannon. Ok, it wasn't that fun, but it wasn't boring either. Unfortunately, the bosses were straight-forward as well, but they made the game a little more challenging, even on Master difficulty.

I hope that this review helps you. If you are a Hardcore Star Wars Fan, its still only worth a rental, even though the replay value isn't low. It isn't worth the $25-$30, so you can go waste your money on some other bad GBA game ;-)

--------
If you read this far, thank you for wasting precious time reading my review, but maybe I saved you a few bucks.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/23/02, Updated 12/23/02