Well, the movie Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is finally out.
People are crowding the cinemas with their valiantly fought for
tickets, waving it in front of the cashiers face and smugly thinking
of how they will awe their deprived friends the next day in their
mad rantings about the film. Along with the film, there are the two
games that coincide with the movies release: "Star Wars: Pod
Racer" and "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" (which is
appropriately named just like the movie so you have to add "The
Game" when ever you talk about it, making it an awfully long
word to say). Even when I shorten this to SWTPMTG, it's more like
the sound a drunken Bee would make, therefore I will refer to it as
SWMenace to avoid confusion with drunken bees.
The storyline…well, as some of you may have guessed from the
start, the game is based entirely on the movie "The Phantom
Menace". Now, I have not seen the movie myself, but I can safely
tell you that playing this game shouldn't have spoiled it for me one
little bit. Any of the story they might have tried to implement from
the movie must have fallen into a pit somewhere. You will
recognize all the characters from the movie, and I bet this game's
levels are all based on the movie, but it's nothing special.
In SWMenace, the camera is placed a bit like Tomb Raider except
that it's a bit higher. The good thing is that you cannot have your
arse in the way of your view, but the bad thing is this seriously
limits the distance you can view. The graphics engine leaves
something to be desired, and it looks like a rather quick
programming job. The only textures you see in the beginning are
flat and gray, then you get textures with some different colorrs.
Overall, the environments look rather shoddy and quickly done.
The second mission is a perfect example where you are
wandering around in, what feels like, a forest made out of carton
clippings. Shrubberies are presented as two flat bitmaps with leafy
colors intersecting each other and forming a "X". Trees look even
worse! They look like long, brown poles with flat, leafy-colored
bitmaps attached horizontally. I must admit, the graphics do start
looking better when you are at the Queen's castle. The level
designers have managed to make it quite colorful using the limited
technology available.
The models in the game look average; the lanky, pathetically
meek-looking blaster-wielding droids are there from the movie in
large numbers along with the much better looking, big,
tough-looking droids that roll along the ground, "deploy" with a
green shield and fire two double laser cannons. The colored
lighting effects are there, although, apart from the lasers and your
lightsaber, you don't see much of the colored lightning. The
explosions are shocking, really shocking. In the first mission, as
you walk outside through an air duct, you see this really big space
ship "explode". I lack the words to try and describe why it looks so
shocking, but you will have to take my word for it. The speed of
the game is perfect, of course, this might be due to my 450Mhz PC
with a TNT card, but I think any average PC should easily be able
to handle this game(although a 3D Card is required). The only
really bad thing I noticed about the speed is when two or three
robots explode on your screen simultaneously the game crawls to
a snails pace displaying all those horribly drawn explosions on
your screen, which I would rather not see anyway.
All the characters in SWMenace have proper speech audio, and
they are all nicely done. The fact that there is no way to skip the
speech is rather irritating, as Anakin, for example, keeps yapping
on about his pod racer as soon as you step near him, and you have
to wait for him to stop blubbering on so you can talk to him.
Nothing to mention about the sound effects really, just the usual
array of little sounds and nothing special.
The Menu is nicely done with each of the four main options
showing a small video clip from the film, although if you haven't
seen the film yet you should close your eyes when looking at the
menu, or you'll spoil it. The controls are rather simple and consist
of moving about, rolling, jumping, and using the "push" force. Now
I had hoped that you would be able to use the force like in "Jedi
Knight", but I was sadly disappointed. The only force you can use
is the "push" force, which had always been one of the more
useless ones in Jedi Knight. This force is a bit more spicy in
SWMenace, but still rather useless. Your trusty lightsaber is there,
but the array of moves available with it is rather disappointing. All
you can do is hold forward, left, right or back while waving your
sparkly stick about. Holding left or right will make you do a
roundhouse-like move (which is rather useless unless you want to
turn 90 degrees away from your enemy). Holding back just waves it
from left to right, which is useful for deflecting shots, but is also
annoying because it merely prolongs the fight while you
backpaddle the whole way and cannot block 100% of the incoming
lasers anyway. All that's really left is to just walk forward and hack.
You also get your standard-issue blaster, which is a very useful
blaster with a lot of punch, and I find it far more effective than the
next weapon, which is similar to a machine gun that fires woosy
little toothpicks at the enemy. There is also a Rocket Launcher,
which is rather average, and you're forced to chug through the
inevitable explosions it makes. Then you get this lovely little thing
called a Thermal Detonator. This little baby makes one really big
bang, but of course it's extremely rare, and sadly one of these
things won't kill a tank. Then there's a small collection of stun
grenades which are rather useless as they just stun the enemy for
a bit.
Starting out, you play Obi-Wan Kanobi. Your mission is to escape
from some sort of base (remember, I haven't seen the movie so I
don't know the names of these places). Your master, Qui-Gon Jinn,
is there to help you along with those really useful earth shattering
suggestions such as, "This door is closed, there must be a switch
nearby". He doesn't really help you fight, instead he just stands
there and waves his little sparkly stick about, deflecting shots. It's
up to you to run in and cut up the enemies. After some hacking
and pressing buttons you'll get onto the next level, the Swamp.
There is more hacking and slashing in this level, and it's relatively
easy. The next mission has you "infiltrate" (hack up all and sunder)
the queens castle to protect her. On the way you meet some small
groups of troops fighting the droids, but they don't actually help
you or anything. After you complete this you have to escort the
princess back to her ship, now the game is a little bit different in
that you have a useless woman running behind you who gets
herself killed if you wander off to far without her, and just hits the
deck as soon as she gets shot at. If she could at least use some
blaster or put herself to some use ,instead of being such an
annoying little nuisance who gets herself stuck on every little
outcropping of wall, it might be a bit more fun. Other than that it's
exactly the same as before, except that near the end of this
mission the difficulty curve is feeling confident and makes an
exponential leap for the moon. Then they start throwing all these
big droids with the dual laser cannons and green shields at you,
having just acquired the rocket launcher it is perhaps a bit easier
to deal with them. Without a rocket launcher you can forget about
it, unless you exploit this "feature" where if you're positioned
properly you can barely see the droid and fire at him, but the droid
will not fire back. After this mission is completed you continue on
to a desert world where, at first, you have to fight a small group of
those monk monster dudes from the original Star Wars. Then
something completely different happens. You enter a city…and
you don't shoot anybody. That's right, after wandering around all
the levels, with your fingers hovering a millimeter above the fire
key, there is actually a lull in the action. Congratulating myself for
pushing through this far, I curiously walk into the city and start
exploring. You walk into the city and find a T-14 engine for your
damaged space ship, and, as I started talking to some people, I
had this feeling in the back of my mind screaming
"Noooooooooooo!". You see, all you need is a T-14 but nonono, it's
not as simple as that. You have to talk to this pompous oversized
butterfly who declares that your going to need a lot of money to
pay for one, perhaps betting on the pod racing. Sounds simple
enough. The young boy named Anakin tells you about his
revolutionary engine that will make his podracer the fastest ever,
(he says that about 50 million times to try and get the point across)
and suggests you bet on him. His podracer is broken though, and
you need to find *two* parts to fix it. Just two. That's it. Two.
Nothing could have prepared me for the ultimately devastating,
irritating and frustrating search for these two parts that took place
afterwards. Talking to people all around the city where everybody
is willing to trade this for that. Slamming the space bar irritably at
every person I met in the search for people who will interact, and
perhaps help, I failed to turn up much. There seem to be only
about 4 people who will talk to you at all and will trade with you,
never asking for parts that you actually have. After wasting away
the best of my evening, I managed to get *one* of the parts Anakin
needs. This "adventurous" bit the developers plugged in is just
executed in the most abhorid manner possible and consumes
hours of time without giving any enjoyment in return.
Upon first seeing this game I thought of it as a blatant cash in, but,
upon some further playing, I found this was not so. The Graphics
engine may be a rather quick put-together job, but the actual
gameplay can be quite fun (up until you meet the "adventurous"
bit). Luckily, the action picks up again afterwards and you'll
happily be hacking away again at those lanky tin cans. I have to
end this with a note to the level designers that they have done a
lovely job and saved this game from doom.
Highs:
The action missions are quite enjoyable
Its Star Wars, you can't help but enjoy it a bit more because of
that
Level Designers did an excellent job on saving this game from
being a disappointment