#FF00AA

Seems like this game enjoys its hype rollercoaster. It started rather poorly with the pretty pointless tech demos and the storm trooper aerial ballet, but somehow the later news and gameplay videos had managed to turn things around. And here goes GameTrailers publishing a bunch of videos that take several points off the game’s cool factor.

First linked, an utterly abominable cutscene: the images are ugly, the voices aren’t right (the sound-alike seems to lose Vader’s voice in the middle of his sentences), and the character faces are just awful (which is a shame when they’ve been capturing the actor’s entire performances, unchanged). Second, an excerpt from a gameplay video in six short parts (if GameTrailers starts cutting their videos in pieces every time they’ve got an exclusivity, I’m gonna have to start linking to DailyMotion or something in protest) that shows a level we’d already seen, but in the hands of a regular player this time. And where it goes wrong is that I don’t feel like I’m watching a Star Wars game at all, but just some random, mediocre God of War clone.

I feel like I’ve already written about this, but didn’t come up with anything in a quick search through the archives: I’ve gotten used to the idea that, in almost all games, gunfire slowly chips away at your lifebar instead of doing any kind of real damage, but that just doesn’t work for me in the Star Wars universe. You don’t take a hit from a laser pistol without a scratch, and I’d like to remind you that a lightsaber is supposed to cut through any material like butter. This time it’s not Soul Calibur, and now that you’ve got all this fancy game engine technology it would be nice to use it for something more than just non-scripted deformation of blast doors… when AT-ST walkers resist everything but quick-time events.

Nevermind that you can’t properly chop up storm troopers — I didn’t expect LucasArts to release a mature game. There’s just one detail that bugs me, one tiny thing I can’t let go of: that moron Apprentice should deflect every laser blast with his lightsaber — it should be automatic, whenever the player isn’t doing something else. Just so that it would like those movies, you know? What’s the name? Oh, right: Star Wars.