And with too many flaws in the gameplay, it never quite coheres here either. In
Jedi Power Battles, you’ll find yourself running through roughly a dozen levels as one of the various Jedi -- Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, or three from the Jedi Council (probably added just so you could play as a light saber-swinging Samuel L. Jackson) -- roughly following the plot of the movie. And while it’s fun at first, reminiscent of the old
Super Star Wars series, it soon becomes a frustrating and, in the end, unfulfilling experience.
The game starts out innocuously enough, on the Trade Federation Spacestation, just like the movie. You’ll have fun swinging your light saber through the various baddies, and generally ripping droids apart. Then you get to the spider-type droids from the movie, and they kill you. Hmm, you wonder, perhaps I should play the training missions?
So you load up the training missions. The first two are simple enough, but the third pushes you rather hard to make exacting jumps.
And, alas, here appears one of Jedi Power Battle’s major issues -- control. Making precise jumps is an exercise in futility, and I can no longer count the number of leaps my characters made into bottomless pits because they decided they wanted to make a short jump instead of a long jump. Why? I don’t know, and it bugs the hell out of me.
Once you learn how to reflect laser fire, the game becomes considerably simpler and actually entertaining again. And then you start encountering the weird bugs that plague the whole thing. Going off screen for too long kills your character. Jumping too soon after dying from falling kills your character... at least in Coruscant. You can get stuck between two items and die, even though you’re still on the screen.
After a while, you start to realize that the game just doesn’t quite gel. As you beat each level, you get to choose to extend either your health or Force meter. But Force powers are rarely useful, until the endgame, and it’s much better to keep yourself healthy as possible. Why? Because the game takes cheap shots. It places troopers right out of your line of sight, letting them shoot you while you can’t attack them back. Ugh.
You also learn new button combos as the game progresses, and I must admit that Obi-Wan’s Y+Force leaping death combo is a joy to execute. But in the end, it’s much more efficient to wail away on the X button, slicing through your enemies with abandon.
The game offers a few more interesting options -- the aforementioned training levels, which has a seventh level that’s a major pain in the butt; a Two-player mode, which is interesting in theory but more frustrating than entertaining in practice; a Versus mode, where you can wail on your buddy, which has been done much better in other titles.
