It's only fair that I post my review of this, after taking the piss out of it's sequel.

I started playing this game soon after its release, on the First of November 2009 to be exact. But it took me a year to finish it. Not because It's that bad, but because I got fed up with it. Some parts of the game are way too difficult and frustrating. I'm sure many of you heard about the controversial Star Destroyer scene. Where you have to pull it out the sky using the force.

Actually this is one of the biggest failings of the game, not the difficulty, but the lack of tutorials, almost every task in the game is easy, once you find out what's the best method to do it. Even bringing down the Star Destroyer is child play if you know what you have to do. That's where the game fails miserably, it doesn't tell you how to do it, just do it, and that's it. And many of the other bossfights are the same. There is probably a pattern to follow for each, but many times I failed to find it. I was just hacking away at them for minutes, to no avail, and sometimes their hp would drop a bit, but it all felt random to me, I didn't know what I did right when I did manage to lower their hp.

So due to my frustration I stopped playing the game about three quarters in, and only picked it up almost a year later again. When I finished it in little over an hour. The whole game is about 8 hours long, which would be reason for me to whine for it's shortness. But due to its frustrating nature I had more than enough of it. It's advisable to get a replacement keyboard and mouse or controller for the console, before you start playing, so you have an escape plan if you manage to break something in a fit of rage.

The game is a typical third person view action flick. You basically have to destroy everything that moves in it. The story takes place between Episode III and IV, but closer to the latter. They made a good job in fitting it into the main story of the movies. I don't remember any major discrepancies in the story. And I have to say I really liked it, probably that's the saving grace of the game, that's why I came back to finish it. In a game like this where you just flow with it you can't expect anything else from the story, other than it being to your liking. There are no choices or branching storyline. This coupled with the frustrating bossfights means that replayability is zero.

Gameplay is very fast paced, but in order to play effectively you'd need to learn an array of combos and special moves. And these are so complicated and hard to reproduce as fatalities in Mortal Kombat. So most of the time I just smashed the action buttons randomly and hoped that some moves might come out.

The movement and fightings controls are decent, there are only two things that makes your life hard: targeting and aiming. When I used force lighting it almost never went in the direction I intended it to. If you have an enemy in front of you and a destroyable object in the background somewhere, it will always hit that object in the background. This made me mad. The other problem child is force pull, the typical Darth Vader ability, where you want to slam objects into the enemies. I was maybe able to aim the flying objects in the right direction one out of twenty tries. But it would have been a really helpful ability if not for this problem. And I already mentioned the randomness of bossfights. You chop away at the boss and sometimes it has an effect sometimes nothing happens for minutes. The other problem with these is that you're enclosed in a small area, and the camera switches to a special view, that makes it even more difficult to aim your force abilities.

The only thing worth noting about the cutscenes is that the facial animations were piss poor, so much so that it ruined the atmosphere occasionally, because you get fixated on the poor animations.

I forgot that there is actually one choice in the game. There is an alternative ending, that I wasn't able to try, because as soon as I finished the game it deleted all my previous saves. I don't know if this is a bug, or intentional so you couldn't check the alternative ending without finishing the game again, but there is no way in hell I'd finish the game again just to see a few seconds of alternative cutscenes.

+

  • Story  
  • Atmosphere  
  • Fast paced gameplay  


-

  • Random bossfights, where everything seem to work by chance  
  • Difficulties in aiming and targeting  
  • Character animations during cutscenes  
  • 8 hours despite the countless retries of some maps and bossfights  
  • Some parts are just too difficult and frustrating, there were parts that I tried at least two dozen times before finally succeeding.  
  • Not worth to replay  

The game is not even comparable to the second, it's leagues better, it's actually worth playing, so I give it a 7/10
The figure might seem a bit high after all I've written. I admit in hindsight I don't know why I gave it this high of a score, but I must have enjoyed it that much, or maybe I was just biased because I really loved the character of Juno.