Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes PC
Star Wars The Clone Wars Republic Heroes brings the animated series to the PC but does nothing to excite or motivate gamers to pick up the story or conclude the game.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 12/25,
Gameplay: 8/25,
Creativity 10/25,
Fun 10/25
Total: 40/100
Star Wars has literally gone to the licensed and franchising dogs, with two recent games being average or mediocre that franchise really needs to step up their game. Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes is yet another Star Wars branded game the comes out on many of the consoles and handhelds without much redeeming value.
The Clone Wars is Star Wars the animated series brought to gather more fans to the fold and yet the series is pretty good in itself with a good storyline and well done voice acting. The game brought on by the series is anything but well done with a myriad of problems starting with repetition and ending with plain old platforming problems.
Republic Heroes is a platformer with very simple controls and features where you play one of two one screen characters getting from point A to point B and killing as many Empire followers as possible. This would all be great if things looked and behaved well and you didn’t have so many repetitive things to do throughout the levels.
You have the campaign gaming where you may well be reduced to tears of boredom after the first couple of levels, adding a second player onscreen does not help much in the end. Here is your usual level: jump to tall objects, run along slicing through enemies, jump onto droid and shoot other part of scenery then hop onto new pathway.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It may not be this bad but at times it does seem like it and the tutorial part goes throughout the whole campaign. You get the first level having the tutorial learning of the game with Yoda telling you how to accomplish certain maneuvers or moving along but he continues to pop up through the campaign and most of his help is unnecessary and useless.
Add to this the fact that even with his help things go wrong more often than not and you have the beginnings of a frustrating game for adults, not to mention kids. I found one situation pretty much being able to sum up the games platforming situations that happened pretty much from the start.
At the beginning of the game through the cut scene you are given some of the story and then objectives, then you get to hop and move along walkways and objects to get to different areas. One section is large parts of buildings in a catwalk type area where your character stays easily on the path and hardly even comes close to falling off.
The next few areas are equally as easy as you maneuver across some small floating pillars and a few other objects to battle some droids. Then you get to the flying hover bike tutorial and for the life of me it took twenty times to get the jump onto the droid right.
You have to be standing on just the right spot before jumping in order to land on the droid and given the partially angled view it makes seeing where you are in relation to that hovering droid pretty difficult. This continues throughout the campaign with some parts that are too repetitive and after the first dozen times becomes downright boring and with the spots that are all but impossible to get through easily.
Fear not when you do fall to your supposed death as you will respawn a few seconds later right back at the start of the present scene so dying doesn’t really mean anything. Republic Heroes seems so much like an unfinished game that it is surprising they did release it with some parts that work well and others that are just so bad it begs the question of why.
You can play the game with or without a fellow human, if you can find someone willing to stomach this repetition, but I am not sure it really helps much other than to move along faster. The AI controlled second character that is always on screen is useless in fights and usually wanders in the wrong direction or gets caught on scenery.
The campaign should take more than several hours to finish if you have the stamina to complete the task but with this game being geared toward younger crowds I don’t think it will do well. There is not much here other than repetitive gameplay to attract someone and even the multiplayer is not all that great because all it does is introduces the other character onscreen as a better fighter in a dull game.
Graphics and effects are passable but again from a Star Wars franchised game we do expect more and often should be able to get at least better than average in everything about a game. The graphics are very cartoon looking but that comes with the game being based on an animated cartoon but the effects are almost too cartoonish.
Reading other reviews I see that I have to agree that this looks much like a PlayStation 2 title and not a current generation game. The graphics and effects look a lot like they rushed it to release and left out much of the detailed artwork, texture finishing and other things that make an average game that much better.
I was actually surprised that Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes was not better in at least some ways as the franchise has had a good track record in the past with PC games. Republic Heroes is one game that may not even make a decent rental as it really has nothing going for it even for diehard fans of Star Wars or The Clone Wars.