Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (PlayStation 2) review "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the cash-in game derived from the final addition to the George Lucas movie series, which uses the story and characters from the movie in an action-adventure setting. It’s disappointing to find out that the quality of recent Star Wars games, like Battlefront II and the Knights of the Old Republic series, don’t come with the name, causing Revenge of the Sith to be a brutal experience. At its core, it’s nothing but a bland, mindless, and pointless butt..."

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the cash-in game derived from the final addition to the George Lucas movie series, which uses the story and characters from the movie in an action-adventure setting. It’s disappointing to find out that the quality of recent Star Wars games, like Battlefront II and the Knights of the Old Republic series, don’t come with the name, causing Revenge of the Sith to be a brutal experience. At its core, it’s nothing but a bland, mindless, and pointless button masher with stupidly simplistic controls that prevent it from capturing any of the emotion or excitement from the movie.

If you’ve seen Episode III by now, you know it has a terrific story that evokes strong emotions, somewhere along the line to game production the emotion got lost. In the campaign you’ll play as Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi as you take part in the Jedi’s demise, the Sith’s rise to power, and Anakin’s tragic fall to the dark side. Movie Clips try to help the story flow, but are cut off at poor spots; one such clip shows you dropping in at General Grievous’ hideout, but it never tells you how you got there or found him. If you’re unfortunate enough to have not seen Episode III, this game will spoil all the surprise plot details, despite a lot of background info. The lack of information allows the story to fly by quickly, putting you back to smashing up droids.

Unlike the typical action adventure you’ll use lightsabers and Force powers to defeat enemies. You make your way through droids, Jedi, and Sith by using a variety of lightsaber attacks, which can be strung together for combos. On rare occurrences, you can stream together a whimsical combo, which looks cool and does a lot of damage. However, these attacks aren’t needed, as your foes have as much intelligence as a rock and very little health. Your best bet is to stick to simple and easy attacks that leave no room for your opponents to counter. Only against bosses do the larger combos play an important role. Additionally, tougher enemies require you to block, which is done by the press of a trigger. The problem is that only the most powerful moves can break the block. You also have the option of using Force powers against your enemies, like Force lightning and Force choke. Yet, these powers are pointless, because they take too long to use and a lightsaber throw is more effective. After each level of fighting through the terrible combat system, you are faced with using a pointless RPG system.

This RPG system doesn’t work, because it serves little purpose. As you progress in the game you level up. Higher levels naturally have more Force powers and strengthened attacks. You shift your points to your liking, whether it be increased Force heal or stronger Force push. Yet, the easy combat system and difficulty make it so there is no reason for you to care about your level. The powers also are too slow, so you only worry about lightsaber attacks through the next set of bland rooms.

To top it all off, Revenge of the Sith suffers from awful level design, every level consists of fighting droids or a boss in linear corridors. Naturally, you can’t quickly finish each level by running through it and avoiding droids, because ray shields or mechanical objects are in the way. To open the path you have to defeat the droids, or press a button activating the Force. To add insult to injury, there are no puzzles in the entire game, which does nothing to break up the monotony of the game. After you complete each 10-20 minute mission, you unlock the next of seventeen missions. You then can go back to unlock some of bonus content and levels.

These bonus missions, as well as the boss battles, make up the only bright spots in the game. In the boss battles and bonus missions you’ll be defeating a Jedi or Sith, which provides an indescribable thrill. Bonus missions have you destroying clones as Yoda, killing Obi-Wan as Darth Vader in Episode IV, becoming General Grievous, and dodging Lava. The battles against other lightsaber foes are entertaining, because the A.I. isn’t entirely brain-dead. However, with Lego Star Wars and Battlefront II out, you can get your Jedi fix elsewhere. The game tries to add to this excitement through a fighting-style multiplayer, but doesn’t succeed.

The multiplayer modes fail to redeem the game. One mode is a terrible fighting game, while the other is poorly done co-op campaign. In the dueling mode the characters aren’t balanced. Attacks like the lightsaber throw are over-powering, while hand to hand attacks benefit the stronger attacker, like Mace Windu. It’s a watered-down fighting game, which you’ll be bored of in a few rounds. The co-op campaign has two players making their way through a legion of droids, which are located plain rooms with exits blocked by ray shields until all the enemies are defeated. Once the doors open, you move into another room with a blocked exit, until the level is over, with no boss fights or anything meaningful to make it interesting. The multiplayer is drab, in terms of gameplay, graphics, and sound.

As far as audio and graphics go, they’re as bad as the gameplay. There is little of the epic music from the Star Wars franchise, so the tone is only set by the dark color palette. The lightsabers provide nice sound effects for the first few times, but they sound the same and get annoying. The actors don’t reprise their roles, which helps to kill a weak script. Additionally, despite looking like Obi-Wan the actor impersonating him sounds nothing like him. The levels lack background detail, but do showcase a wide variety of locations. The characters and droids look terrific, but the frame-rate stutters hampering the brutal gameplay. The game looks great, but the sound never helps anything, and ruins an already bad experience.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a terrible game that is too easy, and can be beaten in four hours without much trouble. The decent graphics hide a large amount audio and gameplay flaws. Revenge of the Sith brings back memories of how bad Star Wars games can be. Not even the die-hardest of Star Wars fan deserve the punishment of playing through pile of puke.

Community review by ghostyghost (July 16, 2006) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.