I have good news for you, my Lord. War has begun
The story starts at about three quarters of the way through Attack of the Clones, when Mace Windu leads an army of Jedi and Clones to rescue Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala and Obi Wan Kenobi from the clutches of Count Dooku on the planet of Geonosis. This battle marks the start of the Clone Wars, a long war between the Republic and the Separatists, a gathering of star systems which have seceded from the Republic. The battles in the game are fought over 6 planets, including Kashyyyk, home to the Wookiees, including the mighty Chewbacca. As the battles move from planet to planet, the Republic discovers that Count Dooku is attempting to capture an ancient Sith artifact, which could spell doom for the Republic. It is up to Anakin, Obi Wan and Mace to stop him.
Clone Wars is structured similarly to Factor 5’s Battle for Naboo on the Nintendo 64, as you pilot a variety of vehicles. These vehicles include Speeder Bikes, Republic Fighter Tanks, AT-XT Assault Walkers, a Maru, and the Republic Gunships. Some missions may also require you to run out on foot with your lightsaber. There are 16 missions over 5 different planets.
This is where the problems begin to start. The missions and tasks you are required to do are very generic and therefore very tedious. Almost half of the game is “get to point A, destroy object B, and return to point C, to destroy base D”, while the other half of the game is “escort and protect object A to point B, and clear point B of enemies”. There is a tiny amount of boss battles, and those just don’t seem to fit in very well. Almost all of your fighting action is basic shooting and dodging, with absolutely no tactics employed at all. All of the targeting in the game is automatic, and that proves to be very annoying when you run into large groups of enemies. Weapons on the vehicles leave something to be desired, with the main lasers on every vehicle bar the AT-XT being extremely weak. Secondary fire is usually your only effective option, but on the Gunship it is a little too effective.
Controlling the vehicles and your character when he is on foot is somewhat loose. The vehicles themselves don’t handle particularly well, sometimes crashing into invisible walls, or invisible meshes on enemy models. The Gunship is very annoying when it comes to collision detection, as its collision model seems to be a lot larger than its physical model. Control on foot is a chore, as your Jedi will handle somewhat like a tank due to their overall sluggishness.
A mediocre game such as Clone Wars wouldn’t quite be complete without a bunch of bugs to complete the experience. While the clipping errors and invisible walls I mentioned earlier are more common, there are other bugs in the game which really shouldn’t have made it past Quality Assurance. For instance, there is a level which requires you to protect a bunch of Republic craft so they can take a ship out, which will allow you into an ancient Jedi tomb. When the cutscene between the protection mission and the tomb mission ended, the game jumped, froze for a second, and then treated everything as though I had completed the mission. The game also froze at random points throughout the game, a hassle given the game’s long load times.
Finally, the game is utterly devoid of any sort of challenge, something which is becoming more and more of a theme in Star Wars games over the past 2-3 years. It took a little over 4 hours for me to complete the entire game, start to finish, in two sittings. Now I may be a fairly experienced gamer, but this sort of length is inexcusable. There are various extras to unlock, as well as a very average multiplayer component that seems very tacky, but it just isn’t enough to justify $99AU (or £40).
Blind we are, if creation of this clone army we could not see.
The Clone Wars lackluster performance continues with regards to the game’s graphics. While the planet of Geonosis wasn’t exactly meant to be shown as much more than a desolate place, the fogging, blurred textures and bad environmental design all aid in making it a really bad experience. The other planets suffer the same fate, excluding Kashyyyk, which is a lush forest with plenty of detail, although it still suffers the low texture quality.
The models of all the vehicles are based on the vehicles in the movies, and they are actually pretty faithful reproductions, with a decent amount of detail going into them, though some of the Separatist vehicles may look a little low in their polygon counts. The on-foot models look absolutely ridiculous – you can almost count the individual polygons in the characters. They look fine while you are in a vehicle, but ridiculous when you’re on the ground level. Animation of the droids, clones and Jedi are also very lacking, and their collision defects make things look rather stupid. The skinning on these troops is also very poor – I feel sympathetic towards the Wookiees on Kashyyyk, as they bear a little resemblance to the stuff Mr. Hankey is made from.
The final nail in the coffin in regards to graphics is the frame rate. Throughout my entire time with the game, the frame rate never seemed to be quite stable. While it is generally supposed to sit around the 30fps mark, it almost runs like a slide show in most of the cutscenes and during the game when the action gets heated (as it so often does), it slows to a crawl. Star Wars games seem to be having trouble with frame rates lately (Bounty Hunter and the GC version of Jedi Outcast), so this is something they really must focus on for their next game.
The music in The Clone Wars has been constructed out of music from The Attack of the Clones movie, as well as the classic Star Wars Trilogy. The music from the classic trilogy does tend to feel a little out of place in some scenes (the Battle of Hoth and Endor themes are in there), it still fits into the game situation very neatly. The sound effects are also pretty good, despite the fact the surround sound that was present in the Gamecube of the version seems to have been omitted. The quality of the sound and music, however, is neutralised by some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard in my gaming career. Though Star Wars games rarely ever retain the original actors for the voices, the sound-a-likes are usually range from decent to scarily accurate. In The Clone Wars, however, only Yoda sounds the slightest bit like his big screen counterpart. Obi Wan would have to be the worst offender – it’s almost as if the actor never saw either of the two performances Ewan McGregor has done so far.
Why do I get the feeling you'll be the death of me?
Rack up another notch in the belt of bad Star Wars games. The fact Pandemic can churn out such crud when they had a decent set of source material to work from hurts pretty badly, both as a Star Wars fan, and an avid gamer. The lack of challenge, poor frame rate, and tremendously awful voice acting make this one of the worst Star Wars experiences ever. If you’re looking for some decent Star Wars action on the Playstation 2, I’d advise you to check out both Starfighter and Jedi Starfighter.
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