Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (Xbox)

Story

If you’ve been hiding under a rock or you haven’t bothered with George Lucas’ massive phenomena known as Star Wars then I will recap the story to this game. A young boy was once rescued from a desert planet, grew up to be a whiny brat and would turn into the most dangerous threat the Galaxy has ever known. Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is based on the film of the same name, oddly enough.

You have to have lived in the Jungles of Borneo or somewhere in the deep ocean to miss that fact.

Episode III is all about the rise of Darth Vader and chronicles the young Jedi’s fall from grace through 16 levels of mayhem.

Gameplay

Right from the start fans of the recent Lord of the Rings: Return of the King game will recognise the style of gameplay in Episode III. It is very reminiscent of that game right down to the way your characters gain powers/abilities. Anakin or Obi Wan have an experience bar that fills up as you battle your way through the levels and when you complete the mission at hand, surprise, you get a point distribution screen.

Here you can put those experience points into skills/moves and train them up, each set has up to three levels of power and it seems that the higher the level the more damage or the better the skill/move/ability becomes.

The actual game plays simply and relies upon a fixed camera to offer the best view of the action. It’s done in the same way as the LotR action games, blending full motion video footage from the Episode III film in with the game’s own engine, succeeding almost as well as the LotR games did in that respect.

Each of the games’ 16 levels has you controlling either Anakin or Obi Wan with the CPU taking control of the character that’s not under your joypad antics, allowing you to concentrate on dishing out some very Golden Axe style hurt upon the enemies. Both Obi Wan and Anakin have extensive Jedi moves and powers lists but the tricky combinations and button mashing can lead to a power or two misfiring or the wrong combination, as is the case with many fighting games.

As you might expect there are lots of combination attacks and over all the fighting system used in this game is pretty good, there are a few minor annoyances as mentioned above but most of the time the lightsabre combat is fluid and the action keeps up at a regular pace, allowing you to mash those buttons and experiment with hidden combination attacks.

Dish out the damage and take none in return and your power meter will charge, when it hits the top the character becomes faster and deadlier. Akin to the LotR games again.