Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes Review

Star Wars is a fickle franchise when it comes to the gaming industry. On the one hand you have heavy hitters like Knights of the Old Republic and the Dark Forces / Jedi Knight series, but on the other you have games like Super Bombad Racing and the generally loathed Revenge of the Sith game.

Here we have Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes. It’s a game with a ridiculously long title, but not enough substance.  I’ll start off by saying I enjoyed myself with this game for a few reasons, but I also came to hate it at certain points.  Referred to from here simply as Republic Heroes, the game, sees you living out events from the world of the Clone Wars TV cartoon and movie, which are in turn based off the less than stellar new trilogy of films.

At the beginning of the game we are introduced to Anakin Skywalker, along with his apprentice, Ashoka Tano. Here we are given a tutorial level on how the controls work and what we’ll be doing for, well, most of the game.  After getting to grips with the lightsaber combat and platforming abilities you have as a Jedi, you are then given control of one of the Clone Troopers – this is the second game type available to you. Controlling a Clone is vastly different from controlling a Jedi. Your abilities such as double jumps and force powers are all gone, in their place, a twin-stick shooter, where the left stick controls the Clones movement and the right stick determines which direction he’ll fire. 

The Clone parts are easily the worst parts of the game, with ropey aiming and grenade tossing, along with repetitive level design. The Jedi have the ability to scale cliffs and climb around, whereas the Clones are stuck permanently on terra firma.

That is basically your game right there. You alternate at times between playing as the Jedi, and playing as the Clones – each time realising that the different Jedi and different Clones all control the exact same. There is an option for co-op play, however it’s restricted to local play only, which is a shame, as the game has some potential for being good fun with two players controlling Jedi, killing enemies with lightsabers and competing for the highest score – a bit of a missed opportunity there.

The game does have a few things in its favour though, it has pretty responsive controls for the Jedi when fighting, letting you jump on the back of an enemy droid – called “Droid Jakking” – then cutting it down to size with your lightsaber before jumping onto the back of a Super Battle Droid and using its laser to decimate any remaining droids, finishing up the dance of death with a swift lightsaber slash to the head of aforementioned Super Battle Droid. It’s moments like these the game gets right, but unfortunately they’re too few and far between, with the game instead opting to force you into some extremely unresponsive platforming.

The platforming sections see you and your current Jedi hero performing acrobatics all over the place, which is all well and good, but it’s so unresponsive at times, you’ll mean to jump to a small ledge and instead end up saying hello to the never-ending hole beneath you. These moments are frustrating and happen all too often, thankfully there’s checkpoints scattered about every level, usually spawning you right next to where you died. This is also a problem though, since there’s not really a penalty for death, I often times found myself jumping about randomly hoping for the best, if I fell to my death, so be it – I’d respawn and blindly jump in a different direction until I was successfully on my way. Needless to say, my attempts weren’t exactly Jedi like.

The game comes with bonuses though. Those are always good. Have you ever wanted to see what Anakin Skywalker would look like wearing Indiana Jones’ fedora hat? Now you can. How about a Clone Trooper sporting an outstandingly oversized Darth Sideous mask, or a Greedo mask for the Jedi when you’re jumping into big holes – I’m sure there’s a few people who would want to do that. The game does sport a large number of unlockables, some of which are ‘bought’ using points earned in the game, while the rest are unlocked using artifacts you will find scattered about the levels. This could add some replay to the game, but again, this is one of the things that would be more fun playing with someone else (preferably with the option of doing so online).

As well as unlockables, the game also sports a rather large amount of challenges you can find throughout the levels – over 100 in total – which are, unfortunately, all rather similar. If you find a challenge marker and accept it, there’s a large chance you will be tasked with defeating waves of enemies, as many as you can in the time limit, for which you are awarded either a bronze, silver, gold or platinum medal. I done about 40 or so of these challenges and never failed to get the platinum. They are too easy and too samey, with the only differences coming when you are asked to kill enemies in a specific way (using Force Push) or killing enemies while in a vehicle.

Republic Heroes is too frustrating to simply call a kids game, but it’s too easy to finish (no death penalty, respawning exactly where you died) to class as an adults game. It keeps the look of the source material, giving you an alternate looking Anakin, Obi Wan and their Jedi and Clone friends, which is refreshing in a time where most things tend to strive for realism.

Unfortunately,  interesting graphics can’t make me recommend it. It would be a better game in my book, simply with the inclusion of an online co-op mode, as you’re not always going to have someone to play it with locally, and it’s not a good enough game to warrant playing through on your own.

It’s not a missed opportunity; it’s more like a needless expansion of a time period in the saga that a large amount of Star Wars fans don’t care about. The new trilogy was a disaster in terms of fan approval – I think Republic Heroes may suffer the same fate.