Star Wars The Clone Wars: Jedi Alliance review

This difficulty also saps the fighting system of some badly needed depth. You can force-throw debris to stun an enemy, lock sabers, do team-up attacks, and deflect blaster fire with your saber. Plus, each jedi has different four-tap combos (low, low, high, high for example). But the imprecise controls make using these talents too difficult. Even when they work, you’re still mostly just hammering the screen with the stylus like a madman.

Combat aside, there’s quite a bit stuffed in here. Some hit-and-miss interactive cut scenes find you tracing arrows onscreen when prompted. Mini-games enable you to rewire control panels by matching shapes, cut doors open with your sabers by tracing shapes, and hack your way into security systems with timed taps.

There are six jedi (Obi-Wan, Anakin, Ahsoka, Plo Koon, Kit Fisto and Mace Windu), and you can take any two you like each mission. C-3PO and R2-D2 also make a playable appearance, with R2 handling the hacking and threepio offering a few fun dialog trees. The story is also new and not half bad, revolving around the theft of a shipment of lightsaber crystals and a shadowy cabal of force-using goth mommas called the Nightsisters. This definitely won’t make you forget about the climactic moments of the original Clone Warsanimatedseries, but it could help ease the sting of realizing most feared gangsters in the galaxy have be redesigned as offensively “comical” giant slugs.

Nov 24, 2008