#amaze entertainment

[miloscat]

[Review] Lego Star Wars II (DS)

An amusing shambles.

I had long overlooked the fact that this standalone Lego adaptation of the Original Trilogy on DS is a totally unique experience compared to the later “Complete Saga” release which faithfully demade the double-pack console game to the DS’s lower specs. It was a Flandrew video that revealed to me its novelty, its goofy, abbreviated cutscenes, and its completely broken state.

Before TT Fusion was charged with handling the handheld companion Lego games, there were Java phone games by Universomo, isometric games on GBA by Griptonite, and this DS effort by Amaze (Griptonite’s parent company). I’ve played Amaze entries in the X-Men, Spyro, and Eragon series and was consistently underwhelmed. This one didn’t really change my opinion of their output.

But first, some positives. While superficially similar to its console cousin, with the same abilities and basic concepts, this game does its own thing with level design. I appreciate that it’s not just a rehash, and these bite-sized stages suit the DS. Some of the vehicle stages even turn out better than the main game since they don’t overstay their welcome, or because the Endor speeder chase is a strictly free-roaming affair this time. Also... Boba Fett has a more powerful jetpack, essentially giving you a super-double jump and a hover?

Whew. Ok, the bantha in the room is the buggy state of this game. Yeah, Lego games are often glitch-ridden, but Lego Star Wars II on DS feels like it’s barely holding itself together. Backgrounds and parts of the playable environment, even characters, often flicker and disappear. Slowdown is prevalent when multiple characters are active. Enemies run into walls, and your allies sometimes will shoot at you. Free Play mode seems like it was almost completely untested, with progression logic breaking or some rooms refusing to load objects, or the camera getting stuck. At least one minikit straight up refuses to spawn, so it is potentially impossible to 100%. The bottom screen’s optional camera controls have broken sprites most of the time (the character picker is a much more useful tool down there). It’s just really surprising that the game was released in the state it’s in... no doubt a result of rushing to meet a deadline set by the main game’s schedule.

Even ignoring the technical deficiencies, the maps are sometimes confusingly laid out. There’s also not much context holding the levels together; with no FMV cutscenes from the console game scrunched in, we only have tiny and awkwardly-animated in-engine scenes, along with text crawls for each level in addition to the scene-setting ones that start each movie.Not to mention the notable absence of a Dagobah level, with Luke going straight from the Hoth battle to Bespin in gameplay terms, which means Yoda exists solely as a Free Play character.

So with all that said, it can be tempting to write this off as an inferior product to be ignored. But naturally I found some charm in its awkwardness, in its clumsy attempt to replicate the console game unlike its handheld predecessors. The dumb cutscenes are part of its character! I could do without the playability-affecting glitches, but I still got a kick out of the distinct content that it brings to the table. That at least justifies its existence to me.

[edains]

Rick Riordan constantly trashing the movies for not sticking to his books then releasing a show in which he rewrites everything and loses the spirit of the books entirely