Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes Review
A New Dope.
Version tested:
Republic Heroes is the very worst sort of licensed videogame: functionally inadequate, creatively redundant and artistically bankrupt. Marketed to parents as a safe Christmas option and aimed at children in the hope of drawing them into a 30-year-old IP in order to secure the next decade's worth of dead-eyed spin-offs, there are few thrills to be found amongst its dim stars and weary wars. In contrast to its joyous LEGO-based cousin, Republic Heroes is persuasive evidence that many videogames have no ambition beyond mere product, existing merely to expand a brand without enriching it, to widen a mythology without deepening it. It's cynical, tiring and sells our children short of what they should expect from a publisher with as much experience and expertise as LucasArts and its associated developers.
Based on the anime-through-a-Nickelodeon-lens series of the same name, Republic Hero's story and visuals are at least consistent with those of its inspiration. Divided into a sizeable three-act campaign, missions are generally no longer than 10 minutes apiece, dividing play between characters such as Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano and Obi-Wan Kenobi to provide multiple perspectives on the unfolding drama. As fan service to Clone Wars aficionados there are numerous references to plot points from the cartoon series and all of the characters share their sound-a-like TV voice actors, ensuring that the premise at least is not without some niche merit.
In mechanical terms, the structure is little more than a device to allow play to switch between the lightsabre-wielding Jedi and the gun-toting clone troopers, the two main character types found in the game. This helps to keep the basic combat from feeling more immediately repetitive than it is. When playing as a Jedi-style character, you wield a lightsabre and enjoy a Force 'push' move to stun or shunt enemies around environments, off ledges and so on. Character animations lack basic fluidity, thereby defying the encouragement of a score multiplier to attempt stringing together combos. The result is a stilted flow of combat that lacks either the smooth acrobatics of The Force Unleashed or the solid workmanlike unfussiness of the LEGO Star Wars titles.

All technology can basically be hacked into by skewering it between the eyes with a sword made of pink light and young boys' dreams.
One of the game's core features during combat is the ability to jump atop enemy droids and impale them with your lightsabre in order to temporarily ride them around, making use of their abilities. This works reasonably well for droids with lasers, but less so when applied to those with more ambitious powers, such as laying mines or spinning at high speed into obstacles. The over-reliance on puzzles that simply require you to jack a droid, use its ability once to open a door and then move on soon becomes tiresome. More enjoyable is when play shifts to a clone trooper character and the game shifts to a twin-stick, Geometry Wars shooter style. A secondary grenade move allows you to angle explosions into pockets of enemies, before mopping up the remainder with your blaster, but again there's a fuzziness to the aiming that niggles and dulls what little excitement might otherwise have been.
The platforming controls are particularly weak. The developer's implemented a system to aid jumps so that as you aim your character towards a platform you're automatically pulled onto a sure-footing, in a similar way to how Halo gently tugs your reticule towards enemies during firefights.
The idea is solid, but the implementation is harmful as the assist only kicks in half of the time and seemingly at varying degrees of strength. Sometimes, it just won't trigger at all, thereby demanding precision where previously the game has taught that none was required. The result is a sort of disorientating vagueness to the controls, a hazy difficulty that jars with the sparse, simplistic environments. Exacerbating the problem is the intermittent unresponsiveness, which sometimes outright ignore inputs or, at very least, delay them by enough milliseconds to cause a disconnect between player and avatar, not to mention a string of death leaps into empty space.
Throughout the game Yoda acts as your guide and mentor, explaining in rudimentary terms the controls and objectives in his characteristic back-to-front patois. In contrast to the Star Wars movies, which employed his unique patterns of speech sparingly, here every line is inverted, lessening the impact of the joke, such that it is. Elsewhere the game makes the most vanilla attempts at humour imaginable. "Nothing gets past me," says one droid, as you jump over the lift in which he's standing. While the Clone Wars universe is intentionally something of a pastiche of the 'grown up' Star Wars, these moments tip the game into awkward parody too often.
Republic Hero's economy is simple. Defeated enemies drop orbs that can be spent in the game's menu-accessed shop on hats and masks, as well as combat upgrades that extend, for example, the length of your combo cool-off period, droid-jack upgrades, droid dances and other more general cheats. The number of points you earn on a level is directly related to the medal rating you're awarded with at its conclusion, so there's a dual incentive to collect orbs. However, as every level has at least one area where enemies will spawn infinitely till you move on, the system is entirely broken. The impromptu 30-second challenges that can be triggered once or twice in each level provide yet more opportunity to mine an area for infinite orbs. In fact, it's theoretically possible to grind one location during the tutorial level to unlock everything in the game.

Some of Darth Vader's former friends. You may remember Darth from his short-lived appearance in the fifth season of Pimp My Droid.
Each level has one or more artefacts to collect, indistinguishable trinket orbs usually found lying just off the beaten track. However, there's no way to tell which levels you've collected artefacts from without actually going into them, something that will infuriate completists. While there's no credit in artificially bulking out a game with endless collectibles, the lack of any compelling meta-game challenge is notable in comparison to LEGO Star Wars' red bricks, mini-models and other assorted treasures.
To simply state that Krome Studios should have worked harder to replicate Traveller's Tales various successes is perhaps to undermine what the LEGO developer has achieved. Good game design for children is difficult and demands not only diligence and inspiration at the planning stage, but also an awful lot of observation of how children react as they play. Right from first touch, it's clear that Republic Heroes hasn't undergone nearly enough of this sort of testing, and the uninspired foundations are further compromised as they are built upon. As a result, this is a product that will make children frustrated and unhappy, the very opposite of that to which Star Wars should aspire.
3 / 10
You may also like...
-
Why Devs Owe You Nothing
-
Digital Foundry: PS3 Skyrim Lag Fixed?
-
Face-Off: The Darkness 2
-
App of the Day: Sir Benfro's Brilliant Balloon
-
Sony admits "dropping the ball" with Demon's Souls
-
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Vita Review
-
CD Projekt: Witcher 2 intro cinematic "the most expensive asset we ever created"
-
Who Killed Rare?
-
One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP Review
-
Grand Slam Tennis 2 Review
-
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Review
-
Gotham City Impostors Review
-
Skyrim patch 1.4 performance tip: make a new manual save
-
The Darkness 2 Review
-
Mass Effect 3 FemShep trailer debuts
-
Epic's Sweeney on graphics tech: "the limit really is in sight"
-
Skyrim patch 1.4 now live for Xbox 360
-
Valve admits hackers accessed Steam transaction log
-
Double Fine Adventure passes Day of the Tentacle budget
-
Next Xbox has tablet-like touch-screen controller - rumour
-
Sony: The Last Guardian is making "slow progress"
-
App of the Day: Superman
-
King Arthur 2 Review
-
Metal Gear Solid: The "Lost" HD Remasters
-
EA announces starry Syndicate voice cast









Comments (37) Latest comment 2 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
This is going to get ugly with an opening line like that.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Once you've looked after us older SW fans, you can go back to fleecing little johnny
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
It's lightsaber. I know Americans can't spell, but they made that word up, so let's use their spelling.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
I'll get this when it gets a price drop, certainly not going to pay £30 for it.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
GL should have gone under a bus in 1985. He would now be a god. And Star Wars would still be Star Wars.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Roll on Knights of the Old Republic!
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Not very good your Yoda voice is. Too many times do you pop up. F*cking irritating you are.
Was a pretty putrid set of demos on the PSN this week. Up was even more simplistic and annoying than this. Turtles was appalling. Even Brutal Legend turned out to be a total waste of an utterly stellar concept, and showed exactly how brilliant God of War was (will be). Oh well. Only one more week until Drake 2.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
..........thanks for the pap review anyway Eurogamer, hopefully this game will be down to about £10 by Christmas, and I will pick it up then
Comment below viewing threshold Show
If you're really a fan of Clone Wars, I'd recommend waiting for the rumoured Lego version.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
So who did you get prenant?
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Those games were from an age where gamers in their late teens, twenties and thirties knew about Star Wars. Maybe if we wait another decade and let the new trilogy spin offs die out we'll return to the glory days of star wars games again.
And, you know, there's always Bioware.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
No way will they be getting this as a full price game though....bargain bin only.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Well yeah.....once they've finished with that silly MMO and do KOTOR3
Comment below viewing threshold Show
My kids were very VERY disappointed with this: they really wanted this game, but I made them read some review first.......
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
you mean who got me pregnant?!?
(shock horror a woman on here!!!)
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Hang on isn't this LucasArts that hasn't done a decent game since KOTOR, and I am sure that was more luck than judgement? The Lego ones weren't even done by them.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Lucasarts didn't make KotOR, Bioware did.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
I felt his pain. He's correct and I couldn't deny his frustration.
This is bullshit.
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
There are some annoying areas with jumps being tricky and it does seem repetitive (and yoda's rants are grating from the start but that goes for the movies also if you ask me), but guess what, some kids enjoy repeating stuff - it's how they learn!
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Comment below viewing threshold Show
*reads comments*
Who'da thunk it?
Comment below viewing threshold Show
Someone ought to have told Lucas this about ten years back.
@ robg
It doesn't work like that. In the UK a slightly curved sword for cavalry is called a sabre, even one from America. In the UK, therefore, a lightsaber is a lightsabre, just like it's a sable de luz in Spain or a lichtschwert in Germany. It's called British English because it's a different language from American English.