Game #1021: Star Wars Trilogy - Apprentice of the Force

  Don't panic! It means the old trilogy, the original trilogy.

 First of all, lemme say that the premise behind Star Wars Trilogy: Apprentice of the Force is brilliant. Basically, it's a 2-D action game that covers all three movies from Luke's point of view. Like, why haven't we gotten a game like this before, albeit on more powerful hardware and with a larger budget? 

 Apprentice of the Force, being made by Ubisoft, recycles their PoP: Sands of Time Advance engine, and on paper it works decently. While it looks bad, 3-D digitalized graphics on the GBA are too ugly, it's fairly fast paced, and Luke can jump, dash, cling on to platforms, roll, and perform all sorts of fun slashes, from ground pounds to spinning aerial slashes, saber uppercuts, etc. I'll tell ya this, Luke's moveset is pretty complete, and you even get more and more abilities as you go through the game, eventually unlocking force powers, which consume energy: Push, Heal, Slodown time and an enemy-clearing attack.

 So far so good, but... it's a bit bland. While you get a nice amount of moves, the game quickly looses its luster as you fight large waves of enemies. And most of the time, you can't keep moving forward until you defeat every enemy, so have fun. Ironically of a game using the PoP engine, the platforming leaves a lot to be desired. Early in the game you are faced with pixel-perfect jumps which are just annoying, eventually you get a dash and a double jump, but still, the early going is rough. And what's up with clinging on to platforms? Sometimes Luke will easy cling on to a platform, while other times he simply won't for no reason whatsoever, leaving you trying to jump to its edge over and over again until Luke finally grabs its edge.

 The first set of levels, Episode IV, also include a few ship levels that are SO bad that they give you regenerating health. So you shoot a few enemies, take damage you just can't avoid and then escape for a minute or two waiting for your health to regenerate. Boring! The game did need a few respites from the frequent beat'em up/platforming stages, but these variety sections are so bad they shouldn't even have bothered.

 Despite covering all three movies, the game is fairly short. Probably because it keeps to Luke's point of view. That said, considering how repetitive it gets by the last few stages... maybe it's for the best.

 Apprentice of the Force it's not too bad, but it's not very good either. It's a bit too repetitive and boring, which is a bit of a letdown considering how good the concept behind the game is. It's said concept that makes me appreciate what the game does despite its gameplay shortcomings. But really, one could do much worse when it comes to Star Wars games than this one.

 5.0