Star Wars has been drumming up it’s hype for Episode IX faster and faster with the last few months… And as such, it’s a perfect time to reflect on the Star Wars game library; the first part of which you can find here!
All this Jedi hype got me thinking about my vast, VAST history with Star Wars video games; I’ve been playing games set in the universe since I was playing games in the first place! I thought I’d try and rank them into a top ten, which when I started I didn’t expect to take so long or be as difficult! There are so many games in this franchise and since I’m an unashamed fan boy, I love them all! even the bad ones… Looking at you Super Bombad Racing…
It genuinely hurts me to put another ‘saber combat action adventure game with RPG elements above Jedi Academy, but it just can’t be helped. Force Unleashed was the first new Star Wars game I got to play on my Xbox 360, taking the role of powerful apprentice to Darth Vader, Starkiller, in your quest to travel across the galaxy to a few familiar locales to wipe out any remaining traces of the Jedi.
The combat was tight and exciting with a few combos ending in some incredible force powers, and that is where most of the fun lies, the Force. Starkiller has insane mastery of the Force and can use it in a variety of punishing ways against his enemies! Most impressively and famously is a scene later in the game where he uses his epic power to grab a Star Destroyer in low orbit over the planet Raxus Prime and drag it down to the ground! There are a few times in-game where you’ll end up retreading the same path on the same planets, but at the very least these planets will have undergone a significant change and now has a noticeable Imperial presence!
Starkiller’s journey from weapon of the Dark Side to hero of a burgeoning rebellion is one of the better examples of story telling in the Legends continuity, and hey, if the hero path isn’t for you, pick up a copy of the Dark Side edition and enjoy the DLC missions playing as the pure evil Darth Starkiller!
Here’s a different one for you! Anyone who remembers the days before arcades became a sea of machines offering up scaled versions of smart phone games, you may remember seeing this bad boy parked against one of the walls. Star Wars Trilogy was a rail shooter controlled by a single joystick and trigger set up, giving you a selection of action scenes from the original trilogy including the Death Star trench run, the Battle of Hoth and the Battle of Endor; Trilogy was a blast to play, and with its bucket seat set-up made you really feel like you were part of the action! Or at least it did it for me when I was 9 years old…
There were some breaks in the space-based action too when you would take the role of Luke Skywalker and use the joystick to control the swinging Lightsaber on screen. Sure it wasn’t exactly one to one of what you were doing, but trying desperately to defend yourself from Lord Vader or the shots of Boba Fett was just the right amount of challenging and terrifying!
It’s a shame this classic hasn’t been remade in someway since, though if you can find a way to emulate it then I can’t stress enough what a great experience it is!
A lot of people will claim that Han Solo is the coolest smuggler in the galaxy, but those people have clearly never heard of Dash Rendar! This hench hero was the leading man in the third person shooter Shadows of the Empire, a game that tells a now non canon story of events between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, starting strong with the Battle of Hoth as Dash single handedly drops 8 AT-ATs, and then takes his rampage inside Echo Base itself.
The game takes you all over the galaxy with a mission to protect Luke Skywalker from the machinations of a space gangster called Prince Xisor! During the trip you get to race swoop bikes, have space battles in asteroid fields and square up to legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett! I never owned this gem myself, playing it exclusively on my friend’s N64 and refusing to leave their house a few times because the adventures of Dash Rendar had me hooked almost immediately. I recently discovered that Shadows of the Empire is now sitting on Steam, so you can bet your scruffy nerf herder ass that I’ll be downloading ASAP and getting on with another playthrough of this non-canon, nostalgia heavy beast of a game!
I think we all knew this was going to be on here somewhere right? You can’t talk about Star Wars games and not mention KOTOR. Developed by story game titans BioWare, KOTOR takes a look at the history of the Republic, and by history I mean the story is set 4000 years before the events of even the Phantom Menace! Although the massive time gulf between the game and the main series should probably mean no technology like they have during the age of The Empire, but no, lightsabers, droids and blasters are all more or less the same! The story of a republic soldier meeting and going on a galaxy-trotting adventure with a famous Jedi is one of the best storylines the franchise ever produced. All coming to a head with a staggeringly well executed twist that even now on – regardless of whatever playthrough of that game I happen to be on – still hits me like a wookiee after a few Jawa Juices. While the sequel improved on a few gameplay elements, there was nothing in that game that really measured up to the overall experience that the first KOTOR gives you.
There’s very little in games that I like more than the simple pleasure of boots on the ground gameplay. Give me a plain old objective and a gun to make it happen and I’ll get on with it! So the Battlefront games give me all that I want whilst also wearing the sweet cosy pyjamas of Star Wars fandom. Of course though Battlefront 2 is probably most famous for its own story mode, bringing in the canon Clone Trooper legion, the 501st.
You take part in famous battles from all across the Star Wars universe from the clone wars all the way to the battle of Endor during the galatic civil war! The biggest innovation from the last game was the addition of space battles. At the time these were awesome and made you feel like an integral part of an epic fight to destroy an enemy capital ship. However, looking back they really just went the same way every time, fly Inside the baddie ship, explosives on all the key parts and win! That samey kind of gameplay should be horrible, but honestly… That shit is awesome at all times!
Battlefront 2 didnt leave my PS2 for a full year after its release, it had so much going on and so many options for battles with various troopers, vehicles and even a few heroes and villians to keep the games going and going. Nothing since has really topped it, but hey, here’s hoping Fallen Order pulls it out of the bag!
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