Yeah, but it's no X-Wing
Written: Mar 25 '02 (Updated Mar 25 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Slick, easy to pick up, fast to play, good story
Cons: To short, limited control.
The Bottom Line: Nice eye candy, don't look forward to any expansion packs.
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| xadrian's Full Review: Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter for PlayStation 2 |
I played this first on my brother in law's PS2 and I really liked it. It was a little campy but enjoyable. I recently purchased it for the PC and it's about the same. Not bad. I'm going to use a lot of X-Wing comparisons, because it my mind it's still the best of the space combat flight sim games of all time. (All you Wing Commander goons keep quiet.)
I like games that you can just jump into and play for 15 mins after work or between hockey games. I don't have a lot of time to spend on one mission creating a new world, or evolving a civilization or flying across The Channel for 30 mins to crash on the beach. I like to get in, smash and blast, and get out. This game suits me just perfect. There are 6 controls tops. Flying, firing, firing something else, zooming, and throttle. Yeah you can tell your wingmen to cover or attack, but that gets in the way of getting all those medals. For a comparison, let's say X-Wing is an open source browser and Starfighter is AOL. It's pretty, works pretty well, but not a lot of options.
The control is smooth as well. I'm a little upset that my force feedback stick doesn't work with it, but that's small potatos. The flying isn't bad, it's even close to difficult when you're planet side. I'm not a big fan of the bouncing of the ground or other ships to face a good 90° from where you were. Very disconcerting.
The bad? First off, it's too short. I played on medium difficulty and at least beat it in one sitting (about 3-4 hours.) I have to go back and play them all to get the gold medals to unlock everything, but this was a very short story. This pales in comparison to the campaigns of X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Even Starlancer was longer than this (another good game for you star jockeys.) I would have really liked the characters a little more branching away from the story, do their own thing. However, without more customization of the ships, it's not like you have to get used to anything new. I was hoping for longer flights, more capital ships, more variance of craft, more story, just more. This was a teaser, an appetizer. I'm now ready for the main course.
What else lacks is the ship focus. The game is called 'Starfighter' but it has got very little to do with the ships other than you're flying them. You don't get to pick the kind of ship you can fly, or the character. You can load weapons. You can't adjust power levels, you can't view briefings or tactical maps. I think the story they stuck themselves in left very little room for this. In X-Wing you're nameless and faceless, you don't have a CGI character that you 'become' in the cockpit. This story should have started long before it did, giving you the option to spend money on your ship. Amp it up a bit, get some nice weapons, stronger shields, smarter droid, faster engines.
The other downer was that it's a typical console game. You have to unlock levels, how Nintendo. If I have to do a level over again, make it because I died, not because I didn't shoot down every invisible probe so I can go to the bber-testing level that has nothing to do with the story. It's a weird shift to PC.
In conclusion (that's my college talk for I'm done now) I would have liked a deeper game. Not more bells and whistles, the game looks and sounds fine, very pretty and entertaining. But like the web commercials, I need more content.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
xadrian
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Member: Ben Rollman
Location: Pflugerville, TX
Reviews written: 79
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
IT monkey by day, artist and LEGO builder by night.
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