I just finished the Wii version Saturday (after renting it from Blockbuster Friday).
When I played, the game felt like someone took star wars lightsabre rpgs from the last ten years, put them in a blender, but didn't hold the "blend" button long enough, giving it a chunky, inconsistent feel.
*Potential Spoilers*For example, the "aboard the Rogue Shadow" feature. It was basically a primitive version of the "aboard the Ebon Hawk" feature of KotOR. It was cool at first, but not being able to converse freely with the crew quickly became annoying.
The Force Powers were reminiscent of the RotS Video game; when object X has a blue aura around it, you grab it and throw it around. They greatly improved this feature however. The freedom with which you could manipulate the objects added lots of fun to the game.
Character customization was similar to the systems used by Jedi Academy. You could choose between a number of costumes your character could wear and could choose your lightsabre’s color and hilt (plus 1 of 8 effect crystals).
The Wii graphics weren’t as good as the other systems’. However, the short load and save times and high performance (let alone the duel mode) quickly made up for this. The graphics actually reminded me of the cutscene graphics from Bounty hunter, but more improved (with the exception that some of the mouth movements were primitive if you compared them with Xbox titles. Most likely done to make the XBOX 360 and PS3 versions look better by comparison).
Which brings me to the cutscenes. Playing the Wii version, it almost felt like they were punishing the player for not buying the Xbox 360 or PS3 version. They actually dummed-down the cutscene graphics from the Xbox 360 quality, making them about the same as the gameplay graphics. The effect of keeping the cutscenes high quality on gameplay would have been miniscule.
The health bar was poorly placed; being at the top rather than at the bottom (which is usually more common). However, it didn’t affect gameplay as much as the poor camera maneuvering did. It lacked the ability to move the camera independently (which could have easily been done by tilting the nun-chuck, like in Marvel Ultimate alliance). If you wanted to look a different direction, you had to point your character that direction and wait for the auto camera centering to kick in. This made certain boss battles extremely difficult; whenever I’d grab an object to throw, I couldn’t change the camera angle to see the boss, forcing me to blindly toss the object in the boss’s general direction, usually causing me to miss.
As for the multiplayer, the only letdown so far is the fact that you can’t play against a computer player; you have to play against another human with a wiimote and nun-chuck. Thus, since I have only one Wiimote and nun-chuck, I haven’t been able to test it yet (a friend with a Wiimote and nun-chuck will be over tomorrow, so I’ll test it then). The selection of characters is nice, but the 10 different versions of the same character is a bit redundant.
The plot was a bit shallow, and too fast paced to relate to or comprehend fully. The characters divulged little, and lacked depth. If the storyline had, for example, KotOR-esque depth, the game would have been much better. The ending cutscene was also poorly constructed and executed, leaving this player unsatisfied. Most of the cutscenes also had a habit of sounding like one of those third person commercials; two characters would talk about something that happened in SW layman’s terms as if they wanted to make sure the player understood the implications of what just happened and its impact on the overall star wars storyline. It would have been better to actually add depth instead (they used a "databank" function to tell everyone's background after you encounter them. This was fine for enemies and non-crew members, but learning about the crew members by talking to the crew would have been better). Also, the apprentice's personality was inconsistent, and his battle taunt were waay too over dramatic. One minute he's complaining about Juno messing with his ship and being generally han solo-ish, the next he's acting like emokin, and others he's acting like luke in either ESB or ANH.
Chad Vader's Performance as Darth Vader would have been perfect if he had better lines (humorously during the first segment, when Vader tells the apprentice to kill all aboard, some of the Chad Vader performance seeps in).
Overall, the game was fun, but the story would have been better with more depth.
I'd give the game an 8, but the plot a 5.
buy or rent?
Rent first. If you think its great, or if its the Wii version and you like the multiplayer, buy it when it drops in price by at least the cost of renting it.
If you don't like it enough to buy it, its short enough to finish in a 2-3 days, so you can finish it before returning it.
Anyway, I think it'll still be fun but seriously, wtf is with the health bars? In the demo that one thing pissed me off. At least give him some armor or some EXCUSE to have a larger life bar, dammit! All it takes is a little common sense...
They basically copy/pasted the force power/health bar/force bar system from the RotS Video game (but made the mistake of putting it at the top of the screen rather than the bottom), and used a death/respawn system similar to Lego Star Wars (you have infinite respawns, but each time you die you lose force power upgrade points).
