Star Wars™: Episode I: Jedi Power Battles™ Reviews

Aspyr, I like every game you made in the past childhood. I'm really looking forward to the last 3 Tomb raider and True Crime games. Can't wait to buy the complete collection of every game you've made (remastered). Keep them coming up!

This game didn't hold up to my childhood memories, Jesus

I case Winnkys ever tests me on my recollection of my reviews - this game is called Jedi Power Battles

Once you get to the scooter section, brace yourselves because you are going to have your ears blasted. My friend and I couldn't hear each other for a solid 5 minutes.

Despite all the negativity I'm about to spew, this is a nostalgic game for me that I used to play on the PS1 as a small child. I thought I was going to be biasedly in favour of it, but I guess not! Poorly made. So many frustrating bugs (the worst being falling through solid ground to your death), and the combat is just awful: from the delay after button presses, to being able to exploit bosses by spamming the basic attack button. There's next to no narrative, so if you're not already familiar with [i]The Phantom Menace[/i], you probably won't understand what's happening. Most levels just hop from one to the next with no cutscenes (minus a couple of instances) or anything to fill the gaps. The cherry on top was when [spoiler]Darth Maul just casually jumped into the pit at the end; they didn’t even bother animating his death.[/spoiler] I laughed out loud.

At the time of original release, the best Star Wars console game I had ever played; this release brings it to modern PCs and makes it very accessible. I loved Star Wars as a kid, and the idea of playing as a Jedi and fighting lightsaber battles should be one of the coolest things ever. However, I never cared for the early Star Wars games. First of all, Star Wars video games were mainly ripoffs of popular genres at the time: The NES/SNES games were all just side-scrollers, which were popular at the time, and then you had effectively Star Wars: DOOM, Star Wars: Battlefield, and Star Wars: Age of Empires II coming later. I hadn’t played Rogue Squadron yet (I think it was like $70 on N64 back then—too expensive for my taste—but I would play it around 2002 on PC), so, besides that, this was the first Star Wars game that I had seen that actually looked interesting enough for me to buy. I was correct. This game was the first Star Wars game that I’d seen and played that made me feel like a Jedi Master tearing it up and doing all kinds of awesome lightsaber moves. AND it was 2-player co-op. It was a dream come true. I had a blast playing, but, unfortunately, I couldn’t make it past level 6 in co-op mode when you had to both jump onto the car that flew underneath the bridge. And I think my save file got corrupted or something and so I couldn’t beat it (I may have played it later, but I don’t remember—playing the final level this time through felt familiar). Fast forward to today, and when I saw that they were rereleasing Jedi Power Battles, I was pumped. Unfortunately, the PlayStation Classic crashes if you try to play it on that mini-console, so I couldn’t go back to it. It ended up being for the best, since this came out and brings improved graphics to make the experience even better. Yes, I’ll overlook some of the rough edges because of nostalgia, but I’d recommend that anyone who likes beat-em-ups and 3D platformers try this game and feel one of the best early games to use the Star Wars license. 
The Positives -This game is pure lightsaber awesomeness. You basically run through levels set in settings from the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace movie and slash everything in sight with your lightsaber. Yes, it’s based on the Dreamcast version of the game and so you can’t damage the environment for points, but I actually prefer it to save a few seconds of my gameplay when trying to get the highest score. Speaking of lightsabers, they corrected the lightsaber colors in this remaster, so my favorite playable character, Mace Windu, has a choice of the original blue or his actual purple lightsaber. -The game has been made more accessible to what I remember it being (I could be wrong—I was playing in co-op before and single player now). You get a ton of lives, plenty of checkpoints, and a decent number of health items (they are placed strangely sometimes, though—I’ll get one at full health in one part and then be almost dead with no health in sight in another). The graphical improvements also make it easier to see everything and make the jumps from the original. And the ugly blurry graphics of the PlayStation are gone—yay for nice visuals! -This game was one of the earlier Star Wars console games that really gave you something close to the movie. They use real pictures of the actors from the movies in the character select screen, and the characters in the game resemble the actors as well. It’s so awesome. The abilities, while nothing like the movie, give you something closer to what would be real than the modern movies’ force-can-do-anything nonsense. Basically, you can throw your lightsaber (long-range attack) or have it spin around you (close attack). You fight the robot army, and the abilities of the enemies and bosses like Darth Maul feel like the movie. -The combat is interesting—it’s not just a beat-em-up game, as you have to deflect blaster fire with good block timing and dodge enemy attacks when they are invulnerable instead of just mindlessly hacking away. -The platforming, once you get the hang of it (and now with the better graphics), is not that bad. You will die a few cheap deaths still, but it’s nothing as bad as I remember it as a kid on the PlayStation. -The cut scenes are high quality. I don’t remember them being that good on the PlayStation, but the animations plus the improved size and resolution of modern screens really made them beautiful to look at. I can’t believe this game is 25 years old and had cut scenes that good. -The characters are awesome—they give you many, and the remaster has even more. It’s a fantastic feature of the game. Though I love Mace Windu, so I can’t speak to how well they all play the whole way through the game. The Negatives -The game takes a little bit to get to work correctly. When I first loaded it up, I was playing in slow motion. I had no idea what was going on. It turns out, NVIDIA’s V-Sync options lock it to 30 frames per second, and so the game moves at 50% speed. When I turned it off, though, it seemed to go in fast motion (it might’ve just been my perception, but I’m pretty sure it was going super-fast). I restarted, and it appeared to right itself because it felt perfect and fluid. -The game has some bugginess to it despite your usually fluid motions. For example, you can fall to your death pretty easily with imperfect environments (you can fall off things when it doesn’t look like you should) and controls (your first jump goes far, so if you hit the second jump too early, you won’t make your jumps). But this version of the game feels a little more forgiving than the original in that department—might have something to do with the larger screen and better graphics. But it feels like it’s a lot easier to land on platforms once you get the hang of it. -If you like a challenge, you might not like it since you need to collect all of the power-ups to max out your points, and if you’re really good then you won’t need a lot of power-ups and will cruise through most of the game (minus any accidental fall deaths from the environment and controls). Overall, I can’t say enough about this game. It absolutely has several flaws coming from the PS1 era of gaming history, but once I got the game to work at the right speed and got the controls working for me, it was smooth sailing minus a few times where I fell off a ledge unexpectedly or got overwhelmed by enemies (it’s the most likely way to die). If you don’t mind older games with a little quirkiness in how they look and play, it’s a fantastic game that I loved then and really enjoyed going back to today. And I even got less miserly with my force use and was able to take down bosses much more easily by being more liberal with my force powers. I had a lot of fun, and I hope you do, too!

The jank and AI in this outdated game is hilariously bad, even when playing with a friend. The first hour, you think you're having a good time playing this retro Star Wars game, but overtime the jank starts to get under your skin. You grow frustrated, annoyed even. The controls, the camera, questionable hit boxes, quest objectives, everything is an enemy. The battle droids are somehow doing Tekken combos on you, or uppercuts you like its Mortal Kombat. Padme, as an escort mission, likes to run ahead of you and purposely gets shot multiple times while running towards Super Battle Droids. You fail the mission, and you have to start all over again. The level designs are long, tedious, and wack. For some reason, Darth Maul's orb sentry droids have multiplied into a whole army, and even follows you from Tatooine to Coruscant. Platforming can be surprisingly difficult, but not in a good way. Sometimes, your character of choice doesn't get enough distance or momentum, and you will fall into the abyss, regardless of how you're playing. Sometimes, you'll encounter an enemy who waits patiently for you to jump over the gap, just to shoot you down while you're in mid-air, causing you to fall to your death. Word of advice? If you're going to purchase and play this game, for your sanity, please do not play this game solo. You will have a bad time. It may as well be a rage bait type of game. Otherwise, have fun, I guess? If you enjoy pain and agony, this game is for you.

I bought it to play with my kid and I ended up loving it more than him. A very fun 2 play couch coop game.