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Star Wars: The Clone Wars Review - Gamecube

The Clone Wars has always fascinated the Star Wars fan since it was briefly mentioned by Old Ben Kenobi at the start of Episode 4 some years back. Fans finally got a taste of the action with the climactic battle scenes at the end of Attack of the Clones. The story is filled out even more with the release of Clone Wars on GameCube and PS2.

GAMEPLAY

Beginning just before the arena battle scene that concludes the movie, you get to control Mace Windu, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in a variety of craft in attempt to stop Count Dooku and the Confederacy Army from creating a Force Reaver. An all out action game, you will take control of a number of different tanks, gunships, walkers and speeder bikes. Controlling them is relatively simple with the control stick, when an enemy is in range your target automatically locks on- once locked one you will have to use either a primary, secondary or special ability weapon to dispose of them. The gunship for instance has it's normal laser cannons, concussion missiles or composite-beam laser turrets (yes, that's right- the solid green laser seen in AOTC- awesome weapon). Nothing better than swooping over a million droids attacking your Clone troopers and blasting them with the composite-beam laser! Tanks can strafe from right to left with the L/R buttons while the same buttons speed or slow down the gunship. The different vehicles all handle quite differently and it does take some getting used to before you can master each vehicle. The fact that it automatically locks onto targets is both a good and bad thing. Not having to worry about locking onto to targets left, right and centre allows for more frantic fights- and believe me, some of these fights are intense. But on the other hand- when confronted with multiple targets that are close together- the target can switch from one to the other- for instance you could wind up in a situation where you've nearly destroyed a droid fighter tank- only to have the target lock onto a nearby AAT battle tank- receiving damage from both. Creating a button that could lock onto a selected target until it was destroyed could have easily solved this. You will start most missions with a squadron and by using the control pad you can order your squadron to attack selected targets or break formation and attack at will. This is similar to other Star Wars titles, Rogue Squadron and Rogue Leader.

The game moves at quite a fluent rate, especially considering there can be a large amount of vehicles and troops on screen at once. There is a little bit of popup and the designers have used a couple of tricks, like fog, which helps disguise this. There are plenty of fantastic set action pieces here, which are quite challenging and are a great deal of fun. Unfortunately, the designers have found a need to break the game up and have ... (continued next page)