Star Wars: The Clone Wars Review (Silenzeio)
As the Clone Wars rage on, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and his Padawan Ahsoka Tano are deployed to Ryloth to fend off a new Separatist invasion. However, elsewhere in the galaxy, new threats rise unexpectedly. An attack on a Republic space station, a mysterious crash of a Separatist warship all point to something much larger...
Republic Heroes is an action-adventure game that supports up to two players as they journey across four locations across various story chapters while playing as various notable Jedi and Clone soldiers. All the while battling the droid armies and... Much of the game's mechanics as it seems.
To start, for Win10+ users, Republic Heroes comes with a Games for Windows Live account process. If you have an XBOX account, congratulations! Not only can you sign into it and get XBOX achievements for this game, but you're actually able to SAVE your game progress! For those Win10+ users who ignore the signup/login for the since discontinued service or anyone playing on a system that isn't Win10+, you won't be able to save ANY of your progress! Hopefully you have the patience to sit through the rest of this horrible title in ONE go without any quitting.
Once you've gotten into the game itself and either have the ability to keep your progress or not, you're introduced to some of the worst controls, platforming, camera and mechanics i have ever had the misfortune to play. Even the tutorials are against you most of the time. As the game tried to point out that to hijack a vehicle from a droid i had to jump and left click above the vehicle. Not only was this completely false but it took me a solid few minutes of falling into death pits before happening to double tap my spacebar and landed on the vehicle before realising that this was only the start of worse things to come.
Combat in this game is a joke. When you're playing as the Jedi characters, the lightsaber is useless compared to the instant kill/hard push back of Force Wave. If charged, this is the most overpowered move of the game. A standard battle droid will just die to it and everything above it will die if they're pushed back into death pits. Playing as the Clones is alright, you'll just have to rely on shooting your way out of situations and maybe using the limited ammo but powerful pick up weapons to deal with more threatening enemies.
But Jedi characters can also perform 'Droid-Jak' moves, where double jumping onto a droid and using the basic attack will allow you to pilot the droid you're on... If the mechanics decide to work that is. Often enough I had B2 droids that were all painfully slow to turn and continued not to fire their wrist blasters despite being fully automatic, Sabotage droids that didn't launch themselves at enemies or an environmental blockage to progress the mission. But if the game was generous and decided to actually launch the droid, it would often go somewhere i didn't want it to. This was even worse during the final phase of the last boss fight as you have to turn these droids so that they face the boss all while the AI (if you're not forcing someone at gunpoint to play this game) runs laps and moves the camera so it ruined all of my shots at the boss. Not only that, but the Sabotage Droids were also very quick to appear and go invisible and ruin my attempt to grab them in the first place. The mine laying Chameleon Droids were also a nightmare to perform the move on as they share the same invisibility mechanic of the Sabotage Droid. Droidekas were a useless target to try and perform the move on because most of the time it just didn't work at all. In fact i was more often thrown off of them and lost any use of piloting them.
When it comes to certain enemies like Magnaguards and Crab Droids, you're better off using your Force input to just immediately destroy them with Force Kill as they are quite annoying to fight.
Killing enemies and picking up little blue glowing orbs will earn the player points that can be spent on buying cosmetic hats for characters to wear, combat upgrades, Droid-Jak ugrades, Droid Dance abilties (which is another ability added to your Droid-Jak prompts that makes the controlled droid and any others around you've bought the upgrades for dance uncontrollably and make for easy kills) and cheats.
When playing as the Jedi characters, you'll also face another one of this game's great mistakes. The platforming. If the game decides to co-operate with you, platforming will be decently intuitive. However in my experience it was the exact opposite and the game constantly failed to register where i was going/intending to go and made me fall to several deaths. Also hampering any platforming you try and do is the horrible camera Republic Heroes has. Both the platforming and terrible camera were more painful to experience during the final third act of the game.
So aside from how pitiful this game is in the most basic aspects of gameplay, do i have anything positive at all to say about this game? I do actually.
The story itself is actually decent for a Clone Wars arc. If the game's story were made into actual episodes instead i'd argue it would've been much more entertaining than this game ever could be.
The voice cast of the show lend their talents to the game which is great as the voice actors throw in some quite good performances.
And seeing a new villain in the mercenary Kul Teska was also quite cool. His menacing design makes him a fearful villain to be up against. However as this game was done pre-Disney takeover, his entire character is rendered non-canon.
Overall, would I recommend playing Republic Heroes? No. Not even to the most curious Star Wars fan interested in a game they haven't played or heard of before. If my newfound hatred of this game and its' every mechanic and system hasn't swayed you from wanting to give it a look, just watch the gameplay online somewhere. Or just read every other review that goes into exactly all the points i've made and click away from this store page.
Or get it as part of the twenty-six game bundle that Steam offers and NEVER install this.