Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes Review - Xbox 360

4

Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 3
Audio: 6
Multiplayer: 5
Innovation: 5

As the Star Wars universe continues to expand, Lucasarts continues to create more video games for the fans to enjoy. Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes is the latest iteration in an infinitely growing franchise, which pits you in the middle of one of the largest Star Wars battles ever to take place. Play as numerous characters in both solo play and co-operative play as you attempt to stop a techno assassin, Kul Teska, from pursuing his galactic domination scheme.

Gameplay

Republic Heroes follows the LEGO series closely in terms of gameplay. There is no penalty for dying, and you basically progress through the game at whatever pace you choose. The game boasts 40 missions, but each mission can be completed in less than five minutes and the player is encouraged to finish it as quickly as possible. Your health comes in the form of bars, and once your bars run low you run the risk of dying if you don't take cover and allow regeneration to occur. If you do die, you will spawn nearby in a matter of seconds with your health back at full. Throughout the whole game, you have an ally with you at all times. We thought that if both of you die at the same time you may have to start earlier in the mission, but nope, you just respawn where you are. Given the game has no penalty for death, we played through on the hardest difficulty and were able to complete the game in its entirety in a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

The game is third person, and you have no control of the camera. This is sometimes a problem as some of the enemies can move off-screen and become unseeable. One situation we arose involved an enemy getting pushed behind a wall, and it took quite a while to find the right angle at which a grenade could be lobbed in to fix the problem. These sorts of errors in development make for a painstaking game that even children wouldn't enjoy. The gameplay is not all bad. Some of the rail shooter levels, though short, were enjoyable. And missions where you jump on mounts and blast everything you see showed signs of promise, but the overall game fails to deliver on the basic gameplay formalities that we enjoy, unnoticeably, in many other games out today.

As you progress through the game you collect orbs which can be used as currency. The shop in Republic Heroes allows you to upgrade everything, from custom masks and hats to dance moves for the droids (yes, really. There's an achievement for killing 25 of them while they're breaking loose). Fortunately, there are also upgrades that are beneficiary, which mainly focus on damage and using the force, and would be essential if not for the almost rewarding death system. The only punishment for dying is that you lose 10 orbs, but these can easily be regained in many of the missions where points are given away ...