Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The force will be with everyone in this exciting, gorgeous, and imaginative game. New weapons and a tougher challenge await any Jedi who steps into this super sequel to Super Stars Wars.

I will admit that I thought that there was no way that any game could match the original, but Lucas Arts comes through once again with this excellent sequel. There are many new scenes and backgrounds, and the excellent play control was maintained. There are very few games of this caliber available, so this is not one to let slip by. Hard to say much else, the game is just simply incredible. Well worth the price sticker...

This Super Star Wars sequel boasts the same fantastic graphics and movie-quality soundtrack of the first. You go from Hoth to Degobah to Cloud City until you take on Darth Vader mano-a-mano.

Best of all, there's an ambitious 3D stage where you pilot a snowspeeder to destroy mammoth AT-AT Walkers! The scaling is a bit choppy by today's standards, but it's still cool to fly around freely and trip up the Walkers with tow cables. After Hoth, you head to the swamps of Dagobah, and then onto the beautiful Cloud City for an encounter with Boba Fett. The final stage pits Luke against Darth Vader in a dramatic climax that had me absolutely mesmerized. A much-needed password mechanism is provided so you can save your progress between stages. The main problem with Empire is its severe difficulty, which is aggravated by cheap hits you can't see coming. Who in the hell came up with the idea for "spouting crystals" in the Hoth stages?! Also, slowdown does rear its head when the action gets hectic. Even so, Empire's sky-high productions values, excellent controls, and fascinating stages make it an experience worth having.

Grafiken är stilig och ljudet är i topklass. Enda besvikelsen är "Star Wars"-scrollen, ni vet texten som försvinner in i bilden. Den är patetiskt långsam och hackig.

Although it didn’t have as great of an impact as the original, Super Empire Strikes Back does enough right to make it a worthwhile trip through the galaxy. Its new gameplay additions (Force Powers & the double jump), and its ESB setting inserted into the good ole’ SSW engine make it a worthy play for any Star Wars fan. Its extreme difficulty and unbalanced level structure are the only things keeping this one from besting its Master.

Even with the problems, a ray of brilliance shines through in the way each level manages to deliver basically non-stop action at a hectic and fun pace. It's still good, but probably not as great as you recall.

The game kicks off with a nightmarish trek through a slippery ice world (the programmers have taken to Hoth like a bull to a red rag) in which you'll spend huge amounts of time falling into the contrived spiky pits that litter the place. And yet the stages set on Dagobah which follow on later, are best tackled by closing your eyes, holding down RIGHT and pressing Y and B a lot. And the energy meter is a complete mystery to me, its reading seeming to bear no relation to what happens on the screen. You can cruise along happily through a level for ages without it falling at all, but then suddenly, within the space of a few seconds, and without you doing anything noticeably crap, it can just completely disappear and your dead.

While I really enjoyed the movie, I just couldn't find myself enjoying this game very much. The control needs more work and seems sloppy (even when not standing on ice) and the game is just plain HARD! You never really get a chance to defend yourself because everything is attacking you all at once. On the plus side, the music is very good and follows the theme of the movie correctly. Now, about that difficulty...

Jag älskade faktiskt varje sekund av spelet, men sådan självinsikt har jag att det framförallt beror på att det står Star Wars på asken och för att musiken är av John Williams, inte nödvändigtvis för att spelet är så himla bra.

It had to happen eventually. The only thing LucasArts loved more than pimping out its Star Wars franchise, was making easy money. So when Super Star Wars became the new buzzword, you could have bet dollars to doughnuts that you'd be seeing a sequel. This is that game.