Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

The Good
The cinematic cutscenes in between chapters are in line with a Star Wars movie with great conspiracy plot elements put in for that epic thrill. The setting for the chapters brings both familiar territory like Hoth and fascinating new places in space to explore and complete your missions.

Level design is good and worth exploring. Your weapons do have an auto-aim to assist you. This game does put all the great stuff that we all know and love in the Star Wars franchise including TIE fighters, stormtroopers and Boba Fett. Fancy fighting a walker entirely on foot with a laser pistol. Sadly the game is only decent skin deep.

The Bad
This game is absolutely packed with some of the aggravating and problematic mechanics and gameplay in a Star Wars video game. The flying sequences are among the most awkward in the genre of space shooting, made only easier by the first person view. In the first chapter, the snowspeeder's power cable is useless against the AT-AT walkers, it looks like spinning a web around it. Your only chance is to shoot them down.

The third person shooter levels feel awkward. The wonky controls can do little to get you through. You can't strafe and shoot smoothly. The camera rotation and positions don't always give you time to target your enemy, while you're being shot at, unless you're really far away. Jumping is a major chore in the levels. If you don't aim the camera perfectly as you jump a gap, you'll most likely fall to your death. Falls are your number one enemy from beginning to end. The jetpack has a horrendous tendency to make you overshoot from exactly where you intended to land. Even worse are the slippery slopes that send you zooming off cliffs, even when you're being careful. Passing the later levels requires you to die and replay lots of times and stack on lives, before you can choreograph a successful level play, because you can't save your game anywhere mid-level. To top it off, there are virtually no health pickups to preserve your current life.

The choc-blocky graphics are lacking in both texture and colour variety, especially the level surfaces. Here and there presentation is lacking with overly bold text placed in some screens. The classic crawl opening sequence moves a lot slower than it does in the films. The resolution works for everything except the HUD, making it difficult to indicate the weapon you're using and how much ammo and health you have.

The Bottom Line
This game will certainly keep you playing for many hours albeit with frustration as you grind your playing skills to pass a level. It seems apparent that LucasArts took some ideas from their Rebel Assault series, but forgot to make them work well. This could've been a decent game if not for the existing issues. One has to wonder if this game was actually finished by the time of its release. It is what it is, with a nice amount of Star Wars lore. If you're accustomed to Tomb Raider and Syphon Filter, you won't be happy with this one.