Twilight of the Republic is a game that fans of The Clones Wars tv series have been waiting for, it features the look of the characters and the worlds but also the humor that the show brought forth.

There is trouble on Geonosis, someone has restarted a droid factory so the republic has sent four Jedi to investigate, Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ashoka Tano and Yoda. As they make their way through the ongoing battle and into the heart of the factory to confront the person behind it, perceptions are leed to be false, as even though General Grevious is there, he is not the one responsible, but the answers may lie in the memory banks of a droid also found in that place, the story plays it safe, but it does feel like it was pulled right from the tv show.


The story is only part of the package though as the gameplay is king here and unlike the playsets of 2.0 Twilight of the Republic does offer up significant depth to those players look for a real challenge. No matter which character you choose to start the adventure off with, most of the combat is going to play out the same, the big difference is in the force powers available to each of the Jedi, Anakin uses Force Pull, to bring enemies closer to him where as the others use Force Push, to help give them some more room to move about. Using the attack button will start some serious looking attacks, but the game does offer up an all new combat system, which allows players of a more advanced playstyle to use some combos that require some skill to pull off.

As you level up the characters you can unlock Force Jump, to help them get up higher and when you partner that in with the Force Dash they all have, you can really move around the world like nothing else. As you wrap up your mission on Geonosis you take off into space and there you are presented with space combat for the first time, which is quite something, flying the Jedi Starfighter around is a lot of fun and you can use the right stick you can do rolls and loops to help shake any enemies that are after you. The amount of time you will spend in combat in space is quite small, but each time does feel like a treat as it just seems to work. After you clean up the droids in space it is time to make the jump to lightspeed and head to your next destination Coroscant.


This is where things really shake up from any of the playsets that have come before it, around the Jedi Temple are various parts of the giant planet city for you to explore; there are people to talk to, missions to undertake and even hidden items to locate. After a while challenges will open up and you will then have the chance to do time trials and collection games to earn sparks, but should you desire you can also perform range of side mission that will see you delivering hot food to people, building a robot dance troupe or even rounding up a heard of Bantha’s. When you venture to the other worlds, Tattooine and Naboo, the options are just as robust and it does show that the developers did listen to the feedback from 2.0

As you play each mission they will rank you in terms of your completion, some will always get you one star, they are usually straight forward missions, others will be out of three and they will require you to meet certain conditions to achieve the best result. Some missions will require you to play as a specific person like Yoda or Han Solo or sometimes complete an additional task, like knocking people of a ledge or riding a Bantha, though because you find out about this after the fact, there is a temptation to go back and complete them again in order to fill all the objectives and get those three stars.


The problem is though that once you done that, once you have completed every side mission, raced all the pod racing you can there is very little to do in the world, it just becomes a place to be. There are the occasional times when enemies will come in an attempt to take you down, but they are fewer than you might think. Which is a shame, the worlds are interesting enough that you will want to spend time in them, but without anything to do they feel empty. You can continue to take part in Pod Races much longer than the rest of the game, but they lack the speed in order to make them feel like real pod racing and they also have the problem of using the same track each time, just in different directions. Exploring the objects in space that you can land on are a mix of fun and tedious as some contain fun things to do, others just contain challenges, which when that is the result, flying all that way is irksome.

One area that the game does really well is in how it looks, I noted before how the story feels like it came right from the TV show, well so do the looks, each of the characters looks like their counterpart in many ways, there are some slight differences like with Obi-Wan missing his armor pieces, but they are small changes and don’t really detract from the experience of basically playing an interactive version of the show. The worlds are really well put together, Geonosis looks right and Tattooine looks nice and barren, just how you might expect to find it. Naboo sadly does not offer much outside of a hangar and some corridors, but it still matches what we know of it. Coroscant is the star, it is the seat of power for the Jedi and it also has the most things to do around it.


When you are first battling your way into the heart of the droid factory or racing through the canyons on Tattooine, hearing the score from John Williams sells that it is Star Wars and fans of the series will be happy to hear the same voices from the show appear here as well, with each character sounding right, even if they don’t speak right. Whomever wrote the script for this game must be influenced a bit by the dark side of the force as it was very strange to hear Jedi stating things like no-one opposes the Jedi. Hearing those lines and others like it did break the experience a little for me, which is a shame as there is very little else that does that.

Fans of the tv series are going to enjoy each moment that Twilight of the Republic brings, even though when it’s over, it really is over. While each of the elements works together hearing the wrong phrases breaks that immersion, but it in of itself is nothing to spoil this wonderful experience.


Thanks to Disney Interactive Australia for supplying the game for review