In its day Jedi Power Battles was a great brawler. Yet now it looks like a boring game with annoying mechanics.
With the release of a new trilogy Lucasarts decided to make a lot of Star Wars games. This one is loosely based on Episode I. They make use of characters from the movie to create a video game without caring about sticking to a script. Like the title might imply this game has the player use one of five Jedi to fight their way through 10 levels.
Each of the 5 Jedi knights all play the same with some minor variation in their special attacks. For example Obi Wan Kenobi has a thermal detonator along with his first force power being a saber dash. He is also faster than Qui Gon Jinn but he has less attack power. Most of these variations are minor and other than having access to different combo attacks faster it doesn’t change the game at all.Going by the percentage at the save screen the developer expected players to play through this game multiple times. I’m afraid this game doesn’t have that much replay value other than it being fun to play with a friend.
The main gameplay loop is mashing through a bunch of enemies to face a boss at the end of each level. Although this was never released in arcades it feels like a beat em up that was made to take all of your quarters. Most encounters aren’t really that tough but the platforming sections always feel a bit off. Constantly falling off platforms was the cause of many deaths compared to fighting droids. This game also has two unique levels based on a tank and a speeder bike. Both of them feel out of place since the tank just lets you blow everything away quickly and the vertical scrolling bike level doesn’t make it obvious what walls will kill the player.
For a game on the Dreamcast it doesn’t use the graphical capabilities that well. Between the graphical glitches and the rough looking textures I’m guessing this was a port of the PS1 version. They didn’t even include some nice looking CG cutscenes either. Some of the scenes that are in the game are very poorly done like the final battle with Maul ends up being drawn out a bit with the climatic fight ending with him choosing to jump into a pit. Which was pretty funny when I saw it for the first time but now it just seems lazy.
The one saving grace for this game back when it was released was the fact that in coop it was easier to look past the rough edges to find some fun. Yet looking at this game as a whole it isn’t very good at all. The combat never changes other than introducing annoying enemies. Whenever the game decides to make the player jump it almost never works out. Even the graphics look poor for a Dreamcast game. So overall Jedi Power Battles is just a bad game that isn’t worth playing.
