Nothing in this game is truly good.
Not much is known about Big Ape Productions, the company that developed Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Lucasarts apparently picked the company at random to design to a game that would follow the release of the long awaited prequel to the Star Wars Trilogy. Upon release, The Phantom Menace was critically panned for a number of issues. Camera issues, stiff controls, lack of force powers; the list goes on. I've read a lot of reviews that say the issues stem from the fact that the game was rushed to be released on time with the movie. But judging by the companies sterling resume, which includes The Simpsons Wrestling and MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, I don't think it would have made a difference.
Sure, The Phantom Menace is a badly broken game, but it's a personal guilty pleasure for a few reasons. The first and biggest reason is, for some reason, I really enjoy being on the defensive end of the combat for once. The combat engine is very different from most Star Wars games. Instead of deflecting laser shots being an automatic function, like in the Jedi Knight games, it revolves around the entire combat gameplay in The Phantom Menace. It's a lot more fun then you think it would be, swinging your lightsaber back and forth, deflecting shots left and right, moving closer to your enemy, until you take him down. Honestly, if it wasn't for the amount of defense in the gameplay, the game would be impossibly difficult. It's already a hard enough game as it is.
The second reason is the voice acting, especially in the Tatooine levels of the game. Some of the voice acting is just simply hilarious. Each character seems to have there own unique, very authentic sounding voice. It kind of brings the game a little more to life. The puzzles are pretty interesting as well. While most of them are pretty simple, the later levels of the game have some pretty well done, and often challenging puzzles. Unfortunately, the game's issues do take quite a bit away from the good points of the game.
The camera is interesting, but awful overall. Instead of typical third-person games, which feature an over-the-shoulder camera, The Phantom Menace camera is almost at a top-down perspective. This allows enemies to endlessly fire at you from off-screen. It also makes jumping simple gaps a lot harder then it should be, resulting in much in-game death. Especially in the later Obi-Wan stages. The controls are a little stiff, but pretty basic and easy to get used to. The force push power is useless. It's pretty shitty that your only force power doesn't do a thing, but it was kind of a stupid idea in the first place, so whatever.
The graphics are actually not that bad for the time. The character models are okay, the environment is nicely detailed, the game is definitely nice to look at. I don't know. It's an okay game. It's kind of funny and kind of fun. Come to think of it, I now know the biggest issue with the game. Nothing in this game is truly good. It's only kind of.
