It’s Happening Again…
HIGH The platforming is only slightly tedious now!
LOW The final fight with Darth Maul is still basically impossible.
WTF Someone at Lucasfilm Games keeps approving these things.
Star Wars: Episode One: Jedi Power Battles is the latest Star Wars game remaster from Aspyr Studios, and I have to say that even after all of my trepidation over their last few remasters that this is somehow worse than I expected. Mad props, I did not see that coming.
Jedi Power Battles is a 2.5D brawler which sees up to two players fighting random enemies as Jedi across linear stages. The scenarios include familiar locales taken from The Phantom Menace and mostly involve fighting droids, but sometimes bandits or mercenaries. There are also two barely functional vehicle sequences — one in a tank that can be hopped out of to explore on foot, the other on a STAP hovercraft driven in the worst 3D Galaga clone to bear the Star Wars license.
Of the playable leads, anyone wanting to retain their sanity will play the campaign as Adi Gallia, who easily has the most combat utility due to speed and stun ability. Qui-Gon is too slow, Obi-Wan is bland, while Mace, Ki Adi, and Plo Koon are just different, worse versions of Adi. Why are all these extra Jedi who barely appeared in the movie here? Because reasons, as there’s barely any story to speak of — this is only about beating up enemies to score points.
The player can acquire temporary power-ups, such as making their saber the size of Staten Island so it can actually hit an enemy before they’re nose to nose. There’s also a random box that grants players a one-use item only useful to Plo Koon or Adi Gallia. Why? Because everyone else gets a grenade, yet Plo and Adi both turn into invincible balls of death for a few seconds, damaging every enemy just by running into them.
Players can also find bonus points they’ll need for a scoring system that’s tied to progression in the least intuitive way possible. See, it’s not about spending points on the upgrades, but hitting certain thresholds to then get access to stat boosts, and every character levels up individually, so that means grinding the campaign missions for each of them. In theory this adds replay value.
The combat is pedestrian button mashing, with a combo system struggling to register single button combos, let alone more complex strings. I’m not asking for Bayonetta-tier smoothness from a game first released on the original PlayStation, but even for the ’90s, this was bad input buffering. As an example of the poor inputs, it’s not possible to jump and hit the attack button, but there is a dedicated jump attack button. Yes, an entire face button that could’ve been used for dodging, parrying, or literally anything else is utilized to perform an attack that should’ve been the first combo any player would typically try. Players can also block, yet while blocking it’s impossible to do anything else, so it’s just delaying the inevitable.
There’s also platforming that will eat up most of a player’s limited lives. At least this is a more arcade-style experience with bonus lives that can be acquired, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not irritating.
If that wasn’t bad enough, how about getting ringed out by a boss into the foreground of the level! The combat never grows more complex, B1 battle droids can shrug off a lightsaber like it’s a hairbrush, and worse still, this remaster somehow manages to have tons of graphical oversights like huge gaps in level environments without any assets or adjustments made to account for a wider aspect ratio than standard definition 4:3. It’s also easy to see objects rendering (or not rendering) in ways they aren’t supposed to. These aren’t elaborate 3D models — even just extending the environmental textures a couple of inches would’ve done the minimum required here.
While these issues were left unattended, the remaster team put time towards converting a bunch of random enemies into “new playable characters” for various modes.
It’s also particularly impressive that someone went to the effort of re-rendering the cinematics to change Adi’s saber from an orange-red to blue. Placing a priority on whether a saber color matches a different canon’s rules than the storyline is more important than fixing Qui-Gon’s eyes, which are still untextured, soulless black orbs for half of the intro cinematic. To quote anti-sand propagandist Anakin Skywalker, that’s “absolutely wizard.”
It’s kind of perfect though, because this is such a lifeless, soulless cash-in of a remaster. Even by the standards Lucasfilm Games is evidently quite comfortable with, this is bad, and I refuse to believe that this is the best Aspyr can do. Their Tomb Raider remaster demonstrated they are capable of more. I don’t know if Lucasfilm isn’t giving them enough time or resources, but this is simply unacceptable.
Between this disaster, the Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords’ lack of promised restored content, Republic Commando’s still-unpatched camera bug on Switch, Battlefront Classic Collection being an unmitigated disaster on almost every front and Bounty Hunter’s questionably redesigned gameplay, we can’t keep accepting that half-baked, unfinished remasters are the best that can be done.
It’s not even like Jedi Power Battles is the most beloved game from its era. Why release it in this state, and an even better question is, why release it at all? If there were at least new graphics, or if they bundled the GameBoy version as a bonus extra, I could at least rate it a little higher, but no. This is not the droid that anyone is looking for.
Final Score: 2.5 out of 10
Buy Star Wars: Episode One: Jedi Power Battles – PC – PS – XB
Disclosures: This game is developed by Aspyr and published by Lucasfilm Games. It is currently available on PC, PS5, XBS/X, and Switch. This copy of Jedi Power Battles was provided by the publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 5 hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign and bonus modes, and it was not completed.
Parents: This game is Rated T by the ESRB, for containing Violence. If your child can watch Star Wars, they can play this. Not that they should, but that’s a matter of it being a pain to play — impatient kids in particular are likely to get very frustrated. There’s nothing gory, no expletives (fictional or otherwise) and the graphics are so low detail it’s hard to view any elements as anything more than rudimentary computer graphics.
Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are multiple visual prompts doubling for audio prompts. There are no subtitles options, but also next to no spoken dialogue, with visual context prompts compensating for this. I would say that it’s not fully accessible.
Remappable controls: No, this game does not offer remappable controls. Playes can only swap between Modern and Classic bindings, which just alters which face buttons do what and whether a bumper or trigger is used for Force powers.
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