Waggle your lightsaber like a true Jedi'Wield your Wii remote like a lightsaber' says the PR blurb on the back of the box. What it doesn't say is that if you do that, you end up with the cord from the Nunchuck wrapped around your head, pinning your other arm to the side of your face, with everyone else in the room looking on and laughing at you while you try to untangle your body from the cable. Worse still, if you're a lady (or, I guess, a fat gentleman) and you try to hold the Wiimote like a lightsaber, this game is responsible for the most boob/moob twanging I have ever witnessed. That is unless you have one of those new wireless Nunchucks, whereby you can hold the Wiimote like a lightsaber. Albeit the world's smallest, most gay lightsaber ever produced. 'I will strike you down!' 'What, with that thing! Why does your lightsaber have a condom on? Is this a new campaign for safe-sabering I'm not aware of?'
Ultimately I'm not telling many of you regulars anything new here. Apart from perhaps the boob-twanging. Most of you by now would have realised that the Wiimote can't tell where it is in 3D space and therefore we are not going to get the lightsaber wielding moments that we'd hoped for with this generation of consoles. But little Johnny and his new-to-the-gaming-scene, 'oh aren't Wii's wonderful? Have you seen that Wii Music yet? It's so good. You can stand there and play air flute and air drums and air saxophone. We played it for nearly an hour last night. What's that? No you don't look like a gormless twat when playing it at all. I know, I thought you would as well' parents won't know that.
But, and here comes the twist, it most likely won't bother them. Krome Studios (developers of the recently released Force Unleashed) is clearly aiming for that casual/young audience; the exact type of audience that won't realise just how shallow and ultimately how pointless the Wiimote integration is. You swing the Wiimote left and your character swings their lightsaber left. You swing it up, they swing upwards. To them they'll feel like they're in the game doing all of that. For the rest of us, we'll know that we could have got the exact same gameplay out of pressing buttons and a d-pad and that what gameplay there is, is as shallow as the controls.
Wiimote your waggle you will, hmmmm!
Playing through in single player you loosely follow the plot of the film and animated TV series and take on Dark Jedi in mini-boss battles. The cut-scenes that deliver the story are short but generally look very good indeed. At the end of the cut-scene you are then dumped into a fight against a Dark Jedi where you have to win two out of three rounds in order to progress. Except it's never actually you that delivers the blow that defeats your opponent. Instead they always get up after the final blow and then a cut-scene plays and shows you the type of moves that you really wished you could have done (such as force throwing an opponent more than 2 feet, or pulling a building down on to them). Annoyingly, as there is only a handful of Dark Jedi in the game (and only 10 playable characters in total), you'll have to face each one at least twice in an attempt at padding out the longevity. They don't change, they don't become any harder and they don't suddenly learn new moves. It's just the same Dark Jedi with a slightly different backdrop.
There are combos that your character can perform, but the most effective way of fighting is to just sit on the sofa and waggle the Wiimote side to side and up and down. I managed to finish the whole campaign doing this (after having tried properly for the first few levels and soon becoming bored of my character not always doing the move I had asked them to do) on the second hardest difficulty setting. It even has quick-time-event based sections of the fight, where you either have to follow movements shown on screen or waggle the Wiimote (something you should be a Jedi Master at by now) as fast as you can in order to get the upper hand. Quick-time-events definitely come from the Dark Side, and the sooner developers understand this, the better.
In multiplayer you get to take on your friends instead of the AI, but again these tend to degenerate into Wiimote-waggling fests (which appears to be the new button-mashing). And with only 10 characters to choose from (two of which being stupidly overpowered) and very similar move sets, there's very little to come back for. As my wife commented after one game: 'It's like Street Fighter with lightsabers' which is a pretty accurate analogy. Except that Street Fighter was great and this isn't.
Plenty to criticise there is, hmmmm!
Graphically 'Lightsaber Duels' is reasonable impressive and at times it really does look as good as the animated series it is based on. The animation can be a bit robotic at times but generally the graphics impress. They didn't scrimp on the audio either, with the original cast providing the voice-over work, although their lines are repeated every few seconds and are little more than 'you smell' putdowns. But to criticise 'Lightsaber Duels' for its presentation would be a little unfair, as it's one of the rare things it does reasonably well.
There is however plenty to criticise elsewhere. Whereas Force Unleashed featured lightsaber duels as an added extra to the fully-fledged main game, this title stretches them into a full priced game. To make matters worse the duels in Force Unleashed were actually better. It even had more playable characters. All of which leaves 'Lightsaber Duels' in that awkward position of not being offensively awful, but still being a game that is smaller and worse than an optional extra in a recently released game. While its target audience may not be disappointed if they woke up on Christmas morning and found this in their stocking, they're unlikely to be bowled over either, especially if they also have Force Unleashed in their collection. It's not a howler, but it's not the type of game that's going to keep the kids out of your hair for very long either.
Dead Space 2 sees Isaac return to the fight
(0) (07/12) 
Ugly bloke + Gorgeous girl scenarios...
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peej - on 25/11/2008 at 08:52 wrote:
What a pity. Seems that the quest for the perfect Wii-Saber game still hasn't been fulfilled.
Lets hope that the WiiMotionPlus does actually do the necessary it'll take to beef up the response of the Wiimote enough to make a lightsaber game possible.
One thing that someone needs to do is to work out a non-clunky way of attaching the nunchuck to the base of the Wiimote so you can use it like a proper lightsaber, but at the same time still move around with the thumbstick. If someone cracks that, games like this might work a lot better.
HairyArse - on 25/11/2008 at 20:13 wrote:
I always had my doubts that this would work as first suggested when the Wii was announced.
Here's hoping that a Wii Motion Plus version is released at some point in the future.
kentmonkey - on 26/11/2008 at 23:22 wrote:
I don't hold up much hope, to be honest. This is a dreadful attempt and I'm not confident that the Wii Motion Plus will sort out all of the problems.