Another game down for the holidays,
this one relatively a mystery to me. My little
expectations were pointing towards another bland
Star Wars game with the same old setting, mixed
in with more of this 'tactical strategy' I explored
in Rainbow Six.
The game ended up, in fact,
being quite a good looking shooter with enjoyable
gameplay; but not without its flaws.
The highest points for SWRC
go to the level design. You battle through three
episodes - Geonosis, Assault Ship and Kashyyyk.
I won't pretend to be familiar with these places,
or the entire Star Wars story for that matter,
as I'm definitely not a Star Wars fan (and yes
I've seen all six).
Geonosis is some desert world,
while the Assault Ship episode all takes place
within a ship that you must regain control of,
and is ultimately the dullest of the episodes.
Kashyyyk is a world inhabited by Wookies, as
you attempt to rescue a Wookie leader. The highlights
were the rooms built out of huge wooden trees.
It wasn't as good as Serious Sam II's attempt
on the giant tree village, but everything still
looked good as there was a decent mix of outdoor
terrain and indoors.
Design was packed with detail
and the Unreal Engine 2 was put to good use.
The only niggle with design is that some of
the levels and rooms became a little repetitive.
Overall it reminded me of Halo. Similar design
settings; only looking much, much better.
The gameplay was a mixed bag.
Overall it was fun with your three team members
improving the experience. They weren't stupid,
but certainly lacked the skill of a multiplayer
bot. They worked best when placed behind a structure
and instructed to use grenades or the sniper
rifle.
The tactics with your soldiers
were all fairly easy. Tell them to charge in,
hold back, open a door, sit behind something
and snipe. When they die you or another soldier
can revive them, and when your own player dies
you can also be revived. I found this to be
much more enjoyable than having to reload. Your
ultimate death comes when you're all killed
and there's no one left to revive any of the
team. A lot of the enemies in SWRC can take
some firepower, so you definitely need all of
your team members.
Unfortunately the gameplay
can be frustrating at times. There's one particular
enemy that flies overhead which is far too hard
and can take your entire team out in 30 seconds,
while some of the other enemies such as the
Super Droid or Spider Boss become a real bore
as your all blasting away for an eternity. The
Droids, which are weak and hopeless, end up
being the most enjoyable enemy. But overall
most of them aren't that fun to fight and there's
not a huge variety in enemies as it is. What
is there, has fairly average AI.
A few times the gameplay suddenly
got extremely difficult with just too much thrown
at you at once alongside endless replicating
machines which you need to shut down. This is
the other major problem with gameplay. Throughout
the game your tasked with turning off these
endlessly enemy-spawning replicators. It takes
20 seconds to shut one down, and after doing
it 50 times it just gets mind-numbing. I can
understand their inclusion to spice up gameplay
a little, but in the end they became tedious
and annoying.
The final problem which spoiled
gameplay, was the abysmal collection of weapons.
You get the Quake2-cloned blaster, a machine
gun which annoyingly shoots sideways and takes
quite a few levels before you get used to it.
The sniper rifle aka Quake 2 railgun which never
has enough ammo. Your fourth weapon is a grenade
launcher I think; but I'm unsure since I only
used it a couple of times due to it only carrying
four grenades at once and not wanting to waste
them. The fifth weapon varies depending on what
episode your in. The shotgun in episode 2 is
decent, but all your alternatives in the final
episode are junk. Even worse, the final level
didn't seem to have ammo for any of the weapons
I had.
If a mod was created that removed
most of the replicators and gave us much improved
weapons and perhaps tweaked some of the monsters,
then STRC would become a great game. As it is,
it's just a good game; thumbs up but little
re-playability. But since I was expecting much
worse, I'm fairly satisfied.
