Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes

Note to all game designers out there: making it impossible for the players to fail at your game tends to make it impossible for them to have any fun. There is no success without the specter of failure, and without success, what the hell are we moving these thumbsticks for? I'm not training for the Thumb War World Championships here. As you might guess, Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes needs a lot of work in a lot of areas -- especially in the area of being good. It's almost impossible to play without dying dozens and dozens of times during a single mission, either from enemy damage, falling into the abyss because you can't see your character on the freakin' screen (more on that later), or because of some control glitch. And the developers didn't fix most of it; Apparently, they worked around the problem by simply making it impossible to die. So, if you fall off a gap, get blown to bits, or just decide to go take a nap in the other room, you'll simply respawn at the nearest checkpoint as many times as it takes for you pass through whatever challenge you may be facing. What this leads to, ultimately, is players not caring about how they play. There's no incentive to do anything other than stand out in the open and mash buttons until you finally kill all the bad guys or make it through the platforming sections. As a result, Republic Heroes is less a game and more an exercise in repetition. Playing through it involves entering a kind of meditative state in which you and/or your partner (there's local co-op) stare blankly at the screen and just go through the motions like you're participants in some kind of team cud-chewing marathon.

The Clone Wars is little more than yet another tedious, overly-simple, unengaging, repetitive arcade-adventures that proliferate the bargain bins of games stores, preying on the wallets of well-meaning grandparents and leaving behind a stream of traumatized children in its wake. ...

This platformer based on the Star Wars cartoon TV series tries to copy the Lego game formula but gets just about everything wrong.