Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles Remaster Review

thesixthaxis.com:

I was ten years old when Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles first released. In the days of demo disks and consoles set up in shops, I was able to try the demo at the time and it was the closest a game had gotten to letting you feel like not only a Jedi, but a Jedi of your choice. Nowadays, with the Star Wars Jedi series pretty much nailing the “be a Jedi” thing, you might think that a remaster of the side-scrolling Jedi Power Battles is fodder for nostalgia and nothing more. And you’d be right.

Graphically, Jedi Power Battles is a huge improvement with this remastered release. It’s sharp, textures are much higher quality, there’s even reflections in places! If all you’re after is to replay the game, but with it looking like how you remember it in your rose-tinted memories, then this is the game for you.

In fact, it goes further than graphical improvements, with all the playable characters and levels all unlocked from the very beginning. Did you always want to inexplicably be Darth Maul fighting off Federation droids? Well you can do that immediately upon loading the game here, rather than having to first complete the game as Qui Gon Jinn to unlock Maul. And there’s the Star Wars music in the background as well, along with some creative uses of Yoda noises when picking up power ups that still make me laugh. It’s clearly designed to invoke that nostalgia, provided you have some for this game.

But if you don’t have that nostalgia? Well, the issue here is that this was an original PlayStation game. Combat is stiff and doesn’t flow very well at all – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve run up to an enemy and pressed attack only for it not attack and for the droid I was attacking to punch me in the face instead. Because moves don’t really flow together very well, attacking feels like just swinging a lightsaber repeatedly with a brief delay between them that allows the enemy you’re trying to kill to get a hit in because lightsabers only take about a quarter of