Some good and some bad comes with the new installment, April 13, 2011

By JBT (Reality, USA) –

Fun: 

This review is from: LEGO Star Wars III The Clone Wars (DVD-ROM)

If you’ve played any Lego Star Wars game in the past you already have a good idea of what to expect with this title. There are more similarities than differences, so if you liked the other installments you’ll like this one as well. I’ll just focus on some key differences: The good: The graphics are notably better in this installment. It comes at the expense of heftier system requirements, so be sure to check them beforehand. This title is in the same company as some of the better Lego games. This is no Lego Indy 2. The hub world is nowhere near as confusing as Lego Harry Potter. The average: Some people have complained that the puzzles are ambiguous. I didn’t feel it was too bad, as each Lego title has a few ambiguous moments here or there. I will say that there were moments where I felt cheated after looking up a solution online – like one case where all the doors on one wall don’t open so you make the assumption that none of them do, but it turns out one does and is required for level progression. There’s no visual cue to let you know that the one door is different from the other, so sometimes you’ll backtrack or get “stuck” until you happen upon the one door in the background that opens. I don’t know why they didn’t color the door differently or just have the door open automatically once allowed to progress. Other sticking points are cases where you have to perform character specific tasks in a certain order, but those can typically be worked out. The bad: I hit a few bugs in this title, at least more than in other Lego games. No crashes, but failed scripted events which halted progress. In every case the solution was to exit and replay the level from the beginning. The method for unlocking bonus content wasn’t clear. Ground battles could sometimes be unlocked by playing other ground battles. Other times it required the acquisition of a specific character. A few times I didn’t even know the reason why a new battle unlocked. Toward the end there were a few locked battles and it wasn’t clear why they were locked. I had no idea how to unlock them without internet research. Ground battles: Where to begin. Play a demo of one and ask yourself if this is something you would want to do 50+ times. This will likely only bother people with an obsessive compulsive disorder (like myself) that want to 100% complete the game but I absolutely hated this new mechanic. Not too bad if limited to a few battles, terrible after the 20th battle. It’s all the same: destroy a statue, destroy a command center, destroy everything, or build an escape pod repeated 50 times. 32 times for the separatist/republic gold bricks, 10 times in the main game (5 story + 5 free play), and however many more times to convert all systems to separatist control to unlock that last character (an example of a completely ambiguous requirement to unlock something). If you bother with these… two words: “super speeder”. One final note on ground battles. I feel a bit cheated in the regular story missions. Typically Lego games have three story arcs with six levels each. 18 story levels that represent the “meat” of the game. The ground battles take up five of those slots, nearly a third of the game dedicated to a gameplay mode that is already far too prevalent in the bonus content. They did include a prologue, epilogue, and a few bonus levels to offset this though. Space battle: The only knock here is because I found myself stuck in the following loop. Select the system and wait for several seconds for the hyperspace travel to complete, take a ship out, oops this space battle needs a different kind of ship, go back to the hangar, pick that kind of ship and finally start the mission. It gets even worse when you find you need to dock a ship, and run, run, run to the hub world turret to take care of something, then run, run, run back to the hangar before you can even start on that aforementioned loop. It’s true that the same ship will allow you to do nearly every space battle, but the tedious trial and error on ship selection was just something else that wasn’t necessary. The interface to the ground and space battles is also poor. If your goal is to get to 100% completion you’ll find yourself highlighting every system over and over and over again to see what you have and haven’t accomplished for any given system. Why they couldn’t included a simple icon over the system name to avoid the click, go back, click go back, click, go back method or even provide a simple checklist is beyond me. I ended on a list of the bad, but that’s not the lasting impression I wanted to create. It’s a really fun game, just weighed down quite a but by far too many ground battles and a tedious method of completing space battles.

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Amazon should have said more about minimum PC requirements, April 3, 2011

By M. Brock –
  

Fun: 

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: LEGO Star Wars III The Clone Wars (DVD-ROM)

The first two Lego Star Wars games work well with just about any video graphics card and controller even my five year old 128mb ATI. My son can use a Logitech Attack 3 programmable joystick with both games and I use a Phillips Game Pad. This new one doesn’t work with older video cards and it likes specific controllers. Amazon doesn’t tell you this in the description. You find out when you look at the DVD case or play the game. We bought a new joystick for this game and I had to use the Logitech software to mimic keyboard controls to get it to work. The game just did not want to deal with it. My Phillips game pad had to be programmed each time we started a new game which was no fun. The game recognizes and works well with Xbox 360 Wired Controller – Black after downloading the driver for Windows 7. It codes the game help suggestions graphics to match the Xbox buttons perfectly. As for the video card as another reviewer points out it takes a minimum of 256mb and really wants a 512mb. Since we got this via Prime on release date, we found this out as we are playing on a 24″ ASUS monitor and large black and brown spikes coming from the center of the screen star covering up the game play. Very hard to jump and fight when you cannot see. You have to restart and lose your forward progress. It would have been nice if Amazon & Lucasarts put in big bold print somewhere: “You will probably need to invest about a $100 in a better graphics card and some XBOX 360 controllers to enjoy this game. While you are at it buy the strategy guide for find it online because while we dumb up the Genosian Arena with hints and help, we pretty much leave you on your own the rest of the game to be frustrated trying to figure out where we have hid the simplest things for game play.” I am trying not to spend anymore money with Amazon to now upgrade my video card after buying the controllers but I might not have a choice due to price out in the brick and mortar stores. I will update this afterwards and it might get a better rating. UPDATE: OK. I bought a Asus ATI Radeon HD5450 Silence – 1 GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI Low Profile PCI-Express Video Card EAH5450 SILENT/DI/1GD3 at Fry’s last night because it was $5 cheaper than Amazon and still get a rebate. After installing it and the drivers I fired up the game and all I can say is WOW. I played the Innocents of Ryloth section where we also had some graphic problems trying to get the balls up the maze on sides. No problems this time. Everything was super smooth. Literally zipped through the level. Gameplay was fast and well displayed. Cannot believe the hours we had agonized through slow and interrupted gameplay was fixed by the graphics card. By the way chose this card over an ASUS nVidia GeForce 210 Silent 1GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI Low Profile PCI-Express Video Card EN210 SILENT/DI/1GD3/V2(LP) because this one supports DirectX 11 and Shader 5.0 and the nVidia was only DirectX 10 and Shader 4.0. Also my wife is a photographer and ATI has been known as a better card for graphic artist etc. while nVidia is a gamer card.

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Lego Star Wars Redux – The Clone Wars, March 29, 2011

By John M. Keller “ITBeast” (Greater Los Angeles Area, Ca.) –
  

Fun: 

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: LEGO Star Wars III The Clone Wars (DVD-ROM)

This is the 4th installment in the LEGO Star Wars Franchise, after a 6 month delay on releasing the game (It was originally slated for a Late September 2010 release) those who have been a fan of Lego’s Flag Ship Series Lego Star Wars you will not be disappointed. This new chapter in the Lego Star Wars starts off half way through “Attack of the Clones” were Ben, Anakin, and Padme’ are to fight for their lives in Count Dooka’s Arena against his assortment of savage beasts. This is more or less a revamp and redux of the original Lego Star Wars episode “Jedi Battle” that has been given a complete face lift (Take a Bow George) and is closer to the elements in the movie. From there you will continue to make your way thru a few more “redux” chapters of “Attack of the Clone’s” into the “Clone Wars” T.V. Series. Game Play: Don’t worry, The Game play is the same as in the previous Lego Star Wars Games with new features to include scenarios in which players can command large armies of clones to battle against droid armies, and Story Swap mode, in which players can switch between two characters in different areas whose stories run simultaneously. The game includes split screen combat. All new character features include lightsaber throwing, lightsaber slicing, picking up droids and stepping on certain pads in which Jedi do “combo moves” to destroy certain objects. Vehicle levels have been upgraded slightly: now, players can land their ship and begin fighting on foot. All the original elements in previous Lego Star Wars games have returned. The classic “hub” has also been changed, taking place in a Republic Cruiser named the Resolute, allowing the characters to explore all the parts of the Star Wars galaxy. Game Graphics: The Best way to describe the graphics is taking a standard Def DVD of the original Lego Star War Games and reprocessing them into Blu-Ray Hi-Def. The characters are amazingly clearer and smoothed out. The back ground elements are just astounding. The game engine used by the previous Lego Star Wars games has been upgraded. It can now hold more than 200 moving units/objects on-screen. The graphics are more detailed than before, and the lighting has been improved to enhance the feeling of depth. System Requirements: Unfortunately with all this Greatness that has been added to this game the requirements are almost twice of the 1st two… Minium Requirements: CPU: Intel P4 2.24 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 RAM: 1 GB RAM VGA: 256 MB Video Memory with Shader 3.0 support; ATI Radeon X1300 / NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 /Intel GMA 3-Series DX: DirectX 9.0c OS: Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista® SP2, or Windows 7 Ideal Requirements: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 1.8 GHz RAM: 2 GB RAM VGA: 512 MB Video Memory with Shader 3.0 support; ATI Radeon HD 2900 / NVIDIA GeForce 9800 DX: DirectX 10 OS: Windows Vista® SP2 or Windows 7 I’ve played it on my HP Pavilion DVT8 Notebook with excellent results, the system specs are as follows… I7 Core 1.6GHz processor NVida 1 GB Notebook Video Card 4 GB of RAM Built-in 18.4inch 1080P Monitor Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64 Bit) I also tried it on my sons Desktop to see if the minimum requirements would support a P4 3.4 HT GHz (478 socket) which it did surprisingly well… P4 3.4 HT GHz (478 socket) processor ATI 3850HD 512mb Video Card (AGP) 4 GB of RAM ASUS 24inch LCD-LED 1080p Monitor Windows 7 Professional SP1 (32 Bit) I would not go to much lower than my Son’s Desktop for continued game enjoyment. Overall, this is a excellent game for almost all ages (I would not let any child under 6 play this game due to some of the more violent scenes in the game) and an excellent entry into the Lego Star Wars Franchise. You’ll spend hours reliving and enjoying the fun you had with the original Lego Star War Games.

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