Star Wars: Galactic Racer is likely to be set within the New Republic period, however podracing screams “Star Wars Prequels” louder than Pepsi, and the bloodsport is essentially beloved because of a online game.
The saga isn’t any stranger to unimaginable video games, however titles primarily based on Episodes I, II, and III get misplaced simply among the many KOTORs and TIE Fighters of the galaxy. The Prequel Trilogy has earned a re-examination from followers after Star Wars’ fashionable decade of catastrophe, and builders are beginning to be not less than Clone-curious with bangers like Zero Firm.
The Prequels could have extra movement than we thought, and it’s value a visit again to BBY to discover their gaming previous. The place can Star Wars video games go from Galactic Racer onward, and what ought to be left behind like Anakin’s mother?
These are one of the best, worst, and weirdest Star Wars prequel trilogy video games. We’ve obtained shooters, racers, and ecology simulators all on deck, so let’s begin with the straight diversifications of the movies:
The Film Games
The flagship sport for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace launched alongside the movie in 1999. Like most Phantom Menace merch on the flip of the millennium, the sport was a industrial success for PC and PlayStation, however that’s extra indicative of the huge Star Wars Prequel hype than high quality. They offered loads of Jar Jar Binks lollipops too.
The sport recreates the movie from its opening tea service to the Battle of Naboo, controlling a veritable Mount Rushmore of beloved protagonists in Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Padmé Amidala, and Captain Quarsh Panaka, all voiced by moderately doubtful soundalikes.
Destiny is a giant theme by means of the Prequel Trilogy, the concept one’s future is fastened and uncontrollable. The similar might be stated of the digital camera within the Episode I sport. Pinned excessive above your character, the POV renders gameplay extraordinarily disagreeable as you leisurely lob blaster bolts again at battle droids. You may embrace the darkish aspect and reduce down harmless civilians who aspect-eye your rat-tail as you push packing containers and full fetch quests in a garish Otoh Gungah, however you gained’t discover it enjoyable for lengthy.
Jedi Energy Battles is the superior sport. Launched a 12 months afterward PlayStation and Dreamcast, it follows Episode I’s whole plot so as, however solely to the extent that Turtles in Time is invested within the story of Shredder stealing the Statue of Liberty. We’re in beat-’em-up territory, full with a handful of fighters, combos and minigames, and a couple of enjoyable secrets and techniques.
It’s removed from one of the best instance of the style, however if you happen to merely must expertise the plot of The Phantom Menace and you’ve had your fill of haggling and handmaiden intrigue, Energy Battles is the reply.
There aren’t actually many choices for Episode II: Assault of the Clones. Scenes just like the Geonisian area and its kaizo platformer droid manufacturing unit appeared tailor-made for video games, however the starcrossed story solely obtained one correct adaptation: a ponderous sidescroller on the Sport Boy Advance which fails to seize the burning ardour of the movie’s love story.
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: the Film: the Sport fared a lot better. A hack-and-slash romp by means of 17 phases, it’s a bit like Energy Battles with an even bigger funds and some fundamental XP upgrades. It’s full of unlockable characters and noncanonical missions the place Anakin unalives everyone and seizes management of the galaxy. For a movie that lives and dies by its duels, the one-participant boss fights and PvP fight don’t miss. Even the ever present handheld ports had been strong.
The Episode III sport oozes a status bundle. Cutscenes utterly spoiled the movie which got here out ten days later, although there are some essential variations for gameplay functions that type of make extra sense than the film, like Anakin personally killing Mace Windu to cement his Darkish Aspect heel flip.
EA’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King has the same vibe, and additionally spoiled the heck out of its trilogy-topping film earlier than anybody might see it. The video games are alike in loads of methods, although from our viewpoint we’d give the sting to Mordor over Mustafar.
No matter occurred to video games like these? It seems you don’t want full-movement-video or fancy movement seize to convey the essence of a cinematic story. Generally all you want is a bit of Danish plastic.
Traveller’s Tales started their a long time-lengthy dominance of the licensed child’s-sport area with Lego Star Wars, whose easy title doesn’t must stipulate that it’s overlaying the Prequel tales, as a result of that’s simply what “Star Wars” was in 2005.
The Prequel period seems in quite a few Lego entries, largely delivered by means of grunts and pantomime with out an oz of gravitas, and it really works. The first Lego Star Wars, with 6.1 million copies offered, is definitely probably the most commercially profitable Prequel Trilogy sport regardless of largely being a joke.
Star Wars films are autos for drama, motion, and particular results. The plots and characters aren’t actually constructed with controllers in thoughts, and one of the best Prequel video games do effectively to discover their margins in aspect tales.
Aspect Tales
Among the extra attention-grabbing titles of the period are prequels to the capital “P” Prequels, just like the Xbox-unique Star Wars: Obi-Wan. To not be confused with the disappointing Disney+ present, or Obi-Wan’s Adventures, the Sport Boy Coloration sport that is likely to be a greater use of your time than the 9-determine streaming sequence.
Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan makes for an ideal protagonist. He actually sits out the worst elements of The Phantom Menace in a spaceship, so that you don’t actually affiliate him with intensive haggling and baby slavery, and Jar Jar Binks and the Gungans don’t seem in any respect in his self-titled sport. As a substitute, we discover younger Kenobi’s journey from the imply streets of Coruscant to the fateful Neimoidian breakout room that kicks off the complete saga.
Initially deliberate for PC, with a novel management scheme the place mouse gestures managed a lightsaber, the sport was personally kiboshed by George Lucas and reworked for the launch window of Microsoft’s console. The padawan’s inexperienced blade, aglow with emerald Xbox synergy, would as an alternative reply to the analog stick of the mighty Duke.
The exploits of Obi-Wan are good to have, however Star Wars: Bounty Hunter has much more to clarify. Launched shortly after Assault of the Clones in 2002 and set years earlier than Jango Fett’s decapitation, it tells the story of how the straightforward man making his approach within the universe was chosen to face at stud for a military of armored doppelgangers.
You’re given entry to Jango’s whole arsenal and a stunning quantity of freedom, blasting by means of seedy underbellies with a jetpack and roasting civilians and bounty targets alike. Industrial Mild and Magic and Skywalker Sound all labored instantly with LucasArts for the primary time to create the sport’s cutscenes, with nice performances from the films’ Temuera Morrison, plus Clancy Brown as a rival Mandalorian bounty hunter who’s not suitable with canon.
The story explores the unsavory aspect of Star Wars, the soiled, harmful locations removed from the Pressure the place crime lords rule with a cortosis fist and a man like Jango suits proper in. Bounty Hunter was cited as an inspiration for the doomed “1313” undertaking, and you don’t should squint too laborious to see shades of Andor, both.
Movies convey character a lot in another way than video video games, a medium the place Kyle Katarn and Cal Kestis carry extra clout than Luke and Leia. Star Wars video games are nice at specializing in characters that the films don’t have time for. The foxholes of a galactic warfare are crammed with Iden Versios.
Begun in Episode II, the Clone Wars had been, a brutal battle that rages throughout 400 billion stars and largely takes place off display. Wrapped up tidily in Episode III, the Clone Wars created an enormous void that expanded media was effectively match to fill.
Launched in 2002 for PS2 and GameCube, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” waged the opening salvos from behind the wheel. Developer Pandemic used the vehicular fight sport as a testing floor for the in-home Zero engine that will usher within the period of Battlefront and its many Prequel Trilogy trappings.
A GBA sport, New Droid Military, emerged across the similar time, whereas the amusing Age of Empires reskin Galactic Battlegrounds rolled out a Clone Campaigns DLC that allow you to lead the struggle in opposition to area tariffs by enjoying because the evil Separatists.
These titles barely scratched the limitless potentialities supplied by a warfare fought over commerce routes between clones and robots. An animated sequence or two was so as.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s god-tier Clone Wars microseries made the struggle look truly cool for the primary time, however its solely interactive illustration got here as a Flash-primarily based browser sport. Dave Filoni, the ascended fan who now basically runs Lucasfilm, reduce his enamel on his personal Clone Wars sequence in 2008, and this one made the leap from Cartoon Community to consoles.
Republic Heroes is a bathroom-commonplace platformer, whereas Jedi Alliance takes benefit of the DS’s stylus swiping for its twin-character lightsaber skirmishes. Each video games meet the usual of “whelming” one may count on from a derivative to a derivative, however they’re overshadowed by “The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels,” the sport each single individual imagined the primary time they held a Wii Distant.
The plot takes a again seat to movement-management motion, de-emphasizing the outsourced assassination and turgid love affair that defines the movie. As a substitute, it zeroes in on one memorable facet of the films for a enjoyable and satisfying energy fantasy as a vertical slice of the saga.
The Vertical Slice
Lore is nice. Expanded Universes are beloved for a motive. There are millions of effectively-worn paperbacks yellowing within the Legends library that may attest to that, however an excessive amount of lore can elbow out the cinematic influence that made Star Wars a phenomenon. What’s “Star Wars” if not a sequence of archetypical characters engaged in blockbuster setpieces, any one in every of which might be separated from the entire as a standalone expertise?
The trench run, the Battle of Hoth, Teras Kasi kombat… You may carve out any given ten minutes from a Star Wars film and most likely discover a respectable sport in there. “Spaceship fight” was the primary place anybody seemed, which shortly developed right into a sub-line of respectable flight sims and shooters.
1998’s Rogue Squadron was an Authentic Trilogy affair, however the devs at Issue 5 included a secret that evaded even GameShark detection for seven months. The UK launch of The Phantom Menace was celebrated by revealing the Naboo Starfighter that was hidden within the code. A gleaming artwork deco Buck Rogers ship that mogged the busted-up Y-wings within the Insurgent hangar, the Starfighter made it clear that the long run was right here, and it was all concerning the previous.
Battle for Naboo is Rogue Squadron with a Prequel coat of paint. Like its predecessor, it’s a mission-primarily based sequence of skirmishes that makes the a lot of the N64 Enlargement Pak, with a propulsive plot powered by dialogue and dogfights.
The Starfighter itself is again, with rather less aura now that we’ve seen a 9-12 months-previous boy grasp it in seconds, together with a fleet of the best ships the Royal Safety Forces have to supply. In contrast to different video games within the sequence, you play as RSF Lieutenant Gavyn Sykes all through the entire story. Cool man, however he’s no Wedge Antilles.
Battle for Naboo is precisely what you’d count on from Rogue Squadron: the Episode I model. The sport is most notable for together with idea artwork and an hour of developer’s audio commentary crammed into the N64 cartridge. It was particularly spectacular in 2001, when DVDs spoiled us with treats and bonus options. We at IGN had been certain it was going to be the start of a serious growth development to return. You may’t at all times get it proper for 30 years.
Issue 5 took their skills again to the OT for the GameCube’s twin Rogue Squadrons, however LucasArts didn’t go away the Prequel age behind.
2001’s Starfighter, the sequence PS2 debut, isn’t any slouch. Much less Star Fox than Ace Fight, the sport mixes sim and arcade because it weaves by means of the narrative of Episode I from the attitude of three characters, together with fan favourite Nym, a mononomic area pirate who would in the future earn an 18,000 phrase Wookiepedia article.
Nym and his signature ship, Havoc, would return the following 12 months in Jedi Starfighter, scrapping with Separatists within the antebellum of the Clone Wars. It’s a fuller bundle than its predecessor, however each price extremely amongst Prequel video games.
For all its faults, the Prequel Trilogy at all times excelled when it got here to area and aerial motion, full of huge battles between cool wanting ships that sound superior. Now that is podracing!
Really, that is podracing: Because of George Lucas’s lifelong fascination with quick vehicles, a lot of Star Wars is propelled by the power of a showstopping loss of life race, a promise absolutely realized within the Phantom Menace.
The movie’s whole second act revolves across the Boonta Eve Basic, a 500 mile-an-hour grand prix by means of the twisted canyons of Tatooine. For the opponents, ILM dreamed up sufficient pilots to fill a Glup Shitto graveyard, most of whom die horribly whereas Greg Proops cracks sensible. Star Wars: Episode I Racer dares to ask: What’s their story?
The 1999 sport for N64 and PC options 23 playable pods, practically all doomed to run out on Boonta Eve.
We embody racer Ratts Tyerell, household man, racking up wins and wupiupi within the months earlier than he’s vaporized. We change into Ben Quadinaros as he purchases pit droids and upgrades his extraordinarily harmful journey so it doesn’t fail when he wants it most. We’re Anakin, pressured in opposition to our will to endure Watto’s gurgling as we dream of freedom on the observe.
There’s little fight within the sport for technical causes, and whereas it diminishes the chariot race pressure of the film, it’s nonetheless a standout racer on a system that had loads of them.
A code allowed you to twin wield two N64 controllers, analog sticks akimbo as you cranked the engines yanking you towards victory or oblivion. It virtually felt like the true factor. The arcade sport mainly was the true factor.
SEGA created a number of Star Wars cupboards with attention-grabbing {hardware}, however nothing ever allow you to enter the world of Star Wars butt-first like Star Wars: Racer. Plop into Ani’s plexiglass pod, place your fingers on the throttles and pray the Pressure is with you. All that’s lacking is the plasma coupler.
The effectively-obtained console sport was adopted in 2002 by a extra aggro sequel, Racer Revenge. With an emphasis on interpod violence, it’s a extra fleshed-out sport mechanically that by no means fairly took off, a potential casualty of the Prequel backlash.
Criticism was calcifying into consensus and followers had fallen out of affection with the pastime of podracing. It might take 20 years for an additional sport to choose up the torch, first with the VR title Past Victory, adopted by Galactic Racer, which proudly options the game and its foremost ambassadors amongst a number of modes of roguelike run-primarily based racing.
Pods aren’t the one strategy to burn rubber within the Star Wars galaxy. You’ve obtained ships, speeders, swoops, and, in 2001, tremendous-deformed mascots.
Tremendous Bombad Racing is the primary and to date solely Star Wars kart racer. The physics are floaty and enjoyable, and the chibified characters are cute. It gained’t unseat Mario, Sonic, or Garfield as kings of kart canon, but it surely’s distinctive and virtually charming at occasions, which is greater than you possibly can say for lots of the video games we’ve talked about thus far.
Thank the maker for the bizarre ones.
The Bizarre Ones
With its jaw-dropping Dinotopia aesthetics and dialogue no sentient being would ever communicate, the Prequel Trilogy is George Lucas’s personal Demise Stranding: the brazen self-perception of an artist with a funds and nobody round to say no. Star Wars has been fairly buttoned-up as a model ever for the reason that Vacation Particular, and with Disney on the reins we’re unlikely to see something as wild as Episodes I, II, and III once more.
The video games they impressed seemed and sounded the half, however not often matched the unfiltered ingenuity of the movies. There are a lot of platformers and third-individual motion adventures on this listing, and even superior racers and dogfight sims are fairly par for the Star Wars course, however a couple of titles tried one thing totally different.
Lucas based LucasLearning in 1996, driving the CD-ROM edutainment wave that introduced Quantity Munchers and Unimaginable Machines to center faculty pc labs world wide.
The imprint launched a number of Star Wars Prequel video games designed to slot in faculty curricula, betting on the youngsters’s love of Jar Jar Binks to show them about fractions and pure science.
Star Wars: The Gungan Frontier sees the titular species in disaster: their bubble cities are overpopulated, they’re surrounded by big sea monsters, and half the planet can’t stand them.
Boss Nass enlists your support in colonizing the moon, manipulating its barren ecosystem for imported Naboo flora and fauna in a simplified Sim Life with hints of Spore. Planting timber and balancing the meals chain whereas vibing to the ambient soundtrack is such a pastoral, zen expertise that you just virtually neglect that you just’re aiding an invasive, extraordinarily annoying species.
Anakin’s Speedway presents youngsters ages 4 and up the chance to assist the enslaved baby construct tracks for racers to die on, whereas Pit Droids makes use of the lovable automatons as Lemmings-type drawback-solvers, guiding them by means of mechanical puzzles that train fundamental logic and spatial reasoning expertise.
The quirky little cluster of studying video games are a breath of recent air after traversing Theed for the thirtieth time, however they didn’t precisely revolutionize early childhood schooling. In case you’re curious how the entire edutainment enterprise panned out, the final sport LucasLearning developed was Tremendous Bombad Racing, which most would agree has little pedagogical worth to talk of. The division folded in 2001, ceding the market shortly earlier than the complete area imploded amid widespread web adoption.
Games have at all times been fast to chase developments, even those primarily based on films that bucked them on the expense of fine style and narrative coherence. Flash video games had been of their heyday within the 2000s, and Star Wars embraced the Macromedia insanity of all of it with a clutch of Prequel-era video games for Cartoon Community. Extra spectacular was the expansive browser-primarily based MMO known as Clone Wars Adventures that boasted 10 million registered gamers earlier than it folded in 2014.
Nothing chased a development more durable than Kinect, the a lot-maligned Microsoft peripheral that jumped on the movement management bandwagon by monitoring your physique motion with a creepy digital camera. Kinect Star Wars on the Xbox 360 is likely to be its most notorious title.
The 2012 launch is constructed on the Prequel Trilogy, not less than as a lot as a seize bag of gimmicky minigames may be constructed on something. There’s an compulsory podracing mode the place you grip a pair of throttles that don’t exist, whereas the story marketing campaign thrusts you into warfare as a Padawan of your individual design, utilizing the Kinect to regulate a lightsaber with flailing limbs in a fairly uncivilized trend.
The lasting legacy of Star Wars Kinect, nonetheless, has little to do with the Prequels. The Galactic Dance Off is a Simply Dance-impressed assortment of Now That’s What I Name Music hits repurposed for Star Wars, with parody lyrics that make one yearn for the delicate wit of “Bizarre Al” Yankovic.
Hollaback Lady turns into Hologram Lady, La Roux’s Bulletproof is Blasterproof, and Jason Derulo’s triumphant ode to self-reliance is repurposed as “Han Solo,” spun by DJ Lobot whereas the titular rogue leads his dance crew of fascist collaborators in strikes like “the Trash Compactor.” Even within the weirdest and most embarrassing Prequel sport, the Authentic Trilogy nonetheless takes priority.
LucasArts went down dancing. Kinect Star Wars can be the final sport from the legendary studio earlier than Disney moved growth out of home, an ignominious finish to an uneven period for Star Wars video games.
Most of what we’ve mentioned thus far has been unhealthy to mid at finest, with a couple of standouts brushing in opposition to the ceiling of “fairly good.” We want that we might simply want away our emotions, but it surely’s true: for no matter motive, it’s laborious to mine real excellence from the Prequel setting. Only some video games have.
The Chosen Ones
Half the online game trade is constructed by gruff sci-fi folks in faceless helmets. Grasp Chief, Doom Man, Samus, and extra all excel as clean slates on which the participant can undertaking. And what slate is blankier than a disposable clone?
In Star Wars: Republic Commando, launched in 2005 for the PC and Xbox and set between episodes II and III, you’re Boss, the gruff Clone commander of Delta Squad. Regardless of their genetically an identical nature, his subordinates Fixer, Scorch, and Sev have absolutely-realized personalities all their very own, like coloration-coded Kaminoan Ninja Turtles who obey each order out of your contextual squad command button.
Your comrades are so effectively-written all through the gritty, violent story that you just neglect they’re synthetic drones in any respect, and you cease questioning why they’ve totally different voice actors regardless of their larynxes coming from the identical vat. The crew earned a loyal fan following, their very own motion figures and spin-off novels, and had been clearly homaged by Dave Filoni’s Dangerous Batch within the Clone Wars cartoon.
Republic Commando’s first-individual fight, with an at all times-appreciated diegetic helmet HUD, provides an infantry grunt’s perspective on the cosmic conflict. It’s a extra gory affair than typical Star Wars, and that’s saying one thing for a franchise with so many routine dismemberments. It eschews the esoteric mysticism of the Sith and Jedi and explores the unsung heroes whose blood oils the gears of galactic warfare like Andor would 17 years later.
Regardless of being among the finest Star Wars video games interval, not to mention from the Prequel period, Republic Commando by no means earned a sequel, which implies we could by no means study the destiny of the Clone we left behind. It’s not often a good suggestion to get connected to characters when there’s a warfare on, particularly if you happen to’re enjoying Zero Firm.
The flip-primarily based tactical sport from ex-Firaxis XCOM vets retains its religious forebear’s insistence that anybody can die when the percentages aren’t in your favor, and if you happen to decide into permadeath because the devs advocate you’ll end up mourning your loved one operators by means of the numerous hours of base banter and trauma bonding that make up the prolonged marketing campaign.
Zero Firm is, by all accounts, a giant success. It’s obtained the best Metacritic rating for a Star Wars sport in 22 years, and followers appear completely aligned on its awesomeness. Between Zero Firm and the goodwill from Galactic Racer, nobody is arguing over whether or not the Prequels suck. We didn’t roll our eyes at one other Prequel sport or use it to relitigate characteristic-size movie critiques by cranky Wisconsinites. In relation to video video games, we’re able to fall in love with the Prequel period yet again, or not less than one of the best elements of it.
Charlie “Moose” Lopresto graduated regulation faculty, handed the bar, and made a financially questionable determination to jot down about video games and films as an alternative. Contributing to IGN since 2021, he collects solo board video games and remodeling robots.