Star Wars - The Clone Wars

The opening hour hands you an AT-XT walker on Geonosis and asks you to hold a line rather than clear a corridor. Droid columns crest the ridges, gunships pass overhead on their own business, and your objectives arrive as radio chatter while the fight is already going. Pandemic Studios were working out something here in 2002 that would pay off two years later: how to make a Star Wars battlefield feel occupied by more than the player. This is the rough draft of Battlefront, built as a vehicle game.

The campaign follows the Dark Reaper, an ancient Sith superweapon, across Geonosis, the ice of Rhen Var and other stops, with Anakin, Obi-Wan and Mace Windu taking turns at the controls. It is also the debut of Asajj Ventress, who was created for this game and the surrounding multimedia project before the animated series made her a fixture. That is a strange piece of continuity for a licensed tie-in to own, and it says something about how loosely the Expanded Universe was being assembled between the prequels.

Most of the playing is done from a machine. Walkers trade weight for firepower, speeders are quick and fragile, the gunship missions swap ground control for strafing runs, and a handful of on-foot lightsaber sections exist mainly to break the rhythm. Combat is blunt: lock on, keep moving, watch the shield meter. The AT-XT's stomp attack and its wobbling, top-heavy turn rate are the closest the game gets to a signature feel, and they hold up better than the saber work does.

What has aged is the presentation. Draw distance is generous for the hardware but the terrain is bare, the mission structure leans on escort and defend beats that repeat, and the story is delivered in briefings that assume you already know who everyone is. The split-screen modes and unlockable arena battles were the part friends actually remembered, along with the Academy challenges that let you drill a vehicle without the campaign attached.

Seen now, it reads as a studio's notebook. The scale is there, the sense of a war happening around you is there, and the shooting underneath is thinner than either. Play it for the walker, and for the odd pleasure of meeting Ventress before anyone knew who she would become.