Let’s be up front: don’t play this game. As with Battlefront Elite Squadron, I suspect that the more powerful and feature-rich PSP version was the lead platform and the superior game, although apparently the critics don’t agree. There are good ideas here, but executed so poorly that it’s hard to appreciate them.
The game can be summed up like this: touchscreen minigame, walk past electric traps and mines, locked into room of baddies, mash fire while strafing to win, switch to controlling robot friend, touchscreen minigame, ride robot along wall section. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Each of these segments is clunkily segmented, and none of them are fun to play. Worse, switching between them often changes up the control scheme: buttons only for Rianna, touchscreen only for minigames, touchscreen and buttons for Zeeo.
The plot might have been halfway decent if there was more going on during levels, there was some voice acting, and the actual plot events were fleshed out more. My impression is that the PSP version delivers on these, including more development of the central duo relationship. Rianna the lone wolf bounty hunter and the slightly quirky droid Zeeo have potential to be enduring Star Wars characters, but you can’t see it in this game. Their quest to get revenge on Imperial slavers and capture the Death Star plans (initiated by star of early games Kyle Katarn, no less) could have been an alluring alternative tale in this post-Rogue One world, but not if you’re relying on this game to tell the story.
Rianna has different guns, alternate firing modes, melee attacks; Zeeo has many neat droid abilities; together there’s all sorts of team-up moves. But most of the time the best way to get past enemies is a very basic strafe and shoot. Riding on Zeeo along walls could be fun, but it’s too simplistic and punishing. Across the board there’s poor play control, graphical bugs…. once I fell through the floor and another time a corridor didn’t load and I walked into the skybox. The bosses are really the only highlight but even then, if you don’t know which of your specific abilities to use then the game will just tell you on a tooltip after you die. It’s not very satisfying. Basically if you want to try this game, get the PSP version, there’s no way it’s worse than the DS one.
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