With several Star Wars-related announcements happening this past week, I decided to finally dive in to my backlog and try out a Star Wars game of a unique type, to say the least--a vehicular combat game in the vein of Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8. It's Star Wars: Demolition, and here is the SuperPhillip Central retro review!
Car Wars
Much like the Star Wars movies and television projects have varying levels of success and quality to them, the games, too, also delve into various degrees of success and quality, too, all within the galaxy far, far away. And much like any long-standing, running franchise, Star Wars as a series dabbled and continues to dabble in a wide range of game genres and types. It's especially interesting when the games go out of the norm of what you'd expect from the Star Wars franchise.
Take Star Wars: Demolition, for example. The game was developed by the team behind the Vigilante 8 series of car combat/destruction games, and much like that series, Demolition features the same gameplay style. It's essentially a Star Wars take on Twisted Metal, which was pretty popular on PlayStation back in the day, and has since seen a resurgence in interest due to the Peacock "Twisted Metal" show.
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| Battles in Star Wars: Demolition are mighty intense at times! |
The gist of Star Wars: Demolition is that Jabba the Hutt has created a twisted game of sorts where various outlaws and characters throughout the galaxy see themselves thrust into vehicular combat in one of eight arenas across the galaxy. There's Tattooine's Mos Eisley, as well as another level on the planet featuring the infamous Sarlacc Pit from Return of the Jedi. You can even throw other competitors into said pit with some spirited maneuvering. There's the icy planet Hoth, the swampy marshes of Dagobah, the multilevel Cloud City, and the capital city of Naboo. The original trilogy and the then-recent prequel movie are well represented here.
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| Hoth features mostly wide open, icy expanses with turrets, AT-ATs, and snowy slopes to take cover behind. |
Arenas in general are relatively open. There are plenty of places to move around, though I did notice moments where I felt I got stuck unfairly on the scenery, making myself quite vulnerable to attacks from that result. They feature opportune locations for staging intense fights, spots where you can teleport in between to get out of a dangerous jam in a jiffy, and methods to duck around cover to avoid attacks.
There are nearly a dozen characters to choose from in Star Wars: Demolition, each possessing their own vehicle with their own stats in three categories: armor, speed, and charged attack power. From Wade Vox and his Landspeeder, General Otto and his AT-ST, and even Boba Fett in tiny jetpack form, each character feels different and contains unique abilities and weaponry.
Each character's vehicle has two attack types: there's a weapon that is exclusive to them and one that is loaded onto their vehicle. The former is used with R2 while the latter type is utilized with L2. For instance, Aurra Sing uses a sniper rifle with virtually unlimited range from her Custom Swoop to shoot foes from afar. This bullet can also bounce between baddies. Whereas the Wookie Quagga's Episode I Battle Tank, the AAT's Tank Cannon is a massive blast that will assist in bringing down even the biggest of opponents. Meanwhile, some character/vehicle-exclusive weapons like Tia and Ghia's Snowspeeder-exclusive tow cable really have limited utility. It's great for tethering opponents and dragging them around, perhaps even into Tattooine Dunes' Sarlacc Pit, but beyond that, it's quite useless, really.
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| That giant blast will give this Wookie's opponent a major Naboo-boo! |
Within skirmishes themselves, players have three colored meters to keep an eye on. There's the red weapon energy gauge, which depletes with each shot, whether with primary or secondary weapon use, that when fully depleted means that that vehicle cannot use their weapons. Either going to a red zone on the map where weapon energy can be replenished, picking up a red weapon from a destroyed roaming droid on the map, or biding one's time to have it sloooooooowly fill back up is what will refill it. There's also a blue (shields) energy gauge and once a vehicle's shields are totally gone, they'll have to worry about their green gauge, which is their health. Once the latter is depleted fully, it's demolition time.
Holding down the L2 (for picked-up weapon types like concussion missiles, proton torpedoes, and thermal detonators, for instance) or the R2 (for a vehicle's primary weapon) will charge a given weapon to bring a bigger bang to an opponent if that attacks hits. Still, even charging your weapons will deplete your red weapons energy in a faster fashion. Fully holding down the R2 trigger to four complete levels of energy is how you use that character and vehicle combo's exclusive weapon. Combining the L2 and R2 triggers together and successfully striking an opponent is also how you get Force Hits, which are important for gaining credits in the Tournament and High Stakes modes--more on those modes shortly--and also how you can provide a super-impressive (and demoralizing for the player on the receiving end) fatal blow to a demolished vehicle.
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| The vehicle types each feel and look unique. What else can you say when your opponent is riding a Rancor! |
Outside of setting up battles, Star Wars: Demolition features a relatively small range of modes. The main one which is where solo players will spend the most time in to unlock characters in is Tournament mode. This is a set of four battles in four different planets, the order and opponents depends on the character chosen. It pits you against one other opponent to begin, then the next battle includes an additional opponent, until the final, fourth battle where the maximum amount of competitors await.
Through personally destroying and demolishing opponents, defeating them with final blows, and getting a high Force Hit multiplier, you'll get awarded with more credits. Credits are important because not only can you spend them when you're in red and blue zones in maps to replenish weapon energy and shields respectively, but if you earn 10,000 or more credits by a single Tournament run's conclusion with a specific character, you'll be one step one closer to unlocking new characters/vehicles to play as, including the ultimate unlockable: the villainous Darth Maul from Episode I, whose awesome special weapon pulls out his trademark double-edged red lightsaber to deliver damage to other opponents in an up, close, and personal manner.
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| Darth Maul takes to the desert with his double-edged lightsaber! |
Other modes in Star Wars: Demolition include High Stakes, where you bet credits for your victory. Losing means you walk away from whatever your bet was, but winning, especially against a tougher CPU player, means you are rewarded with a copious amount of credits for your victory. There is also a Droid-destroying mode separate from every other mode, where the goal is to hunt down roving Droids by either ramming into them or shooting them from afar and getting a high score within a three-minute time period.
Star Wars: Demolition plays well enough, though its visuals are severely limited by draw distance from the PS1 with textures not really rendering until you get close enough to the environment. This is especially noticeable in the Naboo arena where steps simply look like ramps from far away, and only start resembling steps when you're practically on top of them. Vehicles look great, however, and the level of destruction that is on display as they deteriorate from damage is really impressive for a game from 2000 and on the PS1, too. Sound-wise, the music is appropriately action-packed and the character voice acting with the spoken one-liners in and out of battle are well done, also. The animated rendered cutscenes that play as rewards for either winning or losing Tournament mode are a nice little prize and little time capsule of the era.
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| What's Yavin IV? Why, it's for vehicular combat nowadays! (Thank you, I'll be here all week.) |
If you're looking for a competent and capable Twisted Metal clone that takes place in a galaxy far, far away, you could do much worse than Star Wars: Demolition. For instance, you could play absolutely nothing, as that's pretty much you're only alternative as this was the only Twisted Metal-style Star Wars game that I know of! You'd be worse off, I'd argue, because Demolition is rather good. It won't take you that long to see every piece of content, play every mode, battle in every arena, unlock every character, and such (so a full-priced purchase back in the day would have been gut-wrenching for me), but the ride there is indeed enjoyable. With it being a cheap purchase and accessible via PlayStation 5 and 4 as part of PlayStation's Classics line, there's no real adverse risk in trying this game out. You'll most certainly like it, especially if you have either a fondness for Star Wars, a love for Twisted Metal, or a combo of both. Just mind the corners and don't get demolished yourself!
[SPC Says: C+]
