E3 Hands-On: Star Wars - Clone Wars Adventures - Preview
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 17 June 2010 / 5,328 Views
Star Wars: The Clone Wars has gained a quick following on television and it making the jump to your computer browser. Sony Online Entertainment and Free Realms had a playable demo of the game running on the show floor of E3 and VG Chartz got some behind-closed-doors time playing the upcoming title.
The demo starts off in a waiting room area. Here you can wander around, hang out with your friends, and interact with iconic Star Wars characters, and change your personal avatar in the Clone Wars world. One of the most fun features in this section were the droids. Like pets in other MMO-style games, Clone Wars Adventures allows you to have droids follow you around and you can do fun custom things with them. The developer chose C-3PO and made him walk like he was high-stepping. Then he chose an astro droid like R2 and had it play disco music while all the characters on screen danced the choreography of Beyonce's "Single Ladies" music video.
Actual gameplay consists of a multitude of different games. There was a tower defense game, for instance, which looked pretty straight-forward but featured some cool special weapons like sending a Jedi into the trenches to slice up all the marching droid soldiers. There was a starfighter section riding on rails with simple point and click firing. There are some fun action-adventure lightsaber battle sections and even puzzle games. There are currently 18 games in the demo and more than 20 planned for the final build.
The current plan is to have portions of the game free to play and introduce membership models on top of that. For instance, there could (I reinforce COULD) be a few free levels of the tower defense game and the rest would have to be paid for. I also asked about the possibility of a PSN version of these games and was informed that Free Realms is getting a PS3 port and will soon be able to put many of their games on PSN.
