Star Wars: Demolition

The level design is by far the biggest culprit in hurting the game. While each level is on a different planet, they’re just way too small. This makes traveling through them way to repetitive, and more than a little crowded when there’s quite a few people on the map. The one positive point about each of the levels in that there are at least a few obstacles scattered through them, allowing for a bit more "Cat and Mouse" gaming, when hunting down opponents.

The visuals are more of a mixed bag. The models for each of the characters are very well done, as is the architecture of the levels, but Demolition suffers from a terrible case of draw-in. This problem borders on being unforgivable in a PSOne title, so why is it present in this Dreamcast title. It’s a very distracting, not to mention disappointing problem. Thankfully the game does run at a reasonably smooth frame rate, so there is a technical aspect that you needn’t worry about. The audio is standard Star Wars fair with familiar tunes and the expected laser cannon sounds to fill out the aural experience.

When playing, one can expect the usual selection of modes from single player missions, to quick pick-up games, to multi-player. In single player the computer AI gets pretty darn polar. One minute your enemies are ruthless killing machines, then next they’re sitting ducks. At least multi-player provides a little bit of additional fun, 

but even after a few rounds it’s difficult to stay interested.

Vehicular combat games had their moment in the sun and were a novel experience when they first came out, but now we’ve seen them all and it’s time to move on. Star Wars: Demolition just doesn’t bring anything to the genre that makes it stand out.

Reviewed by Mr. Nash

(January 12, 2001)