Via Starwars.com:
WHICH GAME DESERVES A SECOND LOOK? TWO STARWARS.COM WRITERS DEBATE!
One of the great things about Star Wars is that it inspires endless debates and opinions on a wide array of topics. Best bounty hunter? Most powerful Jedi? Does Salacious Crumb have the best haircut in the saga? In that spirit, StarWars.com presents From a Certain Point of View: a series of point-counterpoints on some of the biggest — and most fun — Star Wars issues. In this installment, two StarWars.com writers discuss which Star Wars game deserves another look.
Shadows of the Empire is the most underrated, says Cassidee.
Shadows of the Empire was among the first Star Wars games that deviated from being strict film adaptation in favor of being its own distinct experience. Originally released on the Nintendo 64 in the late ‘90s, Shadows was part of a multi-media campaign to create a story bridging the gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
At its center is Dash Rendar, a scoundrel-type given instructions to aid Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa as they attempt to recover from the events of Empire and thwart new threats hunting them across the galaxy. With his robot pal Leebo, Dash travels to various planets, stations, and ships to work behind the scenes and face off against high-profile enemies in challenging boss battles.
Video games of the Nintendo 64 and original PlayStation era all share similar criticisms today: they haven’t aged well; their graphics are flat, blocky, and muddy; the controls are janky and unwieldy at best.
Shadows is not immune to this. The environment on planets like Tatooine especially are blocky and jagged, thinly held together to create a feasible progression path for the player. Dash’s face is compressed and blurry, and the textures on creatures, vehicles, and in the environment look more like stains on a napkin than anything representative of real-life substances. It controls with the grace of a car swerving along an icy road, levels are straightforward and largely empty, and the overall pacing ebbs and flows in ways that oscillate between being satisfying and overdrawn.
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