Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions Review
A Blatant Cash Grab
The Empire has just taken over the galaxy, leaving a band of scrappy teenage heroes stuck in a two-dimensional side-scroller. Your goal, to rescue every citizen, and gather kill trophies in the form of imperial stormtrooper helmets, seems a difficult one.
Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions begins with an utterly forgettable young man by the name of Ezro as your initial protagonist, a Jedi-in-training, who introduces the player to the others in his equally immemorial band of heroes as they attempt to rescue him. As you’re introduced to these other misfits in your merry band, you’re also introduced to Haven (seems to be a popular name for video game hubs these days, at least it wasn’t Skyhold), a do-it-yourself, ill-defined hideout. Once you’re in Haven, you’re given the opportunity to build it up with a series of rather bland buildings that don’t seem to serve much of a purpose, populated by the citizens you rescue (who promise to reward you with upgrades after you pay them). The objective of the game seems somewhat unclear beyond “rescue these citizens and pay them to reward you”. Every citizen you rescue requires a donation of “Hope”, the primary currency of the game, which is joined by gold medals, stormtrooper helmets, droid parts, and other various loot, none of which are ever given a reason for being worthwhile to collect.
Should you dislike Ezro enough, you can skip him entirely for three to five US dollars as part of the game’s micro-transaction system, a system that frankly breaks the game by introducing heroes with far more powerful abilities. Instead of having to go through and unlock other protagonists through the game as would be the case in many other games, you’re given (right after the tutorial level) the opportunity to skip right to them; some simply cannot be unlocked except by complying with the maker’s demands for more money.
Once you’ve decided on your hero, you’re treated to a series of rather forgettable levels, with “hidden” bonus rooms that are sometimes mandatory to find or not hidden in the slightest. Threats such as strafing runs by fighters that you must dodge are introduced in the second or third level, while you’re forced to destroy wave after wave of attackers before you can proceed, often with little visual feedback as to when you can proceed.Environmental threats range from the mundane (exploding barrels), to the Super Mario-esque (bursts of flame from vertical pipes).
But enough about the story. Let’s take a look at the mechanics of the game. First off, your movement is fairly standard. Three buttons representing left, right, and up. Coupled with those is a button to mash down and twitch in the direction you want to shoot, which makes me seriously wonder at the sanity of whomever designed it: my thumb had to cross half the screen before the controls understood what I was trying to do. You’re given a terrible aiming system (your shots arc, despite being an energy weapon, for some unknown reason); while the game also keeps track of your hit percentage as if to mock you for the game’s poor aiming system. Your jump ability has a double-jump feature that you can activate by hitting the jump button while in the air (useful for the placement of some items), which is one of the few useful and noteworthy abilities for a good portion of the game.
On several occasions, the game seems to switch it’s own mechanics and not tell you, such as when you’re granted control of an AT-ST (the two-legged walkers that the Ewoks destroy with nothing but logs and stones), granted two weapons, and rewarded with the inability to turn around very easily, leading to perhaps some of the more memorable portions of the early game.
The game has a tendency to cause my phone to overheat, and also eat up a lot of RAM, leading to at least one crash when I forgot to close other programs; part of this was caused by the game’s incessant need for rather bloated, drawn-out, or unnecessary cut-scenes that, a number of which appear to be ripped from the Star Wars Rebels TV series. These hardware-straining cut-scenes, coupled with the game’s lack of replayability and repetitive micro-transaction pop-ups, wouldn’t lead me to suggest this game to anyone unless they’re just trying to kill a few minutes. The only people this might be enjoyable for are well-behaved children who know not to click on the ‘buy!’ option in the micro-transaction pop-ups, making Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions a rather blatant cash-grab disguised as a game, aimed at kids armed with their parents credit card. That said, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone, not even my Sith nemesis, unless I was in a particularly vindictive mood.
Supply Hardcoredroid
Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions Review - App Review 4U
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