Star Wars: Battle for Hoth

Can you imagine life without Star Wars? Given the fact I didn't see A New Hope until I was 21, I can personally confirm that, on the whole, things tick over fairly well without the heady influence of George Lucas' mammoth franchise.

I ate, I slept, and I was without the strange fear of overly hairy men that has dogged me ever since I first clapped eyes on Chewbacca. You could say it was a happier, more innocent time.

Conversely, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth would be nothing without its ties to LucasFilm's greatest.

It's a dependency that goes beyond its name and setting, providing an essential sense of standing and motivation to what is an average tower defence title. On this evidence, THQ was in no great shakes to bring anything new to the table.

Shooting stars

As such, much of Star Wars: Battle for Hoth feels especially familiar. Like other titles in the genre, gameplay takes a fairly loose approach to the tower defence set up, with your foe – naturally the armies of the Empire – taking no set path as they make their way to the base you're charged with defending.

Instead, the streams of Imperial forces, which attack in well defined waves, flow around you. Any trenches you build and turrets you place essentially block your foe in and set their path.

This gives you the upper hand and, in the first few stages at least, placing your men to take down each and every assault is not a hard task. Most of the time, they simply play into your hands.

Naturally things get harder the longer you play, with the Empire employing AT-ATs and Tie Fighters – amongst others – as the pressure builds. Your own forces are bolstered by the addition of X-Wings and laser turrets: each unit you deploy taking a slice of the credits you earn by taking out the enemy.

Army of we

As with all tower defence titles, building up enough points to employ your supposedly stronger forces – some of which come with extra shackles, such as needing to be tied to an energy source – relies on efficient killing from the off.

Should the enemy get on top and slip a few men through into your base, the stage is as good as over.

None of these extra units really help maintain the balance between attack and defence, either, because they're just as easy to take out as the rest of your forces.

As a result, it makes far more sense to simply place standard gunners – known as heavy weapon soldiers – left, right and centre, helping you save points as well as keep on top of the enemy in one fell swoop.

In essence, Star Wars: Battle of Hoth lets you cheat, nullifying much of the challenge and making one level much like another.

An old hope

What makes this all the more unacceptable is we've been here before.

As Pocket Gamer pointed out when looking at the iPhone release back in August, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth could and should hit some notable highs, but a lack of care when implementing its units means any sense of structure or design is lost.

Add to this slack take on strategy reports that the game has trouble running on several Windows Phone 7 handsets – problems with save files mean some levels have to be replayed, while others fail to load altogether – and you have a title that has not only failed to learn from its previous mistakes, but has inadvertently added some more for good measure.

Star Wars: Battle for Hoth feels especially lazy as a result, its Empire Strikes Back clips delivered in the wrong aspect ratio further evidence that THQ considers this a battle it lost a long time ago.