Game Reviews

Star Wars: Assault Team

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Star Wars: Assault Team

A piece of trivia: back in September 2013, Konami released a Star Wars card-battler called Star Wars: Force Collection. It was okay.

It didn't step too far away from the classic card-battler formula, but there was great appeal to gathering up a collection of cool Star Wars trading cards.

Roughly six months on and LucasArts has released its latest Star Wars mobile game. It also appears to be a card-battler.

Why is there the need for two Star Wars card-battlers in such a short period of time? Are the two games very different from one another? And how does this one differ from the umpteen other titles in the genre?

I'll have all the answers for you over the next week.

First impressions

Star Wars: Assault Team is much better looking than Star Wars: Force Collection. You're guided around fully 3D corridors of Star Destroyers, firing blasters and using character-specific special attacks against the polygonal enemies. Though your heroes are represented by their cards at the bottom of the screen, the art on them is pretty good.

The game certainly has its roots in card-battling, but it's a lot more involved than the typical battler fare. Missions so far have been linear sequences of battles, with the occasional need to tap a button to call an elevator or open a crate.

Yet there's more strategy to it than, say, a Marvel: War of Heroes. You can't keep tapping away to progress, you need to fight your battles carefully and use the skills of your party to their fullest.

Darth Vader even pops up to tell you off if you keep tapping the screen when it's not your turn - the developer clearly keen to distinguish Assault Team from other titles in the genre.

I'm not far enough into the game to say that I'm swayed by this approach to battling, but its reliance on more sophisticated gameplay ideas than its competitors gives me reason to hope that my next few days with Star Wars: Assault Team will, at the very least, be interesting.

Day 3: Star chores

Early progress in Star Wars: Assault Team was easy, but now the game is starting to (force) push back, stopping me from continuing. The toughness of foes has increased - though the difficulty of the combat has not - and unfortunately the team you start with is simply not up to the task.

This is where the cards you collect through regular play are used. You can add members to your squad, change out squad-mates you don't like, and sell off the weaklings.

Once you have modified your team with your new additions, you set about upgrading them. You pick up item cards on your travels, and use these to improve your character card's abilities, in conjunction with spending some of the Credits you pick up along the way.

Items marked with a golden star during the upgrade progress indicate that the associated character will receive an Affinity bonus for using them, increasing their stats more than they would normally.

To get these items and cards you'll need to go back and replay stages, with higher rewards yielded if you choose to attempt those areas on higher difficulty levels. In other words: you'll need to grind (or spend money) if you want to proceed.

Day 7: Sun Battles: Fight Squad

The point of using a licence in a game should be to implement it in a way that pays respect to the original work while complementing the new piece of media.

Though Star Wars: Assault Team doesn't muck about with the Star Wars universe, it doesn't fit the tone of the beloved series into its actual gameplay.

And it really needed to to differentiate it from the other card-battlers on the market.

The story so far has the veneer of Star Wars, in that it's set on spaceships, and desert planets, and alien jungles, but it's slow and repetitious. Those are two adjectives I would never use to describe Lucas's space opera, but they apply here.

When you're powerful enough you can enter the Arena and use your deck of cards to take on the decks of other players for special points that can only be won in multiplayer combat.

There's a risk/reward mechanic, whereby you can take on multiple fights in a row for the chance to win bonus points, but when you're still at a low level like I am it's best to quit while you're ahead and spend your winnings on the Arena Crates.

Arena combat isn't a huge part of the Star Wars mythos, and seeing a pair of R2D2s battling it out, or watching Han Solo blast Chewbacca in his furry face, feels inauthentic.

But the multiplayer, the weekly Special Missions, and the drawn-out campaign will keep you busy for a good long while - especially if you happen to catch the card collecting bug.

Star Wars: Assault Team is a solid card-battler, with a few new ideas included to add a little more strategic variety. Yet its use of the Star Wars licence - though respectful enough - is mostly cosmetic, meaning that it's not half the game it might have been.

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Star Wars: Assault Team

If you're up for another round of card battling fare, or want to experience the genre with a Star Wars skin, then go for your life, but Star Wars: Assault Team is otherwise rather forgettable
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Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.