At the largest game industry convention, E3, where all the entertainment companies are showing off their latest, Microsoft used part of their press conference this morning, to show off Kinect Star Wars. It was presented with a wide range of other games for Kinect and not for Kinect, but all for the Xbox 360. I know that it would have interrupted the proceedings, but part of the fan in me, really wanted to see at least one Star Wars character hit the stage during this portion. Oh well.
What did we find out? Not much that we didn’t know already. What they did show is one actual working scene which has a Jedi Knight fighting his way through the Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back. One thing that Star Wars fans will really like is the amount of realism in the scenery and characters. They looked just like in the movies, including the Carbonite freezing room where Leia admits that she loves him. We’ve seen a lot of scenery in various Lucas games, but these seemed to be the coolest of the lot. During a short intro, they also showed the pod racing, the forest flyers in Return of the Jedi, the flying cars in Attack of the Clones and other scenes, X-Wings and Tie Fighters, all playable.
One thing we noticed from the above is that the game doesn’t seem to be following any specific time line in the Star Wars Universe, but encompassing scenes from all the movies, intertwined into a video game. Judging from this preview, it didn’t seem to be very story oriented, but they only showed one scene and didn’t speak much more than that so it’s hard to tell.
As to the Kinect support, the game is a fully integrated title, unlike some who are just enhanced by the controller. You actually get to play the Jedi, using fencing moves when fighting against the enemy with light sabers. Since there is no button, telling the weapon to “turn on” does so, while telling it to shut off does that too. We would have liked to see something more Star Wars oriented like “Activate” and “Deactivate.” If you throw your hand up and push forward, it shoots out the force push. By acting as though you are lifting something, you get to do as Yoda did and raise a large object with only your hand. The other scenes weren’t elaborated on in relation to how the Kinect gameplay works, but we were really impressed with what we saw.
So basically it plays as one would think it does, and looks amazing, so we have to say this is one Star Wars video game that we are looking forward to seeing. Hopefully it will meet the end of the year deadline that has been rumored.
