IGNORE THE HIGH SCORES! Buggiest DS game to date. Good source material can't make up for an unfinished game.
Since I have a DS now, I was interested in checking out the game on a handheld scale. But here's where the weirdness begins...
At the Target near my workplace, you can buy LSW2 for the PC for $30. The price for the DS version? $35! As many people know, the DS game is a very toned down version of the game, with far less detail, options and features than the PC version. I was very surprised to see that it could cost $5 for an inferior game. But if the games good, who cares, right?
I am so disappointed by LSW2 for the DS. There too many bugs to be considered acceptable as a final release game. I won't be vague here:
--The freeplay on level 4, Episode IV cannot be finished. After grappling across a large room and reentering the first hallway of the level, all the enemies, set pieces and, well... everything but the walls and floor disappears! I try to go back the way I came, but the door no longer works. The camera sticks in one direction. I fall in a pit that should kill me, but I don't die! I land at the bottom of a very very deep pit. Can't jump out, can't escape. I have to cancel out of the level, thereby making it impossible to collect all of the minikit pieces in the level.
--My team mates, no matter whatever level I'm on, shoot me in the back constantly. While playing, you will have the added challenge of making sure you are never in-between you "friends" and a stormtrooper, else they rob you of your hard-earned studs with a well-placed shot to your back.
--Speaking of teammates, they have totally lost their minds in this game. In the original they would follow you where you went and play nice. Not here. They will often get stuck respawing and dying in one spot over and over and over and over and... you get the idea. They don't seem able to eliminate any enemies, no matter how many times they shoot them.
--Free play is also messed up on Level 1, Episode VI. No matter what character I played, I was turned into Leia the Bounty Hunter as I entered the final room in Jabba's palace. In addition, the same but happened again; everything disappeared except the walls and Jabba, and the minikit piece I needed disappeared from the corner at well. The trap door in the floor wouldn't even work, so I had no chance of collecting the last kit piece. BUT WAIT! There's more! All the character selection buttons on the bottom screen went blank, and all the text from all the menus disappeared! I had to try and guess how far down the menu "Exit to Mos Eisley" was (just push up once and A twice to get back when it screws you, too). I tried to get the last piece by replaying story mode, but none of the characters were able to jump high enough to get the last kit piece... another unbeatable level.
--God forbid you die while platforming from 100 scale feet above the head of your party in the Sarlaac pit mission (I think its L4, EP VI). My entire party started spawing BELOW the platforms over and over. They would hover in sitting positions for a few seconds and then die. Over and over and over and over... And that was in story mode. Had to cancel out again.
--CLIPPING. Not a little clipping. INCREDIBLE clipping, in every single level. When I fell into the pit that was supposed to kill me, I was looking through the wall and out into outer space. Escape from the Death Star? If I could have just walked through that damn wall I was looking through, I'd be free! There were plenty of others walls I had clipped through, so why not this one dammit! Asteroids will vanish, doors with disintegrate! Floors will lose all texture and turn bright white!
--CUTSCENES. Well, they're gone. Maybe two or three have worked, but the rest skip most of the frames. So I didn't see the Death Star explode, I saw a stuttering blue ring. I didn't see the asteroid worm eat the Falcon, I saw a worm having a two-frame seizure. And all that wonderful humor? Gone. No funny in-jokes.
-EXTRAS. I paid about 100,000 studs for "Whitebox mode" and a similarly high price for "letterbox mode." Whitebox means everything looks white... what a deal! And letterbox mode? Well, I suppose I deserve it. Its black bars on the DS screen. At least moustaches and silly blasters are funny. These are just lame.
-CAMERA. They real opponent in this game is the camera. It hates you. You don't know it yet, but it does. Want to leave the trash compactor? Good luck finding the door. How about walking onto a platform where a minikit piece is to your right, but every time you turn around the camera switches sides, so you can never actually move in that direction? Nice. All the clipping its been doing, and it won't just sit still on the wall so I can FRIGGIN' MOVE LEFT!
I refuse to surrender to LSW2 on the DS. I will finish playing the game. But I'm saddened to know that I will never be able to unlock all the minikits without using a cheat code.
This could have been a terrific game. And I understand (a little) why some people are giving it high scores. But the game sucks. It is by far the most broken game ever developed DS. And as gamers, we need to NOT BUY broken games, or else we're telling the developers that its okay to sell crap.