Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars for Leapfrog Didj

Written on Jun 13, 2009 by Thomas S. and filed under LeapFrog, Reviews

Help Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker stop the Separatists and practice your math concepts at the same time!  Star War: The Clone Wars for the LeapFrog Didj Learning System is targeted at 1st – 3rd graders who are ready to learn geometric shapes, fractions of a whole, fractions of a set, place value, and more than/less than relationships.  This game is fast-moving, with challenging gameplay and plenty of opportunities to train yourself in the “ways of the Math”.

Game Play

As a quick summary, the game consists of four levels, with each level having several stages.  For example, the first level has four stages (1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4) with the first two being very similar and the last stage consisting of the “boss”.  Your character runs, jumps and slashes through the stages; eliminating droids, avoiding obstacles and reaching checkpoints.  When you encounter a checkpoint, the educational aspect of the game takes over.  In each “challenge”, you’re asked three questions.  Once you’ve finished at the checkpoint, you get a health power-up and can continue with the level.  If you miss a question during a challenge, a droid appears next to your character, so you need to act quickly to take care of it.

In The Clone Wars, you’re either controlling Anakin Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi, but there is no real difference in game play between the characters.  The controls are pretty straightforward, with the directional pad moving the character and the A and B  buttons providing attack and jump, respectively.  It wouldn’t be a Star Wars game without the use of the Force, so as you go through the game, the R2 unit messages you with little helpful hints and instructions on several Force moves.  You can Force Throw (which throws your light saber), Force Jump (for extra height), Force Push (push enemies and objects) and Force Block (which holds your light saber in position to reflect blaster fire).  The Force moves are accomplished with use of the R and L buttons on the top of the Didj unit, in combination with either the directional pad or A/B buttons.

The player character has two “meters”, one for health and one for Force energy.  Every time you get hit by blaster fire or run into an obstacle, you lose a little health.  To replenish your health, you need to find red Medkits.  These show up after you complete a question challenge successfully and you’ll find them throughout levels.  Every time you use a Force move, you lose some Force energy.  Your Force level is replenished over time and by destroying enemies, whose little Force bits fly into you after you take care of the enemy.

The enemies in the game consist of several models of droids and the bosses.  In addition to the enemies, there are some obstacles in the environment that will cause problems for you.   You need to avoid open energy conduits, security lasers, and security cameras that will detect you and summon droids to attack you.  In level 3, you actually fly through an asteroid field so you need to avoid the asteroids.

While the game play (figuring out the controls, navigating through the levels) is pretty straightforward, getting through the game is actually pretty challenging.  The levels scale difficulty well – you start against easier droids and then move on to tougher droids, and with more quantity.  I had a hard time getting through the fourth level and my son, who just finished first grade, wasn’t able to make it very far in the game and quickly lost interest and moved on to something easier.  I believe what makes it challenging is that your character actually moves quickly and the “window” into the game is a bit too small, with enemies firing their blasters at you before they’re visible on the screen.

Since the character moves quickly, it’s very hard to anticipate what’s going to happen next.  If your character is running along, by the time you react to an enemy in view, your character is only half of a screen away from it.  Now, the upside of the character’s speed is that you’re able to run away from blaster fire with some success.

When the enemy is able to fire at you before you see them, it’s almost crucial that you’re paying attention to the game audio, since you’ll hear the blaster sound before you see the droid.

The educational content in The Clone Wars is appropriate for the advertised age group (1st – 3rd grade).  The Clone Wars sticks to math skills.  You’ll answer questions about filling in the blank with the correct comparison operator (<, >, =), identifying geometric shapes, determining fractions from graphical pictures and place value of digits.  Your child’s progress can be tracked using the LeapFrog Connect software, which uploads game play data to be viewed in the LeapFrog Learning Path system.

Customizations

As with other Didj games, in-game accomplishments are earned in the form of badges and Bitz.  In each game, there are different badges to be earned.  For example, you’ll get a badge in Star Wars: The Clone Wars if you destroy all the enemies in a particular level.  Bitz, once accumulated, can be used to “buy” Micromods.  Using the LeapFrog Connect software with the Clone Wars, you can purchase new character celebration dances, alternate droid voices, new load screens, and different music remixes.  Once purchased, they’ll be transferred to the Didj device for use in-game.

Bottom Line

Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the Didj is a solid game, but not without some drawbacks.  The integration of math questions into the Clone Wars world is well done and age appropriate.  Running around slashing droids is also very fun and the game is easy to pick up and learn.  The trick is that it’s pretty challenging to make your way through the game because of fast characters and even faster droids.  The graphics, while well done, can be a little tough to see at times.  However, I do think that LeapFrog appropriately aged the game.  My son (end of first grade) had no problems with the math questions, but was more challenged by the game play.  My hunch is that older children (at the top of the 3rd grade range for this game) would have no problem with the game play and that the math questions may not be much of a challenge.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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