Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (SNES)

While it might not be as prevalent now thanks to digital distribution and steep sales, there was a time where if a kid got a game for one of their systems, they played it regardless of its quality. It was one of the few options they had after all, so no doubt many kids who received the sidescrolling platformer Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for Christmas or their birthday would soon find themselves smashing their heads against this unusually difficult adaptation of what might be the best Star Wars film. Luckily, I was not one of them, but my brother was, and he has decided to inflict that old suffering on me. Thankfully I have far more experience under my belt as I finally tackle this tormentor of his youth, but that terror the game instilled in him certainly wasn’t misplaced.

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back gets off to an absolutely awful start. Since the game follows the events of the film rather closely, you begin on Hoth, which means slippery floors will immediately appear as you’re just starting to play the game. As you explore the caves and snow of the ice planet, you are Luke Skywalker, whose lightsaber and blaster pistol feel like they’d be a good match for the wildlife of what seemed like a relatively uninhabited world in the film, but Super Star Wars packs in tons of unusually aggressive fauna to harass you in these early stages. Small creatures that shoot quills off their backs, flying bird aliens, hog creatures that charge towards you, small Wampa yetis with ice breath that lets them freeze you and wear down your health bar at their leisure, and somehow more all pile in during these early stages. What’s worse, many of them will respawn if their spawn point goes off screen, and things like the small bats in the cave love to appear constantly to knock you into other foes or just gradually wear poor Luke’s health meter down.

The game does seem to recognize it is being ridiculous with the amount of intensely aggressive enemies though. Many will drop health that heals just a little less than the damage they’ve dealt, and if you jump around with your lightsaber as Luke, he’ll protect himself from most angles while potentially killing these often rather frail foes. The jumping around does mean spawn points can slip off screen though, and these stages also feature many dangerous falls that are inordinately long despite the fact the outcome of them will be death no matter what you do during the drop. Hopping aboard the Tauntaun mount does give you a secondary health meter at least, health bar extensions drop from certain enemies, thermal detonators drop that give you a chance to do a screen clearing blast so long as you use them quickly, and passwords mean you won’t lose all your progress if you run out of lives. However, even on the easiest difficulty, these opening stages are an incredibly poor way to kick off the action. Even if you get good at learning where the animals are, your response is usually going to be lightsaber jumping and hoping you don’t get hit during it, so this slog is either going to be extremely difficult or extremely tedious unfortunately.

However, after you’ve finished up with these annoying levels in the caves and on Hoth’s surface as Luke, the game actually begins to open up into something far less terrible. When you get to play as Han Solo or Chewbacca, it becomes more of a run and gun where the danger of your enemies is actually fairly balanced. They do hit rather hard, but a careful and methodical approach makes even engagements with rather simple enemies more exciting than they’d be if more enemies were pushovers. Since they drop health about as reliably as the Hoth creatures, you can recover from the exchanges and as you get better at learning how the enemy types behave, you can start refilling your health entirely. Han and Chewy both start off with the same basic blaster shots, the ones Luke can use as well if you have reason to ever switch off that lightsaber, but enemies can drop power-ups to make the hits more effective, such as adding in chaser missiles or firing large powerful plasma blasts. These upgrades do disappear if you die, and some of these levels still have a few moments of unfair difficulty like trying to jump onto platforms over instant death drops with enemies offscreen who will attack once you move, but for the most part, Han and Chewbacca get to have some actually enjoyable levels that make up a good chunk of the experience.

Han Solo has a secondary weapon as well, the player able to collect grenades that are a good fit for the boss fights. Unsurprisingly, Luke Skywalker’s bosses are usually best handled by frantic jump attacks, even his dramatic showdown with Darth Vader at the end of the game likely to devolve into these, but Han’s ability to aim his blaster in multiple directions and use of grenades fits the boss characters he faces off with. Chewbacca has levels built for his capabilities as well, but rather than grenades the furry alien instead gets a rather pointless spin attack that only hits enemies that are so close you would be better off backing away and firing on them instead. Luke does eventually get something far better than a back-up pistol though, force powers joining his repertoire after he meets Yoda on the swamp world Dagobah. One of these force powers is the ability to deflect laser shots, and you can find other force powers on the planet like the ability to freeze all enemies on screen or mind control them, but the one you’ll actually be using is the ability to heal whenever you want to, this being such an invaluable tool that Luke’s later levels manage to become far more bearable. The Invisible force power is similarly strong although more costly, because despite the name it also makes you invincible, meaning you can get in a tough enemy’s face and land plenty of free hits. The Dagobah swamps are filled with tough enemies who take a lot of punishment, but you can move past them and Force Heal to make these levels rather simple. When later levels take Luke to Cloud City there are still things like deadly drops to worry about, but the Force Heal does so much in making engaging with enemy forces an actually tolerable part of this game. Vader’s fight still doesn’t come out clean though because he has so much health that you can only take small swings at him and then wait until he throws junk at you that you can break for force power refills, but at least by this point Luke has had some actually decent experiences under his belt before the underwhelming finish.

While Han and Chewy have mostly good levels and Luke’s are all over the map, the last gameplay type is just somewhat dull. At different points in the story you’ll find yourself in a vehicle of some sort, whether it be the snowspeeder on Hoth, the X-Wing spacecraft above Cloud City, or the Millennium Falcon making its escape into space. These make use of the SNES’s Mode 7 for 2D environments that feel like they’re a 3D space, but none of these segments use that very well. The space battle is just about looking all around until your radar picks up a TIE fighter you then turn towards and easily shoot down, and the snowspeeder and Cloud City fights are hurt by their visual design. The hills of Hoth make spotting targets difficult and send your speeder up and down to make aiming at your targets difficult, but the tow cable used for tripping the massive AT-AT walkers is surprisingly easy to use thankfully. The Cloud City fight’s problem is the Y axis mainly, as you dip above and below the cloud layer and aiming your lasers at enemy craft feels unreliable due to the shifting shape of their sprites as they move around. These aspects mostly make these slow and somewhat lacking in challenge, and while you can very well die if you don’t pick up health enough or struggle in finding enemies to target, these small segments are pretty weak and don’t provide the interesting gameplay shift they were likely going for.

THE VERDICT: After giving off an abysmal first impression with the early Hoth levels, Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back manages to make a shift into something more acceptable but still imperfect. The early stages are ruthless with their constant assault of enemies, slipperiness, and deadly drops, basically requiring constant jump attacks with Luke to make progress so they’re not even interesting when you do figure them out. However, when Luke gets his force healing power, his stages become more tolerable and sometimes interesting, and Han and Chewbacca have run and gun levels that mix challenge and gameplay in a more interesting manner. These actually enjoyable levels sometimes feature poor design like enemies swooping in from nowhere to knock you to your doom, but these could almost be overlooked because most of the run and gun portions ask for skill without punishing you too hard as you learn them. The vehicle segments are rather bland though, so that means when you look at the game in totality, you are left with an experience that has far too many faults to let its better moments truly define how it plays.

And so, I give Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for Super Nintendo…

A BAD rating. If the game had continued as it started in Hoth this game would be absolutely unbearable, because even if you work your way around the difficulty in these stages, it’s not by doing something interesting or being strategic. It’s a lot of lightsaber hopping that isn’t that great to engage with, and enemies are littered all over the place so it’s not like you’re really choosing to jump so much as relying on it to keep away the enemies from all sides. However, later Luke levels do get the Force Heal and start easing up on how ruthless its enemy design is, the Stormtroopers and their guns a surprisingly welcome change compared to the blue boars and alien bats. When you start getting time to play as Han Solo or Chewbacca, you’ll find that the game does understand how to do difficulty properly, but while you get plenty of stages on Hoth and Bespin as Han and a few levels here or there as Chewy, they don’t dominate the experience enough to completely redeem it. You still have bad enemy placement to deal with here and there, and when you hop into vehicles it often feels aimless or like the Mode 7 visuals work against it, so Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back isn’t only getting off to a rough start, it’s still finding stumbling points all along the way before reminding you how bad it can get with its slow finale.

We are lucky to live in an age with plenty of legitimately challenging games with fair difficulty design that values skill, and we can certainly get more than just one game at a time if we keep our eyes open for sales or shop digitally. Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back came out in a time of limited purchasing power and when the Star Wars series was still searching for games that could accurately capture moments from the film. This game does capture the plot of The Empire Strikes Back quite well for a game of its time and takes you through the areas you’d expect to see, but then it crams in plenty of poor design choices like its enemy placement and tepid vehicle sections. While the game does improve after the unfortunate opener, it doesn’t do so to the degree where pushing through the slippery start feels justified.