by Jack "MaxCarnage" Deswha

Well, its official. The designers at ShardWare have completely lost their freaking mind. If you need evidence of this you need look no further than their latest Star Wars offering for the XBox. Raptor Squad:Black is as hard to describe as it is to enjoy. Now, while I am notorious for my one-sided reviews and "off the wall" opinions, I think anyone who actually invests the money in this piece-of-crap game will wholeheartedly agree with me.

Lets start from the bottom and work our way up the ladder of suck shall we? First off, of all of the characters in the Star Wars Raptor Squad universe, you get stuck playing...Jonus Kable. Thats right Jonus...freaking...Kable. Now let that roll around in your mind for a few minutes. While they could have set you up with a cool-as-hell Jedi like Baal or Klux, or a gunslinging badass like Koort, they instead choose to stick you with the least charismatic and arguably weakest character of the entire series.
That being said, they also add insult to injury by excluding ALL of the remaining Raptor Squad personalities from the game. Why did they do this? Well , keep reading and I will fill you in on the clusterf**k that passes for a plot.

As it turns out, you have been deserted by your fellow teammates. Thats right, apparently you got on their nerves so much that they up and left. Ok, thats not entirely true, what happens is, that you are left behind when the other members of Raptor Squad are taken prisoner by a roving Imperial deathsquad.Why they didn't kill or take Kable along with the others makes up plot hole #1. Anyway, you are stuck in the hulk of a demolished star destroyer, and, like most horror games released after 1998, you have to make your way through the Sd and find clues that will enable you to get out and escape the SD before a deadly ion cloud rolls through the system and rips apart what is left of the destroyer.
In addition there is a subplot that runs throughout the game. See, turns out Kable's long lost dad was in Imperial Admiral, and this Destroyer was his command ship. So, while trying to find a way out of this doomed piece of wreckage you are also tasked to find out what happened to dear old pops and his crew. Ordinarily, this would be a cool game concept...but not this time. See, in addition to playing the least prolific of all Raptors, your arsenal is about as impressive as the contents of Queen Amidala's handbag. You can expect to be saddled with nothing more than a cheap looking blaster pistol through the majority of the game, unless you are lucky enough in some of the last levels to actually find a light repeating blaster.
This begs the question: where are the lightsabers? Where are the Thermal Detonators? Sadly, they were left out of this game.

The need for weapons then brings us to your arch rivals in this game. While cool horror games would throw tons of creatures at you just dripping with ooze, Raptor Sqaud:Black throws mynocks and exterminator droids. Thats right, the scary creatures in this game are mynocks and pest control droids. The only time cool SCARY enemies come at you are, again, in the later levels where you have to battle sith zombies and the occasional "blob" which, if it touches you paralyzes you for up to 30 seconds.

Granted, the graphics are solid in this title. I mean, when you are blasting chunks of rotting flesh from the zombies, it actually flies off and smacks into the bulkhead. ShardWare can at least be given credit for making disturbing looking villains...these guys will give you nightmares long after you have settled into your underoos for the night.
Still, after playing this for the first time I wanted desperately to visit the ShardWare lab and shake the life out of any designers associated with this game. "WHERE ARE THE DEMONS!?! WHERE ARE THE LEGIONS OF DIANOGA!?!" I wanted to scream. For those of you who arent particularly sharp, let me lay this out for you...you are looking at HOURS of game time killing the flying rats that are the Mynocks. HOURS. Who in the blue blazes thought this would be fun? Who sat back and said, "ya know, a good ratio would be TEN MILLION MYNOCKS TO EVERY SITH ZOMBIE?!?". It was enough to make me weep. Really. I sat in front of my tv weeping like a twelve year-old girl while my girlfriend slung Cheetos at me and told me to snap out of it. It's that bad.

Ultimately I guess the gaming industry has itself to blame. The Star Wars: Raptor Squad line has always been a surefire money maker. From the earliest games like Droid Adventures up to the Playstation game "Raptor Squad", Raptor Squad has been literally money in the bank. It is obvious the designers have run out of ideas and are trying to capitalize on the "horror" genre. Where games like "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill 2" are modern gaming masterpieces, Raptor Squad:Black comes off as a sad desperate copy.
In retrospect, I cant even give it high marks for atmosphere and ambiance, because everything feels "ripped off" from other games. Granted, it is eerie to walk around the hulk of a torched Star Destroyer, with the only sound being your own breathing apparatus (which grows annoying after the first ten minutes)...but it just seems forced in this game. In an odd way, it seems this game both uses and abuses the ability of the XBox. The graphics are good and the sound is eerie, but soon you realize that the repetition almost kills the flow of the game-it becomes almost comical.

For those of you just joining the broadcast, what I'm basically saying is: save your money. Because, when you boil it all down, the problem isn't really with the gameplay or even the plot or the lame villains...it's the fact that this isn't Star Wars. There is no "space opera" feel to this game, no sense of the galaxy's future depending on your every action. There are certain things we, as gamers, have come to expect from the Star Wars line, and this simply isn't it. If you were to take the Star Wars name off of the box, you wouldn't even know that this was a Star Wars game. You would probably mistake it for the latest Aliens installment or something. Rumor has it that this will be the final Raptor Squad title in the Star Wars line. If this is the case I can think of nothing more sad than the series ending with such a blemish on it's otherwise fine name.

Game Title Stats

Concept The Concept is good, the execution sucks.	35
Gameplay You will get more satisfaction from a scratch off lotto ticket.	05
Graphics Above-Average. Gruesome in all the right spots.	80
Sound 90% of it sounds like a prank phone call.	35
Overall I would rather spend my day chewing broken glass.	39

Genre:
Action/Horror

Release Date:
Available

Developer:
ShardWare

Publisher:
TieRyl

ESRB:
Teen/Adult

Requirements:
X-Box