Update: Although the game is in “open beta” it still has a NDA according to CM Plex.  This post was originally made yesterday but I pulled it out of respect.  The rest of the internet doesn’t care, and this isn’t a review really as much as it is my “impressions” for my “friends” (you’re all my friends, k?).

Clone Wars Adventures is the Star Wars version of Free Realms… or so we thought when we went to play yesterday.   When we heard that SoE was taking the popular Star Wars cartoon and turning it into a F2P game, pretty much everyone immediately thought of Free Realms.

While the game shares many things with Free Realms, the two are actually more different than they are alike.  Free Realms attempts to create a virtual world feeling.  Your character moves around in a standard 3d environment in a fairly traditional way.  In Clone Wars it feels more like you’re looking at your character move in more of a left to right pseudo 3d environment feel with a fixed camera angle.  The game so far, when playing your character, plays more like moving screen to screen.

Just how much is played as your character?  So far it’s just the part where you’re in a lobby area walking from mini-game to mini-game.  This is just a beta, but unless I’ve missed something (and I may have, please let me know and I can update this), it appears that the entirety of the game is mini-games.

Free Realms has a world to explore, monsters to fight, and offers more than mini-games.  In Clone Wars I look out the windows and see a city-like atmosphere that just begs to be explored or adventured in, even in a shallow way like Free Realms… but it’s all so confined in CWA.

Since the game is so much about the mini-games at this point, let’s talk about them.  They’re not bad.  There’s everything from Tower Defense to an on-rails starship shooter (lol SWTOR) to a who-can-press-the- arrow-keys-patterns- faster saber duel game.  Some of them are stupid like the one where you throw your saber or have to match the blocks or tell what’s different about a picture,  but for the most part they’re deep and at times difficult on the harder levels.

The absolute best thing that we’ve seen and can say we love about Clone Wars are the graphics.  This is absolutely one gorgeous game that has captured the look and feel of the Clone Wars cartoon.  There’s a richness to the simplicity of the stylized cartoon appearance that really comes through on the higher resolutions.  It’s easy to get started and the whole thing is polished up nicely.

What little we’ve seen of the Station Cash microtransaction implementation, it looks to be all about the costumes and furniture.  If you want the Boba Fett outfit (which every kid and adult will) then you’ll need to pull out the wallet.  If you want the cool spaceships (I assume for use in the mini-games?) or furniture then it’ll cost you.  If your character meant more than an avatar in a lobby we’d be all over the idea but right now it serves no purpose to buy any of this stuff if it’s all mini-games anyway.

Some of the features, like an inventory with slots for gear, are a bit aggrandizing.  They serve little purpose with the current direction of the game except to make it seem like there’s more going on than there really is or that the game is a MMO/RPG/whatever.

If SoE makes Clone Wars like Free Realms with places to explore, quests to complete, monsters to kill and more than just mini-games then we’re both going to be all over this game.  If it remains as-is then it’s a missed opportunity that doesn’t offer much more than a flash game site would with a Star Wars coat of paint. In other words, there’s no reason to play it.

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