Here are 12 of the best and worst Star Wars games ever made

Star Wars as a franchise must be an absolute goldmine for videogame developers. You could make any type of game you want, give it a Star Wars twist and it'll often work.

That means that Star Wars fans are pretty much spoiled silly when picking a game to play.

You want a Star Wars-y first-person shooter? Star Wars: Battlefront II. You want a story-heavy Star Wars RPG? Knights of the Old Republic. You want a Star Wars dancing game? Well, you can play Star Wars Kinect - but why in the Baby Yoda would you want to?

With so many Star Wars games out there in all sorts of shapes and sizes, there are bound to be a couple of duds to go along with all the brilliant, timeless games available today.

Here's my pick for 14 of the best and worst Star Wars games of all time! I'll tell you right now - fans of Super Bombad Racing are going to be very disappointed.

Best:

6. Star Wars Episode I: Racer

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQbAidihQ10&feature=emb_title[/embed]

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is by far the most disappointing start to a Star Wars trilogy. I'm sorry, Prequel fans - your love is valid, but it's certainly not universal.

The movie did spawn a fantastic racing game for its time though: Racer. Podracing is a neat concept for a Star Wars racing game, and Racer took that potential and ran with it. It's fantastic at delivering just the right sense of speed and danger, earning its spot on this list.

5. Star Wars Dark Forces

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inDfUhFEeGM&feature=emb_title[/embed]

You'll probably sense a pattern forming with the games on this list - they all seem to be inspired by at least one or two other games. Here, we have LucasArts' answer to id Software's original Doom game.

It's a first-person shooter where you play as Kyle Katarn - a mercenary trying to stop the creation of Imperial Dark Troopers. LucasArts actually improved a little on the Doom formula here, allowing players to actually look in other directions, duck and jump, while also introducing multi-step puzzles to the mix.

4. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbyKtFhDzE&feature=emb_title[/embed]

The Lego Star Wars games were bona fide classics. These games were filled with earnest, goofy fanservice at its very best. The premise was simple: play through all the Star Wars movies (minus the sequel trilogy) while solving lego puzzles and collecting studs to unlock characters.

It was an addictive formula that made the games far better than they had any right to be. These games are actually getting rebooted soon, and I couldn't be more excited for it.

3. Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLqVIw_Qz8A[/embed]

This was once the game for lightsaber combat. You once again play as Kyle Katarn - this time, as a Jedi. You travel the galaxy fighting off the empire, meeting several familiar allies along the way.

The game also has a multiplayer component, which somehow still remains active today. It's coming to the Nintendo Switch soon, so why not pick it up?

2. Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ6Ta-Ovx4c[/embed]

Words cannot describe how much I love this game. My brother and I used to sit down and play this thing on the PlayStation 2 in splitscreen co-op all the time, setting the number of enemies to 500 and spending a whole day watching that number slowly tick down. This is an absolutely fantastic Star Wars video game, offering players some of the most iconic battlefields in Star Wars lore.

You can play as rebels, stormtroopers, clones or droids, in any one of their many available character classes. You can charge the battlefield in an AT-TE - or with a lightsaber in your hand. Mowing down waves of stormtroopers as a Jedi never lost its novelty. You could even head to space for some 1v1 dogfights! This game was amazing. The fact that we almost got a Star Wars Battlefront III, only for it to be cancelled will always break my heart.

1. Knights of the Old Republic

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzq9epS2b1A[/embed]

I mean, are we really surprised? Of course Knights of the Old Republic tops this list. You can barely utter the words, "What's the best Star Wars game?" without someone slapping you and handing you a copy of Bioware's RPG epic. This game crafted a beloved story, with incredibly memorable story beats and a big old twist to bring it all home.

Knights of the Old Republic not only defined what it meant to be a great Star Wars game, but sealed Bioware's name as one of the greatest RPG developers of its time. Unfortunately, the Bioware of today is not the Bioware of yesterday, and even if we got another Knights of the Old Republic game - it might not be the same. All the more reason to play this game then, and relive the adventure of a lifetime.

Honourable mention:

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfcAHfDuNzw[/embed]

The only reason I didn't slap this on the list with the rest of the games is because it's so new! Personally, this game was my favourite Star Wars experience in quite a while, and certainly one of the best Star Wars games I've ever played. It fits in pretty comfily with the rest of these games - due to its unique combat and gameplay structure, and heavy doses of amazing fanservice (that ending!).

This wasn't too surprising - the game was developed by Respawn Entertainment, who have a pretty stellar record of making fantastic videogames. This one balances out souls-like elements with metroidvania-like exploration, so fighting and finding things make up for 80 per cent of the whole package - and it's great. Unfortunately, the experience was marred for me with some ugly performance issues on the PlayStation 4. Check out our review!

Worst:

6. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74ZR0m1YHig[/embed]

I'm putting this game a little lower on the list purely because it does one thing right, and one thing only: making you feel like an all-powerful Jedi. I'm sorry, but other than that, this game is garbage. You play as a clone of Starkiller, Darth Vader's apprentice, who died in the previous game. Sam Witwer doesn't do the best job here as Starkiller - but hey, he went on to play Deacon in Days Gone this year, and I enjoyed that much more than this sorry fare.

Unfortunately, its gorgeous graphics (at the time) can't make up for its awfully written story, repetitive combat and quicktime event-filled gameplay. This game improves on virtually nothing from its predecessor, with a story that is disappointing on every level. Hey, at least it's not canon anymore.

5. Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3QlDWTvtrM&feature=emb_title[/embed]

If I were asked to describe Star Wars, I probably wouldn't say 'cute'. This Mario Kart rip-off is an absolute disgrace, and doesn't even fit in well as a Star Wars game. Who on earth asked for a Star Wars racing game where we play as a bunch of silly bobbleheads?

It didn't even do kart racing right - doing nothing to further the genre with boring gameplay and badly designed courses. Nothing about this Star Wars game is unique. Even just as a racing game, why would you play this over Crash Team Racing, which came out two entire years prior?

4. Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6HMu0k-NVc&feature=emb_title[/embed]

Cool title, bad game. Of the many, many Star Wars games where you get to fly a spaceship, I would recommend this one last. This game flat out controls badly, with overly long and repetitive levels.

It kind of plays like a poor man's Star Fox - though that character is probably more well-known as a Super Smash Bros. character these days, than the star of his own series of games. It was a bad, bad idea to make a fully 3D game like this on the Game Boy Advance. Seeing all those 3D graphics chugging along is enough to make a person puke.

3. Star Wars: Obi-Wan

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GhqikBktQQ[/embed]

You'd think an Obi-Wan Kenobi game would be a no-brainer. He practically carried the prequels on his back! Unfortunately, there's no saving this game.

I mean, where do I start? The horrifyingly bad voice acting? The almost impossible final boss battle? The bad controls? The boring levels? No, steer clear of this game. There are plenty of better games to play for good lightsaber combat than this mess. If you're hankering for more Obi-Wan, just be patient - he's getting a TV show soon!

2. Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfFpEfS4k3w&feature=emb_title[/embed]

A Star Wars fighting game isn't exactly a bad idea - remember Darth Vader popping up in Soulcalibur IV? This Star Wars fighting game, however, is garbage. It's not even the fun kind of garbage, like Force Unleashed II. This is just bad, with a horribly written story and poor gameplay.

A hopelessly unbalanced roster where anyone with a lightsaber was immediately more powerful than anyone else is the real kicker. Where's the fun in that? This is a game destined to be forgotten - the fighting game that could've been great, but ended up sadly mediocre.

1. Kinect Star Wars

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg_FoEy8T_A&feature=emb_title[/embed]

This is it. The worst Star Wars game of all time. In a twisted kind of way, it's actually a pretty impressive achievement that LucasArts managed to produce something this bad. First off, the game was fully dependent on the Xbox 360's Kinect peripheral - a motion controller, essentially. The Kinect didn't quite take off, but it would have at least been remembered if Kinect Star Wars turned out as advertised.

In one particularly misleading ad, players were told that they could literally wield a lightsaber in their hands. They could push away enemies with the force, just by gesturing with the kinect! They could control rancours and destroy stuff! They could go podracing! Well, they did get all that stuff technically, but they also got poor controls, lacklustre gameplay and weak writing. This isn't even good as a party game. The only reason we even talk about this game anymore is because of the now-infamous Han Solo song - which I think is pretty good, actually.

Dishonourable mention:

Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTBu4tigSDo&feature=emb_title[/embed]

Yes, there are two Star Wars Battlefront IIs. This is the 2017 game, developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. There's a reason this isn't with the rest of the stinkers above, and that's because it's actually good now. DICE has painstakingly added tons of new features, heroes, villains, maps and game modes since release, making a case for it being one of the better 'live service' games of recent years.

Unfortunately, no amount of good will will ever make people forget how horribly this game was monetised at launch. People had to PAY to play iconic characters like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker - or grind, grind, grind until they had enough credits to unlock them.

How can we forget when an EA Community Team member jumped to the game's defence on Reddit - only for their comment to become the most downvoted comment in Reddit history? Over 660,000 downvotes on a single comment. Star Wars Battlefront II might've redeemed itself in the end - but its controversies remain as a stain on EA's involvement with the franchise.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.