Best and Worst Star Wars Games of All Time

Friends know I'm a big Star Wars fan.  As such, I've played every video game that came out, until it all started to be about the Clone Wars.  And I mean every one.  Star Wars Monopoly, Star Wars Demolition, Star Wars Jedi Power Battles, Star Wars X-Wing Alliance, Star Wars Rebellion, Star Wars Force Commander, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds... there were a lot of them.  Many of them were pretty bad games, although that usually didn't stop me from loving them based on the brand alone.  Head past the jump to find the very best, and very worst, of the Star Wars games.

Good

• Dark Forces - A truly brilliant FPS game that was ahead of its time in some respects.  It had a fun story, cool characters, and took you right into the movies with the sound effects, environments, and enemies that you're familiar with.  Just a fantastic experience all around.  8/10.
• Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight - I spent way too much time on this game as a kid.  This was the masterful sequel to the original FPS, with much-updated graphics, force powers, and a lightsaber, on top of the familiar and perfected shooting combat.  The force powers and saber combat could be a little bit clunky, but overall the game felt incredibly well designed, with expansive levels that demanded exploration, as well as challenging enemies and puzzles.  This game also introduced me to mods, with dozens upon dozens of amazing fan creations keeping me entertained.  The game has aged really well, do check it out.  9/10.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - My favorite online multiplayer experience of all time.  This game upgraded the graphics to use the popular Quake 3 engine, and looked beautiful at the time (I had to beg my parents to get a new graphics card so I could play the thing!).  The lightsaber combat system was totally overhauled.  The developers truly created a work of art when designing the combat system, and the 4 years of daily online play is a testament to that fact.  The skill ceiling was through the roof - advanced players could completely manhandle beginners, and every move or strategy had a counter, and a counter to the counter.  The single player was good too, although probably the weakest in the series.  10/10.
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy - A sort-of sequel (it's a full game, but the publishers strangely insisted on never calling it Jedi Knight III), this took the original Jedi Knight formula, focused on making your character a Jedi from level 1 of the game, and focused heavily on that.  Dual-wielding and double-bladed lightsabers were added, and the combat system was changed from the perfection of Jedi Outcast.  As a result, the multiplayer was severely disappointing, and not nearly as deep.  Everyone I knew from Jedi Outcast that tried Jedi Academy hated it and went back to the older game.  The one thing I did prefer in Jedi Academy was the single-player, which had some very varied missions and was a lot of fun.  It also had some brilliant mods, including some Matrix-themed Kung Fu mods and levels and a realistic sword mod, that I enjoyed a ton.  Jedi Academy is by no means a bad game, but playing it after Jedi Outcast only made me want to go back to the original.  8/10.
• X-Wing Alliance - The best Star Wars space sim that was made.  While it had superior graphics to X-Wing or TIE-Fighter, what really set it above the rest was the story and missions.  You played the role of a freighter pilot for a family business, and start off doing a few cargo missions for them.  Soon, the Empire descends on you, and you're forced to run and join the rebellion - all of this happens in-game, which is brilliant, and reminds me fondly of Freespace, where the plot was conveyed by in-game transmissions during missions, never taking you out of control.  It's a really immersive game experience that builds fluidly from piloting cargo freights to fighting in the battle of Endor (inside the Death Star!).  Really brilliant game.  9/10.
• Galactic Battlegrounds - The first good Star Wars RTS.  It's essentially a modification of Age of Empires II, with a Star Wars skin.  That is as great as it sounds.  The game mechanics kind of shows its age nowadays, but it's still fun marching a dozen AT-ATs on a Gungan City.  Take that, Jar-Jar!  7/10.
• Empire at War - The second good Star Wars RTS.  This one had some really cool and unique ideas, and executed them fairly well.  It had good graphics, which hold up today.  There was also an interesting campaign system where you managed a turn-based galactic map, similar in many ways to the Total War campaign maps.  When a battle occurred, you'd zoom down into a real-time battle on land or in space.  While the gameplay is pretty fluid and easy to control, it felt just a bit too simple and slow-paced for me, especially in space where many ships practically fly themselves.  Still, there's nothing wrong with the game, and it had some very cool ideas about sci-fi RTS.  7/10.
• Knights of the Old Republic - My second-favorite RPG of all time, period.  KOTOR is a classic with fantastic combat, a good story, and tons of choices and characters.  I am always blown away by this game, and you owe it to yourself to play it, whether you're a Star Wars fan or not.  10/10.
• Knights of the Old Republic II - It's possibly even better than the original, with cool characters, an even more unique storyline, and neat scenarios in the story.  The problem is the ending - there isn't much of one.  The gameplay is also a little imbalanced - Force Crush was just a wee bit overpowered.  Still, it's more KOTOR, so it's a good thing.  9/10.
• Racer - Yet another game I sunk way too much time into on my PC when it debuted. Racer is, well, a racing game, featuring the Pod Races of Episode 1.  The game had a fantastic sense of speed about it, which is always important in a racer, and the tracks were designed really creatively.  It was a difficult game with treacherous courses, including some creative uses of zero gravity and shortcuts.  Terrific game.  9/10.
• Super Bombad Racing - Ok, this is an obscure and weird Star Wars game, but I genuinely think it's good.  It happened to be my first Playstation 2 game, as well.  It's basically Mario Kart with Star Wars characters, with all the wacky fun that entailed.  It was pretty cute, had fun weapons and tracks, and all the stuff you love from Kart racing with a Star Wars skin on it.  Only downside was that the game was based on Episode 1.  7/10.
• Starfighter - This one was interesting. A well-made game with tons of content and decent gameplay, but the story and setting seemed almost tangential to Star Wars in many ways.  I enjoyed it at the time, but feel little need to return to it.  It was fine.  7/10.
• Jedi Starfighter - A much-improved sequel over the original, this is a space sim with the novelty of Jedi powers during dogfights.  It was a lot of fun, and had a ton of unlockable content and fun multiplayer mode.  It's super satisfying zapping a bunch of small enemy ships with lightning, even if I think it's very much implausible in the context of the Star Wars movies.  8/10.
• The Force Unleashed - The most recent Star Wars game I've played.  It was short, but very fun, mostly due to the awesome physics engine and fun force powers.  I was really impressed with this action game.  I heard the sequel kind of sucked, but I didn't play it.  8/10.
• Bounty Hunter - Another fun action game, where you got your first chance to play as a Fett - although unfortunately, Jango, not Boba.  Still, it had a really neat two-pistol auto-aim system and some fun combat and exploration. I don't remember the story, and the setting was kind of bland and repetitive (coruscant, tatooine, you've seen it a billion times before).  But I enjoyed it nonetheless.  7/10.
• Republic Commando - They actually pulled off a tactical FPS in the Star Wars universe!  And it works pretty darn well.  I wish I could play it co-op, but the friendly AI is fairly good too.  My favorite memory of this game is the level where you explore a derelict republic cruiser, partly in zero gravity, and mostly in darkness.  Very tense, atmospheric stuff.  The gunplay could have used more work, though, as it was a bit meh.  8/10.
• Rogue Squadron - Similar to Starfighter, but a predecessor, the original Rogue Squadron focused on atmospheric dogfight combat in the original trilogy era, while the sequels included more space missions and even occasional ground missions.  They were really fun arcade experiences, and if you had a Nintendo 64, chances are you know about this one.  The series stuck to Nintendo platforms, coming out on the Gamecube, which prevented me from playing them until finally picking up a Wii, but these games definitely still hold up today.  Very enjoyable and polished.  8/10.
• Battlefront - One of the most beloved and fondly remembered Star Wars series, and for good reason.  Battlefront featured epic multiplayer battles on vast battlefields, with infantry, vehicles, and aircraft.  This title and its sequel were some of the most popular Star Wars titles out there, and a new one is even in the works.  9/10.

Bad

•  The Phantom Menace - I really like the Phantom Menace game much more than I have any right to.  It's a bad game.  Terrible voice acting, dumb combat, blocky graphics, unintuitive puzzles.  Yet somehow, I kept getting sucked into it as a kid, and even when I went to try it again as an adult.  The levels are quite large, and actually feel sort of alive and open.  The voice acting and cutscenes, while bad, are memorable to me, like fake-Liam-Nieson saying "obi-wan!" a lot.  The Tatooine level was really huge, with tons of side quests and areas to explore, and lots of neutral NPCs walking along doing their business in the town of Mos Espa.  Coruscant was explorable.  Many levels had very little combat, and featured heavy exploration, platforming, or puzzle solving.  Oh!  And every neutral NPC is attackable.  You can bet I tried to kill Jar-Jar, Watto, and every other random NPC in the game, and you totally can!  It won't let you finish the game without important characters, but you can still DO it.  I also think Lucasarts did an impressive job padding out a minute-long location in the film into a 15-30 minute long level, without it feeling unnecessary or bad.  I'll honestly say I'm defending a game that really isn't that good, just because I had a fun time messing around in it.  6/10.
• Jedi Power Battles - I remember the trailer for this game, back in middle school, and how awesome it looked.  It promised a new game going through the events of The Phantom Menace again, but this time with much better graphics, more polished and deep gameplay, and co-op as a main feature.  While the combat and graphics were better, and the co-op was a fun feature, the gameplay overall felt really slow and unresponsive.  Enemies took way too many hits to die, the game was overly challenging due to the timing-based combat and blocking system, and overall, I just don't remember the game having much personality.  There weren't areas to explore and NPCs to talk to.  There weren't really side quests or puzzles as I recall.  It was a far more linear, on-rails experience where you fought a lot of droids.  While I think technically, this is a better game than Phantom Menace, I didn't enjoy it quite as much.  5/10.
• Obi-Wan - my memories of this game are vague, as I only played it one or two times on a friend's Xbox.  It seemed like a graphically updated version of Phantom Menace, with a similar combat system and level designs.  Not a super memorable game.  Probably 6/10, but my memory is hazy.
• Revenge of the Sith - While a competent action game based on a pretty incompetent movie, this was really just an updated Jedi Power Battles.  6/10.
• The Clone Wars - I had expected something like Battlefront in the Clone Wars era, but boy was I wrong.  This is really just an action game set in Clone War battles, letting you control some of the vehicles, soldiers, or even Jedi in the action.  But the gameplay and controls felt very clunky, perhaps due to the Gamecube controller.  Everything felt unpolished and bland.  I did not have fun with it.  4/10.
• Rebel Assault II - I had a lot of fun with this game.  The live-action FMV cutscenes are goofy, and the arcade style gameplay is challenging and kind of fun.  Kind of.  There's even a rather infamous cheat code to enable hilarious parody subtitles for every cutscene (check it out on youtube, it's the best!).  Still, I can't call the gameplay or the design quality "good" particularly.  The graphics were mainly sprites lazily shifting perspectives, the action was entirely scripted, and the gameplay was really simple and repetitive.  6/10.
• Lego Star Wars I and II - These were ok, nothing really bad about them besides the simplistic gameplay.  They had a lot of humor.  But I can't really rank them higher than this because they honestly aren't better games than Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith.  They're really basic action-adventure games with Lego stuff.  6/10.
• Shadows of the Empire - This will be controversial.  I know most people talk about this as one of the jewels of the Nintendo 64 library.  But I played it, and it just felt like a worse, buggier, lower-quality version of Jedi Knight.  I wanted to get into it, but I couldn't.  Console games just had no business competing against PC games in some areas, and this one stacks up unfavorably with the best PC Star Wars games it was trying to be like.  Sorry, Shadows fans.  At least the story was good (but you might as well read the book).  6/10.
• Masters of Teras Kasi - One of the very first games I bought for my Playstation 1.  It's a fighting game set in the Star Wars universe!  It's an awesome idea, and I enjoyed the game immensely, playing it with friends all the time.  It had a ton of unlockables, and each character was (somewhat) unique.  Now, for the bad... the gameplay.  The combat system was just horrid.  Each character had an ultimate move that was in no way balanced, and usually couldn't be avoided at all.  Ringouts were far too easy, and very buggy (you could be near the edge of the ring, roll toward the center of the ring, then teleport out of the ring and get a ringout for no apparent reason).  The game featured almost no real combos, just single moves that didn't connect to each other.  Movement was clunky.  This is not a good game.  But I'll be damned if I didn't have a blast with it as a Star Wars fan!  7/10.
• Demolition - What an odd one.  Demolition is what happens when you take Twisted Metal and decide to make it about Star Wars, but it seems so out-of-place with the universe.  You drive around in various vehicles in arenas, shooting at other vehicles.  I guess it had multiplayer.  It really wasn't very fun.  The gameplay consisted of moving around and shooting at enemies until you got the most kills.  Since you were on vehicles, you were usually very slow.  4/10.
•  Yoda Stories - Ahh, Yoda Stories.  If you played it, you surely remember it.  Kind of a Zelda-ish Roguelike type of game, Yoda Stories was built as a casual quick-play game specifically for computers.  You run around as Luke, trying to do a (randomly generated) quest for Yoda on a (randomly generated) planet.  There's towns and NPCs to give you side-quests, there's some really basic combat and force powers, and a lot of puzzle-solving and exploration.  The graphics were actually quite nice-looking sprites that reminded me of the really good-looking 2D JRPGs from the PS1 era.  There was a lot of charm and humor about this game.  And while it was random, once you've played the game through a couple times you'll recognize all the quests, scenarios, and map sections as being pretty repetitive.  The gameplay is just a little too simplistic to merit a ton of replay.  I can't really rank it as a good game, but it was a really unique unknown gem that deserves to see the light of day.  7/10.