If you've played Jedi Power Battles on PlayStation or Dreamcast, you should already know what to expect with the GBA version. If not, here's a quick summary: hack, jump, slash. The current near-final burn of JPB is so simple that you can kill nearly every enemy in the game with the jump-attack alone. Most enemies (which include Trade Federation battle droids for the first part of the game and sandpeople once you land on Tatooine) can be easily killed in one hit, and their numbers are very finite. Sure, you can use the R-trigger to block a laser shot and, with excellent timing, reflect it back to the enemy, but there's little incentive to do so other than for a change of pace.

The other gameplay element is platform jumping, and so far that doesn't seem to be faring well either. Most of the jumps are reasonable enough, but the sometimes-awkward isometric view and the always-awkward control scheme make even simple jumps quite deadly. Jumping is oddly mapped to the B-button, while A serves up a standard lightsaber attack, L employs an alternate lightsaber swing, and R blocks. You can whip out your (useless) force power by holding R and pressing L, and the aforementioned jumping attack is done by pressing A before your jump peaks. There is no option to change the button layout.

Although the game's design is obviously pretty simple, beating down droids would be a lot more fun if the control weren't so slack. Hit detection for the standard A-attack is terrible, while you can take out baddies with your jump-attack even if you land several feet away. Platform jumps are often extremely hard to judge because it's not clear how deep into the environment you should get before leaping; in addition, there is only one running speed, and considering that you can jump about one screen high with the double-jump, that same leap only takes you forward a tiny amount.

But enough about the control, eh? JPB's graphics are quite good, using the same sort of pre-rendering techniques that worked well in the recent Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace. The classic Star Wars music is reproduced faithfully, though it sounds a bit grainy even through headphones...luckily, the sound effects are excellent. Other than jumping frustration, the game is pretty easy. A simple password system takes you back to the last stage you played, and apparently you can be playing as all three characters, each on a different level, from the same password. Perhaps something is unlocked when you beat the game with all of them?

A couple other things to note...the three playable Jedi, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gonn, and Mace Windu, are almost exactly the same. The only differences I can see are different force powers (which you don't really need) and some different attack animations. Finally, Jedi Power Battles was originally supposed to have a two-player cooperative mode like its console brethren, but that feature seems to have been dropped during development.

We should have the final, boxed version of Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles pretty soon. It's currently scheduled for release on December 1, 2001.