The game begins exactly as the movie: General Grievous has kidnapped the Chancellor and two Jedi have been dispatched to rescue him. Those two Jedi are General Obi-Wan Kenobi and the young, brooding and gifted Anakin Skywalker. You'll play as both through most of the game, with your control shifting from one to the other regularly.

Your view of the action is in third person, traditional for action games but with no control over the camera angle or direction. Other than that, most players will be pretty comfortable with controls that are easy at the beginning and get progressively more advanced. You'll have a quick, weak attack or a strong, slow attack to choose from and the combos start racking up from there. You can jump, of course, and force push as long as your force bar stays full. Your other status bar is health, which can be healed using force heal, though the tradeoff is very low for Anakin and a bit higher for Obi-Wan.

As you adventure, you'll get rated not just on how many enemies you dispatch, but how well you do it. The scale goes from Fair to Masterful, and at first it can be difficult to get good ratings. But if you concentrate on making the judges happy you'll also be practicing more combos and in the long run making the game more interesting and challenging. And that's the only way to make the game challenging, because it's quite easy. The block move is nearly guaranteed and most of the time you'll simply wade through enemies like you're harvesting wheat.

While you control one character, the other helps out. Situations arise that separate the two often and the scenery moves fast for the most part, expanding on the scenes in the movie. In some cases, there are scenes included in the game that were cut from the movie (at least according to the game narration). If a battle goes on a little long, you'll start to hear the same canned conversations over and over, which is irritating right from the start. It's not unlike listening to John Madden repeat the same tired football commentary, but in this case you can't turn it off.

Between levels and missions, the game often reverts to clips straight from the movie. There are also many in-game scenes that serve as more specific transitions. Visually, it's inconsistent, but what's more jarring are the voices. Obviously the movie scenes use the voices you expect, but sometimes during the battles the voices seem dead on, and at others they are horribly off. The difference is obvious and never ceases to be distracting.

While your powers progress in strength and number, it's not clear at all that you're doing more damage than you were before. In some situations, powers do nothing at all. Force Choke, for example, can lift an enemy off his feet but he just sits there floating. Your companion doesn't take the opportunity to attack him and he doesn't take any damage. He just sits there until you throw him. That would be fine, except that throwing him with any accuracy is nearly impossible. Even if you do the result is underwhelming. Over time, you'll have a lot of powers to choose from and no encouragement to do so because you really only need a few, combined with a couple well-learned combos, to be more efficient and just as effective.

Combined with the bad voice clips and shallow, unsatisfying combat, there's the visuals. From far away, the action looks great. The characters look and move accurately and naturally. Animations between characters coordinate well enough and some battles have enough going on to make you feel like you're in the middle of a real fight. But up close, it looks so bad it's hard to care. Everything is grainy. The walls, the bad guys and especially the faces. Faces are pixilated so badly that if not for the license it would be hard to watch.

But the game as a whole is not horrible, which comes as a relief in the same way the movie being un-horrible came as a relief. It's fun to run around the galaxy as a saber-flinging Jedi, cutting down droids by the score. But after a few minutes there's no point. It's too easy and extremely shallow when compared to other adventure games. It looks and plays just well enough to entertain Star Wars fans who relish interacting with the world of Lucas – nothing more.