In honour of ‘Star Wars Day’, as May 4th has come to be known, we’re republishing this reader-ranked list of all the Star Wars games on Switch and other Nintendo consoles. As they say in Britain, Fourth of May be wi—hang on…
The release of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019 may have ‘ended’ Star Wars as we’d known it for the previous four-and-a-bit decades, but all it really did was tie a bow on the cinematic tales of the Skywalker clan and the nine-film saga which began in 1977. After all, Star Wars is never really gone.
Streaming platform Disney+ has all the movies in 4K, plus shows like The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, and a deluge of other TV projects, not forgetting new trilogies, spin-off movies, games, and much more in the pipeline. Yep, that galaxy far, far away will be coming at you across all media for a long time to come.
The franchise has a storied history with video games, too, with plenty of Star Wars games to play on Switch. Below we take a look back at nigh-on every Star Wars game on Nintendo systems in the West, ranked from worst to best by you, dear readers.
To keep things tidier, in instances where the same game was released on multiple platforms, we’ve opted to mention the lesser of the two — invariably the portable version — in the other’s entry. Remember, the ranked list below is governed by each game’s User Rating in our database, meaning that the order is dynamic and subject to real-time change, even after publication. In order to rate any of the games on the list below out of 10, logged-in Nintendo Life users can simply tap the ‘star’, assign it a personal rating, and refresh the page to see any changes reflected.
So, come with us on a journey to a galaxy fa—oh you know the rest. We begin at the bottom, so beware that the Force is not strong with many of these…
An isometric platformer that takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, you control the petulant young Skywalker in this stodgy action game. Considering the platform it’s on, the game looks and sounds okay. Beyond that, though, it’s dull, repetitive and so s-l-o-w. Anakin, you’re breaking our heart.
With passable animation and audio (especially considering the system) and boring, finicky platforming, Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles falls into a regretfully familiar pattern of portable Star Wars games. It’s not as hateful as some, and it’s a little faster-paced than New Droid Army, but it’s a similar story. Perhaps developer HotGen was trying to faithfully capture the excitement of The Phantom Menace‘s trade disputes, in which case job done. Some might call the non-canon blue lightsaber wielded by Mace Windu on the cover unforgivable, but we were too bored to care.
You have to remember that while Yoda is a beloved character, this game came before we’d ever seen him wield a lightsaber in what is easily the best scene in Attack of the Clones. Despite the name, in Yoda Stories you control Luke Skywalker in a top-down adventure as he chops snakes in two with his laser sword. How bad can that be?…
Really quite bad, it turns out. ‘Sedate’ is too generous a word, and the whole game is a technical embarrassment. It’s tempting to blame the hardware, but then you look at Link’s Awakening and see what might have been. Link’s Awakening this ain’t. Poodoo, plain and simple.
Anyone who’s only ever played Star Wars games on a Game Boy deserves your pity. Retro Nintendo portables had a lot of things going for them, but a high midi-chlorian count wasn’t one of them.
Flight of the Falcon is one of the very worst Star Wars games ever because it’s got Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon on the cover — the two coolest things in the Star Wars universe — and it sullies their good names. As with all terrible Star Wars games, the iconography fools you into thinking ‘ah, it can’t be that bad!’, but our review conclusion sums this up perfectly: “Flight of the Falcon is a very bad game. As such, you should not play it. However cool the screenshots look, however promising the premise sounds, just remember that the Force is not with this one in any way, shape or form.”
Han, mah boogie, you deserved better.
Fittingly, perhaps, the weakest movie in the saga got one of the weakest Star Wars games ever. Normally we’d caveat a statement like that with ‘arguably’, but Episode II is inescapably pants in parts (except for Mace Windu’s general badassery and that Yoda bit at the end — we remember quite liking that).
The tie-in GBA game is a turgid side-scrolling beat ’em up that lacks the artistic polish even the dullest Star Wars games bring to the table. Coarse, rough, and irritating, indeed.
Another one quick to tick the ‘dull’ and ‘repetitive’ boxes, if you think the isometric adventures on the GBA were tough going on the eyes, Obi-Wan’s Adventures takes that style of game back a console generation in an ‘adventure’ set concurrently against the events of Episode 1. It’s not awful, just ugly and entirely pedestrian.
This is a real shame. The irony is that Aspyr has done a nice job with remastering the visuals in both games here, and we enjoyed seeing the results. But the reality is that these games often feel old, they’re extremely buggy, and the online play is hit-and-miss. This should have been a slam dunk. Instead, playing Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection made us feel sad. If Aspyr can fix the slew of technical issues (and the updates are coming, slowly), this might one day be worth picking up on Switch. Until that happens, though, playing this makes you want to go home and rethink your life.
A relatively ho-hum 8-bit platformer where you play as young Skywalker battling through variations of the locations from the movie, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back could not be more average. For kids desperate to play as hero Luke, it was passable filler but no more.
A Game Boy version also exists, but if you’re gagging to play through the best film of the saga in video game form, you’re much better off going with the 16-bit ‘Super’ iteration. Indeed, LucasArts didn’t even bother with an 8-bit Return of the Jedi — the developer simply jumped generations and started afresh with Super Star Wars on the SNES.
A Ubisoft side-scroller, Star Wars Trilogy: Apprentice of the Force sure looked impressive. It used the same engine as the console’s port of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, with smooth animation and 3D-style character models. Giving you the chance to relive the original trilogy anew in 2004, bland gameplay was once again its undoing. Totally vanilla, utterly underwhelming, but could’ve been worse.
Another Ubisoft entry, Star Wars: Lethal Alliance put a Twi’lek named Rianna on the cover, which is about the most exciting thing this third-person shooter has going for it. Ditching lightsabers for blasters, the story features characters new and old (Kyle Katarn’s in it) and includes the theft of the Death Star plans before Rogue One arrived to wipe the canon clean. With obligatory touchscreen shenanigans because DS, it’s not awful by any means, just generic.
Star Wars deserves better, no?
Angry Birds — remember them? This Star Wars crossover came out for Wii and 3DS as well, and although the comedy of the mash-up might not be to everyone’s tastes, it’s a fun little time sink all the same. It suffered from being massively overpriced on consoles, but the core Angry Birds gameplay is as fun as it ever was, except this had TIE Fighters with pig faces. What’s not to like?
