Into the Vault: Star Wars: Demolition

Main Street Electrical Arcade
4 min readFeb 19, 2023

Ah, vehicular combat games. You know no genre in video games ever truly dies but few have been on life support for the better part of multiple decades like the vehicular combat genre. Sony even tried to bring it back in the launch window of the PlayStation 5 with a new free game (for PS Plus members anyways), Destruction Allstars, and no one cared.

It’s fair to say the genre pretty much lived and died with the Twisted Metal franchise, when that was hot, so was the genre and there were plenty of developers taking their own spin on the idea. When Twisted Metal fizzled out, vehicular combat could still be a part of a game sure, but it couldn’t be the whole game. There just wasn’t enough depth there.

But in the height of the genre’s popularity, namely 1995-early 2000s, Star Wars would take its own crack at vehicular combat with Star Wars: Demolition for both the PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast. Since the game wasn’t recently made available on PS5 digitally (and is free for PS Plus Premium members), I thought it would be fun to take a look back and see if there really was something special about those games that are now kind of lost to time.

Star Wars certainly has a wide variety of vehicles that are well-suited for combat but whether it was just some weird limitations from Lucasfilm or just limitations of the technology, the selection in Star Wars: Demolition is just weird and silly. Bobba Fett fighting someone in a land speeder who looks like a Han Solo rip-off? A Rancor with mounted guns? It just seemed like they were really reaching to fill in some slots for the roster of “vehicles” here.

The visuals haven’t aged very well in Star Wars: Demolition but honestly are on par with many games of that era so I’m not going to hold that against the game too much. What I will hold against it is the abysmal gameplay. Now granted, some of this is something you could encounter even with revered classics in the genre such as Twisted Metal. Frankly, the issue with many games in this genre is you are just kind of flailing about an arena, desperately hoping to damage another vehicle with lasers or machine guns or whatever, but it often just chips away at the health of the vehicle so it takes forever and gets dull. This can be sped up somewhat with missiles or other special weapons but still the majority of the time you are doing the former not the latter.

Star Wars: Demolition is not the exception here and I’d say it’s even worse in many cases because the arenas don’t even fit some of the vehicles very well, the several vehicles I did try all controlled poorly, and honestly, it was hard to tell if I was even damaging other vehicles when I shot them. Star Wars: Demolition received some pretty solid reviews upon its original release and granted it’s hard to go back almost 25 years and think of how we thought about games back then but for a poor representation of a genre pretty much on its way out I’m very surprised at those reviews. Star Wars Demolition is just a chore to play and not fun in any way shape or form. As I said at the start of this blog entry, video game genres never really die but the vehicular combat one has been on life support for decades and Star Wars Demolition is evidence it should probably stay that way.

That’s all for today but we’ve got a new update for Disney Dreamlight Valley that just hit and Marvel’s Midnight Suns is getting new DLC with Venom next week. I’ll definitely be writing about at least one of those if not both so see ya real soon!

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Main Street Electrical Arcade

All about Disney games, past present and future. Mix of reviews, opinion pieces and anything else that fits here.