I've never been good at space shooters like Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, etc. and this is no exception. Your ship maneuvers slightly better than a fire hydrant does. The enemies spend way too much time behind you where you cannot attack. Lock On for your Photon Torpedoes is many times awful, added to which you have to keep the locked on target on screen until impact. Even though you are toting around a repair droid, it doesn't ever actually repair anything (except where you get full shields back in a couple places, which, given WHEN this happens, doesn't seem to be because of the droid) as you might expect it would do between stages (or maybe even during the stage, considering R2-D2 does it during battle in the movie). There's no way to get more continues (not even a game option to make things easier or harder), so you're stuck with 3 -- you get one life per continue, so you can die 3 times before it's back to the beginning.
There are two modes, Arcade and 32X. The Arcade mode is supposedly just like the arcade version, but since I've never played that, I can't verify it. The 32X mode just adds a bunch of extra stages where you shoot down TIE fighters in space, which are easy and simply time-consuming. It also makes it so you get to blow up the Death Star, and then later blow up the Death Star again. The Super Star Destroyer and Death Star trench run (I never made it to the end stage, which is basically the same idea (I watched a playthrough video)) come down to memorizing the turret locations and destroying them before they pop onto the screen. Couple that with your atrocious handling, where you'll most likely end up pinballing back and forth unable to regain control until you've slammed into the walls a half dozen times, and it becomes way more difficult than it should be.
Some of the graphics are laughable: the opening text scroll looks like it was written by a kindergartener who just learned how to print and the Super Star Destroyer destruction animation is atrocious. It would have actually been better for them to have made it realistic and not had explosion sounds in space. Really, the only good things I can say about it is that it uses music from the movies, which sounded good to me, and the speech is actually very crisp and clear (especially considering this is on a cartridge).
