Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Hoth buried in snow, a towering AT-AT walker on the horizon, and you with a blaster in hand, tiny as an ant beneath the colossus's metal leg. That's how Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back begins, the second installment of the iconic trilogy of action platformers from Sculptured Software, released under the LucasArts label for the Super Nintendo. And it's a sequel that lives up to the bar set by the first part in every respect, and in places even manages to surpass it.

The core of the game remains relentlessly action-driven. You lead Luke Skywalker (and in some sections Han Solo or Chewbacca) through hordes of enemies, leap across chasms, collect blaster upgrades, and gradually cut your way to the bosses. The game is renowned for its brutal difficulty – one wrong jump or a mistimed shot and you're starting over. Patience and level memorization are a necessity here, not a virtue.

What truly makes this installment shine, however, are the sequences that make use of the legendary Mode 7 graphics. The battle against the snow walkers on Hoth, where you pilot a snowspeeder and circle the AT-ATs to wrap them in a tow cable, ranks among the most impressive moments of the entire SNES era. The pseudo-3D rotation and scaling gave the game a cinematic dimension that felt almost magical at the time.

Visually and sonically the game draws on its source material to the fullest. Digitized blaster sounds, striking enemy sprites, and environments that faithfully evoke the icy base, the swamps of Dagobah, or Cloud City on Bespin – all of it rounds out the atmosphere Star Wars fans craved. The music, naturally, builds on the immortal themes of John Williams, translated into chip form.

This installment reinforced the reputation of the whole series as one of the best film adaptations of its time. In an era when licensed games were often synonymous with disappointment, the team behind Super Star Wars managed to deliver a technically advanced and honestly designed experience that held its own even against original franchises.

Why play: If you crave a demanding, technically impressive action platformer set in the Star Wars universe and aren't afraid of repeated deaths, this is one of the peaks of the genre on the SNES.