Review- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

It all began way back in 1995; LucasArts released the first Star Wars game (apart from, you know, all that crap on the Nintendo) not based on the films. Dark Forces exploded onto PC’s with a first-person shooter based (debatably…) on the Doom engine, putting players in control of the smuggler and spy Kyle Katarn. But, the natural question was…

This is Star Wars…

How come I’m not a Jedi?

The answer came two years later, in the form of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, where our hero from the first game discovered his latent connection to the Force. The game received critical and popular acclaim for its lightsaber combat and story. However, it was still essentially a first-person shooter; a wide range of weapons kept the combat focus off of the Jedi arts.

And then, in 2003, Star Wars games reached what many consider an all-time high with the BioWare RPG Knights of the Old Republic. Turning back time thousands of years before the time of Darth Vader, Knights of the Old Republic puts players in control of Jedi when the order was at the height of its influence and power; combining a compelling narrative with strong characters and an indepth combat and customization system, the game has justifiably earned the respect of those who played it.

Yet still, an RPG is just an RPG; you aren’t in direct control of your character, and so cannot feel truly connected to their actions. You cannot, in short, feel like a Jedi.

This is, cry geeks everywhere, a problem.

But how does one allow a player to wield this degree of awesome power—such as a nigh-invincible Force-wielder wreaking destruction upon all that stands in his way– while still providing compelling, challenging gameplay?

The answer seemed to appear in 2005’s God of War. Here we were finally presented with a hero who was brutal, unstoppable, and powerful-feeling; attacking the legions of the gods with the Blades of Chaos feels truly empowering, yet the game still managed to be challenging and present a compelling story.

This sea change in video game design paved the way for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. The intrepid creative trust at LucasArts thought, can we put this same empowerment into the Star Wars universe? And… how can we justify a Jedi wreaking untold carnage upon his environs?

The result is about eight hours of extremely shiny, moderately well-written, and terribly frustrating gameplay, resulting in several hundred words of ranting review from myself.

Objectivity ends now.

I fully understand the aim of The Force Unleashed, appreciate it, applaud it, and wish it had worked. As the first Star Wars game to really try and focus just on the aspects of being an incredibly powerful Sith warrior (the aforementioned justification for the ensuing carnage), The Force Unleashed does succeed in some ways. There are no weapons besides your lightsaber and the Force; these powers can be combined in various ways to make combat feel a bit more improvised and provide some illusion of freedom.

The story is an interesting, if rather infeasible, link between Episodes III and IV; Darth Vader rescues a Force-sensitive child and secretly trains him in the dark side as his Jedi-hunting ‘Secret Apprentice.’ This apprentice (referred to only as ‘the boy,’ ‘the Apprentice,’ or rarely ‘Starkiller’ but that’s not important right now.) seeks out hidden Jedi across the galaxy and dispatches them for Darth Vader (who is, y’know, unable to do that himself. What with being real busy and all… breathing…)

This works fantastically in theory, and provides an excellent reason to unleash Force-fuelled mayhem. Sadly, this falls rather flat in the execution.

Which is, arguably, the rather important bit.

Let me say to begin that The Force Unleashed is simply beautiful. Everything is shiny and beautifully-rendered. Character faces are lifelike, with the exception of a few expression changes and Princess Leia.

I played The Force Unleashed’s Ultimate Sith Edition on the PC. My system (specs here) can run the game comfortably, so performance wasn’t an issue. However, just about everything else was. From controls to camera to targeting to the port itself, this game is sadly plagued by crippling technical flaws and bugs.

Let me dwell on the port itself for a moment; the PC port was done by Aspyr, and this company deserves a swift kick in the groin for the slapdash job they have done. First of all, nobody bothered to put mouse support intothe menus.

Let me state that again:

For a PC game, nobody thought it might be a good idea to throw a cursor into the menus (which, for some bizarre reason, each have a loading screen. For menus.)

The dangers of Sith tanning beds are VERY real.

Whoops.

Next is another little thing that is kinda important to PC gamers: graphics options. The graphics options for The Force Unleashed cannot even be accessed from in-game; you have to completely exit the game to open the graphics settings from the launcher. And then, your option is…

Resolution.

That’s it; that’s all. No anti-aliasing, no view distance, texture resolution, or particle effects. I don’t know if this is sheer laziness, some pretentious artistes at LucasArts who couldn’t stand their project to be seen any way but Their Way, or sheer bloody-mindedness to make their earlier bullcrap seem legitimate.

The only difference between the PC and console versions of this game is the in-game tutorial text. Gamepad buttons are replaced with keys, and that… is all. This doesn’t make any sense either, as LucasArts has a long and robust history of PC games, meaning they should have some idea how to make a functional game interface.

Technical issues aside, the game itself suffers from a tragically flawed targeting system. With so many targetable boxes and scenery items and wall plates, designed for using your Force powers on, it can often be difficult to target an actual enemy. Target Lock can help with this some, but the lock only lasts for a few seconds… defeating, in my humble opinion, the purpose of a target lock. Several times my locked target would switch to a different enemy entirely in the middle of my attack, causing me to break off of the nearly-defeated enemy to attack somebody else.

Targeting issues are especially prominent in boss battles, where I would often waste an entire bar of Force power attacking a wall with lightning after losing my target because the game decided I wanted to target a chair.

American Gladiator Unleashed?

Combined with the terrible forced camera angle in boss battles– a high, wide-angle view that makes the controls feel incredibly awkward and can make it all but impossible to accurately judge if you are in range for an attack—boss battles often end up as little more than a series of cheap shots and spammed Force Lightning to wear your opponent down.

The goal of this game was to let you feel powerful; putting you in control of a rampaging Sith should be empowering, catastrophic, and darn good fun. Sadly, several issues prevent this from ever coming to pass. Besides the camera and targeting issues mentioned above, the game takes every opportunity to hit your character with a cheap shot. It is very easy to get backed into a corner, stun-locked, knocked down, and blown to bits before you can even realize what is happening. More often than once, I would be engaged with an AT-ST or some other large foe, when a Purge Trooper would appear behind me and launch a rocket, which knocks Starkiller to the ground. Before he can stand back up, another one is already on its way, knocking him down again. In the meantime, all the Stormtroopers in the room are shooting while he’s down, meaning that by the time you regain control of you character and can launch a counter attack, your health is all but gone, and the next missile that has just been launched will kill you.

Blocking is also worthless; you cannot block in the middle of a combo, because the game is determined to finish it’s animations before it will let you do something else. So if you have just launched an attack, and suddenly need to protect yourself, then… too bad. If the player tries instead to just hold a Block, then they will be hit with an unblockable knockdown attack that nearly every opponent worth blocking has at their disposal.

The environment often works against you as well. In one particular boss fight, my character was knocked down and thrown across the map onto an exploding trap on the ground. The explosion from this trap threw him onto another trap, and another, and another. For this entire sequence of events, I had no control over my character and no way to prevent my fate (which was death).

These consistent cheap shots and unfair play by the computer make The Force Unleashed incredibly frustrating at times, infuriating at others, and barely enjoyable the rest of the time. It is impossible to feel like you are a powerful force of destruction when you can be so easily beaten by these poor mechanics.

A lack of memorable set-piece events also hurts this game. The concept art and early promotional materials for The Force Unleashed showcased the destructible environments, epic Force powers,

You never get to do this.

and pulling a freaking Star Destroyer out of the sky. I am not ashamed to say that when I saw this in the trailer I geeked out and may have squealed like a small girl.

However, these moments never happen in game; you never get to rip an entire corridor apart with the Force, or lift a battalion of storm troopers into the air and electrocute them all. The much-lauded and overhyped DigitalMolecular Matter is only seen in the rare windows and all-too-frequent doors that must be opened with Force push. There are no truly destructible environments, just lots and lots of doodads that break into smaller doodads that distract your targeting.

The games one set-piece is the above-mentioned Star Destroyer; however, what could have easily been one of the most epic moments in recent gaming memory was hamstrung by frustrating design, shoddy execution, and a litany of bugs and glitches. Your attempts to pull this massive starship down are hampered by flights of TIE fighters, launching from… somewhere. And for some reason, a Sith warrior powerful enough to pull a freaking STAR DESTROYER out of SPACE cannot flick these TIE fighters away with his little Force-powered pinky; no, he must tackle them all one at a time, and if they are not defeated within a few seconds the Star Destroyer returns to it’s original position, making the entire sequence a mind-numbing rinse and repeat.

This level is also badly bugged (which is stupid, you’d think one would thoroughly bug test a major scene like this one). Players wandering too far to either side will get stuck there, resulting in an inability to confront the TIE fighters and the Star Destroyer. Also, the on-screen cues telling you what buttons to push to pull the Star Destroyer down… are wrong.

Whoops.

It doesn't happen anything like this.

In the final stretch of the scene, you need to totally disregard the game’s instruction and eyeball the positioning of the Star Destroyer. This costs you precious extra seconds, meaning that another group of TIE fighters will reach you, allowing the Star Destroyer to return to it’s previous position.

So you can start over.

Whoops.

Level design is nothing to write home about; there are no puzzles or secret paths, and almost nothing to prevent you simply sprinting through the levels without killing a single enemy. Gorgeous, yes; interesting, no.

The story mirrors the rest of the game: shiny and outwardly polished, but lacking any solid “meat and potatoes.” Character animations are mostly good, and voice acting is decent. Darth Vader is one of the better-sounding Fake Vaders in a Star Wars game, and the rest of the acting (except Princess Leia. Some developer must have a vendetta against this character. Fat, ugly, and poorly-voiced. Moving on.) was mostly quality. Jimmy Smitts even voices his character from the prequels (poor, career-dead man…), who plays a fairly significant role in the second act.

The narrative itself, however, does not float so well; the Jedi-hunting plot seems fairly contrived, and the second act is a pointless retread of the same levels from the first half of the game. A painfully awkward, and (thankfully, really, if it would have meant more of said awkwardness) underdeveloped romance is touched upon in the final act. The ending is also difficult to swallow, and creates a slew of consistency issues with the later Star Wars canon. For the serious lore geeks, though, the plot fills in some cool details on the rise of the Empire and the formation of the Rebel Alliance.

I feel I have rambled on long enough; this brief little review has turned into a 4-page rant. The bottom line is this: Star Wars- The Force Unleashed had every opportunity to be the greatest, most important game in the long history of Star Wars games; over 7 million gamers agree, making this the best-selling Star Wars games ever.

Sadly, all of the potentially-excellent ingredients scattered throughout this tragically flawed game never manage to mesh together, resulting in an inconsistent experience that is at times entertaining, at times keyboard-smashingly frustrating, but never truly fun. It is still a worthwhile play through for hardcore Star Wars fans, and the bonus content in the Ultimate Sith Edition is a big improvement (kudos to the developers for obviously listening to the early feedback and fixing some issues.). A wide range of unlockable costumes (playing through a level as C-3PO nearly made me able to ignore all of the game’s other flaws.) and lightsabers give some replay

Beating up Obi-Wan Kenobi is the game's high point.

value, if you can trudge through the story multiple times.

But for casual gamers and anybody without an extremely high-end system, this game is better left in the yard. (…on a leash. Like, it’s The Force Unleashed… so… leave it leashed… aha. Ha. Ha…)

A bright note- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II is due out in October, and hopefully will address many of the complaints from this game. There is still hope for a great all-Jedi, all-mayhem Star Wars game out there.

5 out of 10

Metacritic Score: 65

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