Star Wars The Force Unleashed
by LucasArts
What I paid: $8.21 (Steam)
http://www.lucasarts.com/games/theforceunleashed/
My score: 8.0/10
-Things that make me smile: Many different force powers that require practice to perfect. You are markedly more powerful than everyone around you (most of the time). Fun game play and physics engine. Great story set in the Star Wars universe. Challenging game that is satisfying to win. Great graphics. You have a light saber- enough said.
-Things that put a frown on my face: The boss battle against a star destroyer. It’s a port of a console game. The knock down cycle. Inaccurate force push. Crappy menus. *Spoiler* No one should be able to take Darth Vader and the Emporer.
I had low expectations going into this game, mostly because I knew that it had received mediocre reviews from gaming websites (5.0 Gamespot). I was pleasantly surprised. This game was fun- real fun. Here’s a quick summary of the game before I go into why I liked it so much.
What I paid: $8.21 (Steam)
http://www.lucasarts.com/games/theforceunleashed/
My score: 8.0/10
-Things that make me smile: Many different force powers that require practice to perfect. You are markedly more powerful than everyone around you (most of the time). Fun game play and physics engine. Great story set in the Star Wars universe. Challenging game that is satisfying to win. Great graphics. You have a light saber- enough said.
-Things that put a frown on my face: The boss battle against a star destroyer. It’s a port of a console game. The knock down cycle. Inaccurate force push. Crappy menus. *Spoiler* No one should be able to take Darth Vader and the Emporer.
I had low expectations going into this game, mostly because I knew that it had received mediocre reviews from gaming websites (5.0 Gamespot). I was pleasantly surprised. This game was fun- real fun. Here’s a quick summary of the game before I go into why I liked it so much.
This game is not junk.
You are Galen Marek, otherwise known as Starkiller. You were discovered as a child by none other than Lord Vader and raised as his Sith apprentice. When you come of age, Vader tasks you to hunt down and assassinate the remaining Jedi knights scattered throughout the universe. Half way through the game your circumstances drastically change and the remaining story revolves around your inner struggle to do what is right and do what you’re told.
You are powerful as a Sith lord and you become much more powerful as the game progresses. The force powers that you unlock as you level up are varied and add to your overall power. It’s difficult to learn all of the key combinations used to perform all of the powers and it is wise to use the in-game practice arena to hone your force skills. That’s one thing that I liked about this game, it actually took skill to use all of your powers and the better you become at using the force, the easier it is to dispatch all of those pesky storm troopers.
An impressive part of this game is the physics engine. Most everything is destructible and if it’s not the floor or the ceiling, then it’s most likely able to be used as a projectile with your force grab or push powers. This let’s you get really creative on how you deal with enemies, especially when they’re in groups. Oh yeah, the enemies themselves can be projectiles too.
Since LucasArts developed the game, they had free reign to add to the Star Wars lore and they did just that. I’m not going to give anything away about the story, I’ll just say that The Force Unleashed fills in some gaps between episodes III and IV of the Star Wars saga. It fills in some major gaps, some gaps that I didn’t even know were there, and I liked it.
Starkiller pays a little visit to Cloud City.
Yes, I did just punt a Jawa.
Not all is well in the universe though. There are some truly annoying things about the game. For one, it is a PC port of a game developed to be on consoles so all of the menus are navigated with the arrow keys and “enter” and not the mouse. This is annoying to a PC gamer. The game menus themselves are poorly done too.
Another annoying thing about the game is what I call the knockdown cycle. You get knocked down when taking a lot of damage and there’s an animation involved when standing back up. If the damage is timed right(/wrong), you can get knocked back down just as you stand back up and this cycle can repeat itself until you die. Needless to say, this is very annoying. I nearly broke my “W A S D” keys trying to break out of the cycle.
Finally, my biggest annoyance of the game-- the star destroyer boss fight. At the end of a particular level, you want to make a point to the empire by bringing down a star destroyer-- with your bare hands (through the force). The battle involves taking out a bunch of tie fighters, then SLOWLY pulling down the ship before a bunch of new tie fighters re attack. This cycle repeats itself several times. Because the game is a console port the controls in this battle aren’t well done and this “fight” is very frustrating. I had to go to Gamefaqs.com to figure out if I was doing something wrong because this fight just kept going on and when you died you had to start all over. Very frustrating and boring.
I would have rather fought an actual boss in this boss fight.
Don’t let these last few paragraphs steer you away from the game though, these are mere annoyances. The Force Unleashed was the funnest game that I have played in a long time. I looked forward to playing it whenever I could. There are several side-objectives that you can do on each level and I’ve since gone back to try to accomplish more. Fun stuff. Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2 just came out and guess what, it got low scores too. I can’t wait to play it.
I give Star Wars the Force Unleashed an 8 out of 10.
