Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

There have been several reviews out for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed prior to the Sunday launch embargo date.  I have purposely not read them. There were several videos that gave in-depth walkthroughs of the overall premise of the game released recently.  I have purposely not watched them.  While I have kept a watchful eye on the conversations in my forums regarding the game, I’ve done my best to try to stay completely neutral about the title until I could get my hands on it to render my own opinion.  I didn’t want my opinions of the game tainted in either direction, positive or negative.  Just prior to starting this review I completed the game, allowing me to get the full experience on my own, without any influence.  Let’s see if my experience of the game matches that of my fellow press cadre.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed takes place between Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.  The Sith Lord Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine have extinguished nearly every Jedi in the galaxy, but on the distant Wookie planet of Kashyyyk, an incredible secret power has been found.  Lord Vader heads to Kashyyyk personally to investigate, but what he finds is a surprise even to him.  The source of this power was actually a small child, the son of a Jedi that was living on the planet.  Dispatching all witnesses, including his own troopers and the boy’s father, Vader takes the child as his own secret apprentice and names him “Starkiller”.  Training him in the ways of the Dark Side, Starkiller acts as Vader’s sword arm dispatching his enemies, and silencing all witnesses to his plan to overthrow the Emperor.  The conclusion to that story may be a bit of a forgone conclusion, but it’s the getting there part, right?

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed uses entirely home-grown technology, with the exception of the Havok engine for some physics work.  Introducing two other technologies entitled Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) and Euphoria, LucasArts looks to approximate a real human’s desire to avoid death.  Soldiers and droids alike will clutch onto nearby pipes, other Storm Troopers, or anything else they can reach.  DMM handles the physics of the objects in the environment, ensuring that glass cracks and shatters realistically, decompression pulls on items in the environment, and cloth whips in the wind as it would in the real world.  Watching as Starkiller pulls his limbs in tight and then explodes with a force repulse, sending bits of glass and Storm Trooper in all directions, or watching as Darth Vader’s cape swirls around his feet shows that a great deal of work was put into these two technologies.  This enables players to interact with an environment that doesn’t have to be painstakingly scripted in every way.  The end results are pretty good, lending realism that would otherwise have to be ‘faked’. 

Graphically, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a bit of a mixed bag.  The cutscenes are fantastic, with incredible detail and texture work.  The characters that you encounter in the game all look realistic, with great detail paid to the central players in the Star Wars canon.  On the other hand, our pilot Juno Eclipse lacks definition and appears to be a murderous cyborg at times.  One area that doesn’t disappoint though is the detail in the environments and the area inhabitants.  The Storm Troopers are well defined and easily distinguishable between their various job functions – you can spot the guys with force-resistant gear just as well as you can spot the low ranking ones.  When you get to the forest stages, you’ll be able to spot the tribal leaders so you can take them out first to weaken the rest of their crew. 

Other than minor detail issues with some of the characters and environments, I did encounter several times where there was texture pop-in, or light framerate problems, as well as a handful of texture tearing issues.  None of these issues were pervasive by any stretch, but when it does happen you’ll certainly see it clearly. 

There are two areas where Force Unleashed truly unleashes the goods – the incredible use of effects, and the sense of scale.  You can pull a Tie Fighter from the sky, throw soldiers hundreds of feet in the air, unleash horrible lightning on a tiny Jawa (I swear to you, hearing them twitch and freak out is worth the price of admission alone – it just never gets old!), or augmenting your light saber with lightning to spread damage to several opponents, and far more.  There is a space station later in the game that looks like a giant Hadron Collider that has a fantastic sense of vertical scale. The use of color in the game is perfectly balanced, enhancing what might otherwise be rather bland force powers.  Well done LucasArts!

I do want to mention how much I love the DMM and Euphoria work when it comes to the environment.  Force repulsing doors, bending steel, hurling Wookies into trees, and that is in part due to the great system that LucasArts has put into place for environmental damage.  If you hurl an object into a tree, there is a good chance that the tree will splinter and crack.  Throw that object with a bit more force and you might see the tree split and crash convincingly into the ground.  It brings the scenes to life and really adds to the environment.

There is a very easy way to give a Star Wars game perfect sounds – simply use the sounds from the movies.  Well, since this is LucasArts and a Star Wars title, they did exactly that.  Each laser sound, machinery clunking about, light sabers cutting through the air, and every creature noise is exactly as it was in the movie. 

Thankfully, there is one area of the movie that didn’t make its way across – the horrific acting.  Starkiller turns in a great performance, but I think that his droid PROXY steals the show, in much of the same way that HK-47 does in the KOTOR titles.  Overall, top marks in the voice acting department.

There were a few instances where the voice-over work got me killed.  While listening to my pilot drone on and on about my personal safety, her voice overrode the announcement of a weapon firing sequence that I needed to hear for timing purposes.  While she droned on about what I needed to do next, I took a large laser directly to my face.  Similarly, there were a few instances where plot points were cut off as the scene transitioned from one area to another.  Thankfully they weren’t crucial, but you get the point.

There are two ways to make things more difficult in a game – the first is to increase the number of bad guys, give them better weapons, or involve special powers for them.  The other sure-fire way to do it is to give your game an obnoxiously slow camera and then a very confused lock-on camera.  Several times throughout the games (including a VERY large boss battle) I was trying to lock on to a nearby enemy, but instead I latched onto a nearby hunk of debris.  When your enemies are capable of rending you into Jedi tartar in the matter of four hits, locking on to the right target it crucial to your success. 

The control scheme is fairly straightforward.  The left analog handles movement, while the right stick gives you camera control.  The triggers handle blocking (although that is of limited use throughout the game – most enemies hit hard enough to punch right through it once you pass the first stage) and force grip.  The A button is jump, B is for force push, X handles your light saber attack, and the Y button rounds things out with force lightning, when you’ve unlocked it.  As you kill enemies and accomplish objectives you’ll go up levels, allowing you to customize your character as you see fit by allocating points into various strikes, traits, and talents.  Throughout the game you’ll have more than enough points to learn almost every single skill and trait, so simply choose the order in which you’d like to receive them for maximum benefit.  It’s the combination of these controls and skills that really unleash your character.  As you unlock them you’ll learn a wide variety of skill combinations.  Some are three strikes with the saber, a quick dash of lightning, and a force repulse finisher.  Others simply augment your saber with a lightning infusion that will dance from enemy to enemy.  Learning these skills are pretty important for taking on the later bosses, so pay attention to learning some attack variety. 

In Force Unleashed, you’ll be able to recover your force gauge by simply staying out of danger, but your health requires sacrifice.  You’ll have to kill creatures and soldiers to obtain their health for yourself.  Unfortunately this game mechanic sometimes creates moments where you will cease to be an up and coming Sith and reduce you to hiding to pick off passers-by with your force lightning.  On the other hand, force repel and force push get heavy use for soldiers and objects alike.  Sometimes you’ll get an action cam view (you can press up on the D-Pad for this if you are into it) that shows what happened to that creature or object you just force pushed halfway across the map.  It doesn’t add much, but it is fun to watch a tiny Jawa twist like a kite in the wind after you’ve force choked him, electrified him, and then shot him hurtling towards the atmosphere. 

Overall the controls work, even if the camera tends to get either in the way or too close for comfort.  Thankfully the game turns the characters transparent when this occurs, meaning that you can usually keep a decent grip on the action, even if it does occasionally require more shepherding than it should.

Somewhere in the galaxy there is a Jedi village.  The hospitals there are surprisingly empty, but there is a large bin somewhere with ‘discarded’ hands.  Unfortunately, you won’t see too much limb loss (read: none) with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed coming in with a T for Teen rating.  The lack of limb lopping isn’t the primary problem here though, it’s actually that the combat tends to descend into a bit of a hack-and-slash pattern.  Unfortuanately, it also breaks canon as you move into the game as you encounter troopers that have equipment that somehow blocks your force power.  I know they couldn’t let me just fling guys willy-nilly throughout the entire game, but we’d have seen some force-resistant gear in the movies if they were that effective. 

Beyond the Vader level on Kashyyyk, there are a surprisingly high number of memorable moments in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  Crushing AT-STs like beer cans, ripping up the native creatures and plant life with your light saber, and gunning down relatively helpless Jawas with the crackle of force lightning makes you feel like a Sith Lord.  Force pushing, gripping, impaling, and ragdolling Storm Troopers is a big rush.  With all that power, it is amazing to me that the boss battles feel so incredibly anticlimactic. 

All larger than man-sized creatures in the game queue up quicktime events just prior to their death.  This means that, when you tangle with a vicious hungry Rancor beast, you’ll finish him off by intently watching the bottom portion of your screen and tapping the appropriate button when prompted.  I’d love to tell you that these fights are awesome, but with the emphasis on quicktime events I wouldn’t know.  As the story really kicks into overdrive, you become invested in some of these battles.  When some of them culminate, they change the very canon of the Star Wars universe.  If only you could watch them…

There are a few other areas where Star Wars: The Force Unleashed falls short of being a fully polished product.  Twice during play I encountered lockups, once after killing 3 out of 4 Rancors in an area (no easy feat), and again while facing a particularly powerful boss.  I also ran into trouble with the quicktime mechanic.  Since I was standing across the room hurling bits of debris at an AT-ST, I was able to essentially drill him down to almost no health without closing the distance.  When the quicktime event started I was warped over to the AT-ST.  Defeating my enemy took just a few button presses, but I was unfortunately warped in between a wall and the next room, dropping me through the floor and to my death.  Little bugs like this add a level of frustration that is simply unnecessary.

All of that negativity shouldn’t put you off of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  The fact of the matter is, this is one of the better Star Wars titles out there.  While some elements of the plot are somewhat overused or contrived, it doesn’t change the fact some of the plot moments are well worth seeing.  I enjoyed the game from beginning to end, despite some of the more frustrating moments and technical glitches.  There are a few choices that you’ll have to make at the very end of the game, but somewhat like Bioshock, they are in fact limited to the very end.  I would have loved to see this same game, but with a light/dark progression system similar to the one we saw in Star Wars: Jedi Academy. 

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will last you roughly 10 to 12 hours to complete the first time.  If you re-run the last level you can tack on an extra hour to watch the second ending cutscene.  When you have beaten the game you’ll unlock the final difficulty level.  In addition, there is quite a bit of collection that you can do in Force Unleashed.  Each level contains 15 cubes that can be collected for additional experience, extra light saber colors and attributes, and if you collect all of them, various artwork rewards, costumes, and achievement points.  So you are aware, there are no multiplayer elements to the game.  With greater emphasis on the single player aspects, LucasArts shelved the multiplayer elements altogether.  If you are primarily a co-op or multiplayer junkie, this will likely affect your busying decision. 

I’ve beaten the game twice to prep for this review, and throughout my first run I found exactly 1 saber power upgrade.  It allowed me better deflection of incoming blaster bolts and served me well until the credits rolled.  I found quite a few colors to change my saber (including the very awesome black saber crystal!) but truth be told, there just isn’t much motivation to go very far out of your way to pick up these items unless you are a completionist. 

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a bit of a mix.  On one hand, there is nothing better that force choking wookies, electrifying Jawas and watching them twitch, hurling Storm Troopers into electrified energy fields, and crushing walkers like beer cans.  On the other hand, the quicktime events take most of the punch out of the boss battles.  A few battles in the game are absolutely epic in nature and damned near worth the price of admission alone.  While the Force Unleashed might not completely live up to the incredible hype befitting a Star Wars title, it is still a worthy entry into the Universe. 

Gaming Trend Score

80

1. Graphics: 87
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 75
5. Value/Replay: 75
6. OVERALL:80