John "wardrox"
September 24th, 2008 8 Comments »

Promising breathtaking visuals, ground-breaking physics and all the force power you could need, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sets out fill the gap between Episode 3 and Episode 4 of the Star Wars saga with the exciting tale of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice.

Set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you play the role of Starkiller, taken from your family as a child to serve as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice to help end the fight against the pesky Rebel scum still hassling the Empire.

The third person, action-adventure game plays out over 9 levels, each following a standard format. Fight your way across a world to meet a final boss. Along the way you will use your Sith training to dispose of your enemies using your powerful force powers or lightsabre skills.

The game sets out to give you a classic Star Wars formula of epic story and dramatic action, and it’s evident from the start that all the key components are definitely there. It’s also clear from the start that you won’t get to experience them; at least not in this game. In my opinion, the game falls miserably short of what was expected and hyped. It’s Episode 1 all over again, only now with quick-time events.

Read on for the full Negative Gamer Review and find out why this game might very well turn you to the dark side.

You don’t feel like an all powerful Sith.
You feel like a clumsy oaf.

The very first level of Unleashed starts you off as Vader on a quest to kill Wookies and chew bubblegum. The stage is a tutorial to get you used to feeling like a badass, and for the most part it does the trick. You will find yourself easily dispensing with all who get in your way with some Force Lightning here and some Force Hurl-A-Wookie-At-A-Tree there. The trouble is, you will spend the majority of your time feeling like an utter fool. Why? The controls are just not good enough.

Firstly: the auto lock. When deciding on what to Force Choke next, the game automatically picks and highlights your target for you. But it doesn’t pick the target based on where you are looking. It instead picks the direction your character is moving and facing; something which is probably not a problem until you realize it’s a third-person game. You are more often than not looking at something in a completely different direction in relation to your character. Distinguishing targets also becomes a chore, trying to make many tiny feet movements to move your character 3 degrees right, just to select the corrent box to hurl becomes tiresome. A simple option to select between character or camera viewpoint for object selection could go along way to alleviating some of these pains.

For the most part, the camera follows diligently behind you, allowing you to use the right analogue stick to point where you want it to look. Where it starts to fail, miserably, is when they decide to “fix” its position during a boss fight. You will find yourself on numerous occasions fighting or targeting something off of the screen. Worse is when the fixed camera becomes obscured. During one of the later boss fights you can manipulate the floor, and through pure accidental Force Mash from me, it bent clean up in front of the camera, obscuring all the action.

Combat itself is too simple and sluggish. Whenever you do any action or give a reaction, the accompanying animation must play in full. If you go to strike an enemy, or an enemy strikes you, you have to then wait for Starkiller to regain his posture before either attacking again or, more importantly, blocking. This leads to situations where you are hit once by an enemy, try to block their second blow but by the time Starkiller has regained his posture and able to block, he’s already been hit again. The problem is amplified when there are several enemies taking it in turns to push you to the floor.

The enemies themselves are all very similar, bland and buggy. I don’t expect all the storm troopers to be different, but when you go up against the same half dozen models of enemy over and over, each doing the same moves in the same way, it begins to drag. The only time you are ever even remotely surprised by their actions is if they have annoyingly appeared behind you. Still, if you don’t like the combat, the game seems to give you the option to (for the most part) completely ignore all enemies and simply run through the entire level without engaging any of them.

On a quick aside (and this is more of a mild annoyance), storm troopers should not require 4 direct hits with a lightsabre to kill. If I am using my special move where I Force Grip, then throw my lightsabre at the enemy, impaling them through the chest. Then that should probably be an instant kill, not require a further one or two hits. Also, if I can use my Force powers to pull an Imperial Star Destroyer out the sky, I should probably be able to use my Force powers to pick up a 12 foot tall droid. The fact I can’t is annoying and unnecessary and at its core, undermines the game’s attempts to make me feel powerful.

When you do encounter a remotely exciting boss or large enemy, chances are high that to finish them off you will be given a poorly implemented quick-time event. Unlike games which use tact, skill and player-awareness to use quick-time events to generate a sense of urgency or grandeur, Unleashed seems to want you to press continue on the nice animation they made. Using occasionally vague on-screen instructions, you will perform some impressive aerial assaults, but you never feel connected to the action. The choice of buttons or timing doesn’t seem to quite match up to the action and you are left feeling like you just missed something cool because you were concentrating too hard on the button icons flashing at you.

It turns out you can have too much physics.

The Force Unleashed has more bugs in it than I thought it would be possible to have, and the majority of them are caused by too much physics. Creatures, vehicles, trees and doors, everything has physics in, on and around it. 50% of the time you can happily destroy, bend, and topple over whatever you want. It looks great and adds a nice feel to the levels and areas (similar to GTA which also used the Euphoria physics engine). But the other half of the time the physics feels completely unnecessary and a step backwards, pulling you out of the action to laugh at a floating tree or stuck Storm Trooper.

Things are fine when left alone. But the second you even think about using your Force powers, everything begins to break. From small eye-sores like vibrating corpses or boxes, to all out show-stoppers such as a wedged door. The physics based bugs are clearly apparent on every stage of the game and often detrimental to the experience. The few times physics isn’t used and canned animations take their place, the action looks forced and very artificial.

Most closed doors can be blasted open with a simple Force Push, but sometimes they seem to need a bit more encouragement with perhaps a boulder, or an equally damaging small Storm Trooper… but not a tree. It’s true that everything reacts to your will, but never quite in the way you expect it to. A number of times I attempted to Force Push Wookies off a bridge, only to have the bridge wobble and see them gently fall over after loosing their balance and roll off the side. The end result was the same, the Wookies died, but in times like that I couldn’t help but feel a little out of place.

Most of the trouble with the physics is the hype created around it. All the tech demonstrations and videos showing how advanced everything was built it up to be the most advanced gaming experience to date. Sadly, with the physics on steroids, everything you do to the environment takes you out of the game and makes you feel like you must be looking at an early, broken demo.

The graphics feel dated in parts, with low resolution and flat textures making up much of the polygonal surroundings. Things don’t improve too well with facial animations, only seeming to move past basic opening and closing at roughly the right time during the pre-rendered cinematics.

The classic and much loved John Williams score is expectedly apparent throughout, but used with limited subtlety. The use of music to build tension successfully is rare, often simply playing the same, “high tension” loop of music at you during boss fights or tough encounters.

The audio also seems to suffer from a lot of glitches; often not quite being synced to the action or worse, missing out key sound effects and completely destroying any feeling of immersion you may have developed. Where sound effects are working, they frequently come across with little impact or majesty and only serve to belittle whatever action is on-screen.

If it starts brown, it ends brown.

The 9 levels within the game are hit or miss. Although each different world feels unique, the start of each level feels exactly the same as the end of each level, leaving very limited sense of progression across the alien worlds.

The linear maps suffer from occasional vague path finding and a buggy direction arrow on the mini-map doesn’t help the situation. With some maps looking nearly identical from start to finish, unclear targets and paths sometimes hidden from view, you can soon begin to feel completely stuck and lost. Furthermore if you do know where to go, the linearity can make the levels feel boring and uneventful.

Though surprisingly, even with these linear levels, the game still feels to need to have many invisible walls surrounding your path. Instead of having say, a cliff to prevent you, a gentle slope is created with the convenient hand-of-god preventing you from progressing to far up it. This can sometimes be confused with Starkiller’s inability to step over small ledges, but more often than not just destroys what’s left of your suspension of disbelief. It’s also a very, if you pardon my phrase, last-gen solution to a  problem which can be easily worked around.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The story has a few strong points, but for the most part remains predictable and bland. Any hope of character development or depth is quickly removed by tacky dialogue and over-simplification.
• Saving doesn’t save. Why include a save option, if when you load your save it takes you back to the last auto-save point? A worthless token gesture offering a very misleading and frustrating sense of security.
• The character development is adequate, allowing for levelling up. Though apart from learning one or two useful combos, the extra levelling feels like it makes negligible difference to your powers. Advanced combos are rarely needed and even if you do unlock them, are never a necessity.
• There is no multiplayer of any description. A wasted opportunity and something almost expected of the current generation of big budget games.
• The total playtime of the game is easily less than 10 hours (I complete my first play through in just over 6), and replay value is limited at best.

The game has its bright points and I’m sure many gamers will never have a problem with it, but for those who are sensitive to sluggish controls, bland maps and feeling like a Padawan in Sith clothing, this Star Wars game probably isn’t for you.

The most disappointing aspect to the game is that you can see the final experience the designers planned, and occasionally you find yourself playing it, but for the greater part of the experience you are playing what feels like an unfinished game. Plagued by technical problems and with control issues making you feel like you are using the controller wearing boxing gloves, The Force remains definitely leashed.

You should play this game if…

…you can’t find a copy of either of the Jedi Knight II games.

Final Score
Falling far short of good, the game’s technical problems as well as questionable design choices make this game one to rent at best.

(What does this score mean?)