LOKO
28-09-2008, 05:45 PM
This game has been out for a couple of weeks now, but I finally got around to finishing it last night so I thought I'd give some of my thoughts on it...
For the uninformed Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which humorously abbreviates as SWTFU, is the story of Darth Vader's secret apprentice set between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars canon. You being a "secret" apprentice is the games way of explaining why this character is never mentioned anywhere in the Star Wars fiction, despite the story-defining moments you involve yourself with over the course of the game.
The game itself is somewhat of a technical showpiece, with your force powers being used to manipulate the worlds you visit. You start off with a basic Force Grip ability which you use to pick up and pull or throw objects and people you come across. And as you progress you gain further abilities such as Force Push, Lightning, Shield, et cetera. As a sith apprentice you aren't burdened by the morals of the Jedi, and so anyone who gets in your way you're free to electrocute them, pick them up and throw them violently into a wall as many times as you see fit. If you get bored of tha, there is of course your trusty lightsabre handy if you just feel like cutting dudes.
Now when you sell it like that, the game sounds rad. But actually playing it is another matter. Unfortunately, SWTFU is one of the most infuriating games I have played in a long time, as the game has technical issues out the ass.
For starters, your staple power (the Force Grip ability) is not as well implemented as it should be. If you want to pick up one guy and throw him violently off a cliff, no problem. However if you want to, say, pick up a gigantic boulder and throw it at a group of enemies to take them all out at once, the game seems arbitrarily decide whether or not it wants to let you do that. Half of the time, it seems like the game has a logical auto-aim that with will direct a thrown object towards an enemy if you put it in that general direction. But then other times, you'll throw the object and it will rocket off into the sky, even though there are 15 enemies in the area it could have gone to.
My next problem is the difficulty level. The game isn't overly hard, that's not my problem. My issue is how ridiculously punishing sections can be by contrast to the rest of the game. For the most part, you'll breeze through killing enemies at leisure without ever being in danger of dying. But then you'll come to parts where there might be multiple enemies or a single strong enemy, and the fighting just becomes unfair. If you get knocked down, the enemies are still able to attack you. And so you'll get knocked on your ass and because of the time it takes you to get up again, they keep on hammering you and knocking you down again and again. There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, other than hope they stop attacking long enough for you to stand up.
Other times enemies will sometimes knock you backwards, and sometimes it'll be a few feet, other times it will be several metres. Now the problem here, is that falling off a cliff or into a hole is instant death. Some of the bigger enemies in particular are able to shoot off one of these knockback moves very quickly, giving you far too little time to react and get out of the way. More annoying is the fact that the bigger enemies are almost all immune to Force Grip or Push, so you're forced to use your lightsabre on them (and for some reason you're using some sort of gimp lightsabre that takes 50 swings to kill one guy, but other times can cut an AT-ST in half with one stroke, funnily enough). Since they're so big and strong, your attacks don't make them stutter or stumble at all, so they can fire off attacks as much as they like while you're chopping them up. It must have happened to me at least 10 times where I'd be melee attacking someone, and they'd fire off a knockback attack without me having time to react, and send me falling down a cliff or hole (which there are plenty of in this game) and kill me instantly.
Next theres the boss fights. SWTFU bosses now rank right up there for me, for games with completely unsatisfying boss fights. The same annoyance factor of fighting big enemies applies here, where your force powers are practically useless and you're forced to rely mostly on your lightsabre. When you attack a boss, 95% of the time they'll just turtle on you, and stand there blocking. But because they're a boss, they have some sort of super block that lets them block melee attacks and force powers simultaneously! Nice design there LucasArts! Oh and naturally if you try and employ the same tactic of just holding the block button, they can of course break through it easily. Every time you get attacks in, it never feels like you've broken down their defenses in a satisfying way. It just feels like you got lucky and hit them when they weren't just standing there like a twat and blocking.
Finally, while trying to spoil as little as possible, there is a part towards the last 10% of the game where you have to use the force to pull a very large object down. But before you can start doing this, you have to fight off a wave of about 10 enemies, which take far too long to kill. Once you've killed them, you can start pulling down the object. But then after some time, another wave of enemies will come which again are more time consuming to kill than they should be. So after that, you kill them and repeat. Now if you do this section right, you'll have to rinse and repeat the above process no less than three times. If you die at any stage of this section, you have to start over again. This section alone just summed up for me how infuriatingly bad the design on parts of this game are.
In the end, I'm not even sure how I managed to finish this game. I was about an inch from throwing my controller through the window in a fit of rage when playing the section I mentioned in the last paragraph. The story is pretty well developed, and serves as a nice explanation of the bridge between the Episode III and Episode IV (between the **** movies and the good movies, if you prefer). This game could have been so good if they'd just cleaned it up a little bit, which is what makes it all the more disappointing for me.
4 out of 10
Edit: I played it on 360, but it's also available for PS2, PS3 and Wii. And there are DS and PSP versions but they're completely different I imagine.
For the uninformed Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which humorously abbreviates as SWTFU, is the story of Darth Vader's secret apprentice set between Episodes III and IV of the Star Wars canon. You being a "secret" apprentice is the games way of explaining why this character is never mentioned anywhere in the Star Wars fiction, despite the story-defining moments you involve yourself with over the course of the game.
The game itself is somewhat of a technical showpiece, with your force powers being used to manipulate the worlds you visit. You start off with a basic Force Grip ability which you use to pick up and pull or throw objects and people you come across. And as you progress you gain further abilities such as Force Push, Lightning, Shield, et cetera. As a sith apprentice you aren't burdened by the morals of the Jedi, and so anyone who gets in your way you're free to electrocute them, pick them up and throw them violently into a wall as many times as you see fit. If you get bored of tha, there is of course your trusty lightsabre handy if you just feel like cutting dudes.
Now when you sell it like that, the game sounds rad. But actually playing it is another matter. Unfortunately, SWTFU is one of the most infuriating games I have played in a long time, as the game has technical issues out the ass.
For starters, your staple power (the Force Grip ability) is not as well implemented as it should be. If you want to pick up one guy and throw him violently off a cliff, no problem. However if you want to, say, pick up a gigantic boulder and throw it at a group of enemies to take them all out at once, the game seems arbitrarily decide whether or not it wants to let you do that. Half of the time, it seems like the game has a logical auto-aim that with will direct a thrown object towards an enemy if you put it in that general direction. But then other times, you'll throw the object and it will rocket off into the sky, even though there are 15 enemies in the area it could have gone to.
My next problem is the difficulty level. The game isn't overly hard, that's not my problem. My issue is how ridiculously punishing sections can be by contrast to the rest of the game. For the most part, you'll breeze through killing enemies at leisure without ever being in danger of dying. But then you'll come to parts where there might be multiple enemies or a single strong enemy, and the fighting just becomes unfair. If you get knocked down, the enemies are still able to attack you. And so you'll get knocked on your ass and because of the time it takes you to get up again, they keep on hammering you and knocking you down again and again. There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, other than hope they stop attacking long enough for you to stand up.
Other times enemies will sometimes knock you backwards, and sometimes it'll be a few feet, other times it will be several metres. Now the problem here, is that falling off a cliff or into a hole is instant death. Some of the bigger enemies in particular are able to shoot off one of these knockback moves very quickly, giving you far too little time to react and get out of the way. More annoying is the fact that the bigger enemies are almost all immune to Force Grip or Push, so you're forced to use your lightsabre on them (and for some reason you're using some sort of gimp lightsabre that takes 50 swings to kill one guy, but other times can cut an AT-ST in half with one stroke, funnily enough). Since they're so big and strong, your attacks don't make them stutter or stumble at all, so they can fire off attacks as much as they like while you're chopping them up. It must have happened to me at least 10 times where I'd be melee attacking someone, and they'd fire off a knockback attack without me having time to react, and send me falling down a cliff or hole (which there are plenty of in this game) and kill me instantly.
Next theres the boss fights. SWTFU bosses now rank right up there for me, for games with completely unsatisfying boss fights. The same annoyance factor of fighting big enemies applies here, where your force powers are practically useless and you're forced to rely mostly on your lightsabre. When you attack a boss, 95% of the time they'll just turtle on you, and stand there blocking. But because they're a boss, they have some sort of super block that lets them block melee attacks and force powers simultaneously! Nice design there LucasArts! Oh and naturally if you try and employ the same tactic of just holding the block button, they can of course break through it easily. Every time you get attacks in, it never feels like you've broken down their defenses in a satisfying way. It just feels like you got lucky and hit them when they weren't just standing there like a twat and blocking.
Finally, while trying to spoil as little as possible, there is a part towards the last 10% of the game where you have to use the force to pull a very large object down. But before you can start doing this, you have to fight off a wave of about 10 enemies, which take far too long to kill. Once you've killed them, you can start pulling down the object. But then after some time, another wave of enemies will come which again are more time consuming to kill than they should be. So after that, you kill them and repeat. Now if you do this section right, you'll have to rinse and repeat the above process no less than three times. If you die at any stage of this section, you have to start over again. This section alone just summed up for me how infuriatingly bad the design on parts of this game are.
In the end, I'm not even sure how I managed to finish this game. I was about an inch from throwing my controller through the window in a fit of rage when playing the section I mentioned in the last paragraph. The story is pretty well developed, and serves as a nice explanation of the bridge between the Episode III and Episode IV (between the **** movies and the good movies, if you prefer). This game could have been so good if they'd just cleaned it up a little bit, which is what makes it all the more disappointing for me.
4 out of 10
Edit: I played it on 360, but it's also available for PS2, PS3 and Wii. And there are DS and PSP versions but they're completely different I imagine.