The Force Unleashed - Star Destroyer Advice v0.2

Pull it out of the sky!

Get used to hearing that line from Master Kota. I've been having a great time with The Force Unleashed, but as Jedi Master Jeff reports in his review the difficulty can be pretty uneven. You go from having a blast landing multiple combos on hoards of fool stormtroopers to facing a single boss that just won't fall over no matter what you try.

The most frustrating boss, for me, was definitely the Star Destroyer, so I thought I'd share some advice on how to take it down as the game itself offers little.

The basic plan is to use your unleashed force powers to rotate the destroyer into the right position such that you can pull it down to the surface of Raxus Prime. When you have the destroyer grabbed, you're presented with a diagram of the two analog sticks that allow you to push it right or left, up or down. Easy enough, but the destroyer itself sends an unlimited number of waves of TIE Fighters to try to take you out. You can only take a small number of blasts from those pesky fighters, so while you're hiding from them the destroyer slips out of position.

The trick to this is to take care of each wave of TIE Fighters as quickly as possible, so that the destroyer doesn't drift too far out of alignment. What worked for me was hiding behind the left bit of cover and do my best to use Force Grip to snag a TIE Fighter out of the air in the small window of time it gives you to do that. I would move left after a fighter flew by to the left while experimenting with the timing of the right trigger to find the best time to grab them. Eventually you find the rhythm of it. Once you've grabbed a TIE Fighter, try your best to maneuver it back to the middle of the screen so you can throw it at another and get two, or more, for the price of one. Grabbing those floating engines and flinging them into a TIE Fighter works as well, but the aiming is odd. I found dragging it to the middle of the screen and giving it a fling right as a fighter cruised by worked best for that.

Others report that using your trusty Force Lightning is the best way to take out the fighters, as it's a one hit kill if you get the timing just right. This might be the easier method. The window for using Force Grab is very small, but, I would argue, throwing TIE fighters at each other is way more fun. Choose your favorite method -- or use a combination -- but above all else learn how to get rid of those fighters fast.

Once you have the Star Destroyer grabbed, and close to position, it sometimes seems to float off again without allowing you to pull it any closer to the ground. The analog stick diagram says you're fine, so what gives? It turns out even when you're being told to leave both sticks in the neutral position, you sometimes need to move things a little bit more. There's a color around the stick diagram that gives a bit more information. If it's red, you're way off, orange, still off, and there's a yellow/green shade when it's right. Even if the two sticks are shown in the middle, if the surrounding color isn't yellow/green you need to tweak things a bit more to get it right. The last trick is that you need to leave it be for a second in the yellow/green state before it' will signal that it's time to pull both sticks down and make some progress on landing this multiple megaton fish.
Because it takes so long to get the destroyer in position, it's tempting to keep pulling it down even while the TIE Fighters are blasting you. I found it didn't help all that much. It worked better to dash off and hide as soon as they started shooting, take them out as fast as possible, and wait for the next round to return to pulling down the destroyer.

It takes about three or four rounds of TIE Fighters to bring it all the way down.

Good luck. The cut scenes are worth it.