SCIV + TFU demo impressions
By sweep 1 Comments
I downloaded two demo's last night. Soul Calibur IV and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Here's what I thought...
The beef
Star Wars The Force Unleashed
This game is surprisingly good. I get sick and tired of mediocre action games which have been plastered over with the starwars liscence (see Soul Calibur IV), but this game is actually a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed lifting up dudes and throwing them around while they scream in fear. The graphics look very impressive, and the force powers really are... powerful? They make you feel like a badass. Playing this, you feel like you have the potential to wreak complete havok. It looks and feels fluent and impressive. I'm very impressed, but still not enough to go any buy it. There are a lot of games coming out soon that I will require, and my fundage remains limited. But SWTFU is obviously a very good game.Soul Calibur IV
The fighting stuff is all where it should be, but my main beef with this game is the aesthetics. Every scene is from a fairytale, every stereotype and classic fighter has been ridiculously over-accessorised, and the result comes away as childish. The lighting affects have been whored out so that every nook and cranny glows, with a horrible lack of subtlety. Everything is bright and cheery, even the evil characters like Nightmare look like they just stepped out of Sesame Street. Cervantes looks like some sort of saturday morning pimp.I know everyone at GiantBomb is very sceptical/dissapointed about the star-wars guest characters and this was something I wanted to experiance myself - but the demo frustratingly cuts out just as you are about to begin your fight with Yoda. Several other characters are playable - Nightmare, Cassandra (If you play story you can tag in some dude called "Rock" and some girl with a big sharp wheel who sounds like a castrated owl). I'm also not sure about the voice acting (annoying) and the tag system (pointless?). Soul Calibur has taken its next step towards becoming another pointless arcade fighter which nobody cares about.