The Force is with you, but not in the controller
For a game that is about mystical powers and controlling this ‘spiritual’ presence called the force, you’d think they would have spent more time working out the actual translation of that into the function of the buttons on the xbox360 controller. The clunky, sluggish button controls are the game’s biggest deficit. There are moments where the lack of accurate control, inability to complete combo key moves, or simply do one button moves will drive you crazy, especially with the higher difficulty settings. At times, the controls are so bad that you will find yourself trapped, pinned against a container or wall, mashing away at the jump button in hopes that somewhere between the AI’s subroutine you get a notice and your polygonal avatar actually gets a chance to respond and floats out of harms way. Luckily, though, if you have the initiative in the fight you usually can maintain it if you don’t mash but be systematic about your actions. Perhaps the game makers intention was that? A far more cerebral tactical game than simply mashing buttons? Who knows.
And what of the quick time events? Seriously? Every single semi-boss that you run into has to be finished with a quick-time button timed event? This is okay in theory, but those damn AT’s keep messing with me, considering the button for attach was x and the first button to lock onto the finish was x…so mashing away on x to deliver strikes and suddenly I was in the quick time finish, thus missing the next button. Take a lesson from God Of War: Quick-time finish, or just hack and slash until they go down.
There are other minor flaws, like for example, that it is basically a more complex retelling of Luke’s Heroic adventure and it changes the Star Wars universe. But that’s neither here nor there and I can’t deduct from my score for such things, after all story telling is all about the story at hand. I leave the conversation to those more versed in the subject.
The story itself is well told, although the cut-scenes seem thrown into the middle. Not what I would expect from the quality of Lucas arts, that is Lucas art’s from the glory days. The voice talent and audio work were great as were the general feel of the plates and special effects. It felt like a real Star Wars game, within the Star Wars universe. Where the story failed is that it didn’t give us enough play on the development of the character’s actions. In the end I wasn’t even sure if we had really been rebels all along or simply a puppet to Vader’s desires. Obviously I was dictating his final path based on my own moral compass, but a little explanation could have gone a long way in helping me to understand the outcome.
In the end, it was a good game, with a lot of replay-ability.
