An enjoyable Star Wars romp, with a decent story...
First of all - The Force Unleashed on the whole is very enjoyable play. The elements that shine and breath life into it are the story and the characters. The characters are interesting and well written, and the canon characters who we know from old are expanded nicely, and behave believably... Even if the Emperor seems significantly more powerful at the end than 'Return of the Jedi' would have you believe...
Without giving too much away you play a 'Galen Marek' stolen as a child by Darth Vader to train as his secret apprentice. The game introduces this to you nicely, by getting you to play a tutorial level as Darth Vader performing this action. It also lets you try some force-powers which are more powerful than you can use in the main game until you are quite a good way through.
The game is connected by nice cut sequences, the acting and animation is good and overal these have a glossy, hollywood feel and are enjoyable to watch and bring the story forwards each time.
For the actual game-play elements, the depiction of force-powers seems better, and more impressive than the old Jedi Knight Games. The force lifting and throwing works excellently in large open area's - but when in confined spaces the contrlols imprecisness can frustrate you - occasionally you'll die and go back to check-point because of the controls rather than your strategy. This is worse in some levels than others.
It also has a variety of interesting boss-battles from time to time which are enjoyable and interesting, and usually work within the story.
One area I thought could have ibeen improved was level design, some of the levels are interesting and give you a sense of freedom as you explore them - others are obviously linear, and it can become a slog of hacking through identical minions to get to the next part of the story - which is a shame..
The designers occasionally get a bit lazy with the difficulty curve - simply throwing you into a room full of Rancor's to make a challenge.
The lightsabre boss battles are more interesting, particularly the one with the Jedi and the Bull Rancor. Some of the missions are very interesting, the ones which felt flatter to me, were the ones set in the outdoors on open planets, as these felt artificially enclosed. The levels set in military facilities or space-craft played much better to my mind.
Overall, this is a very enjoyable game to play - and in the right area with the right force-powers you can real feel like the dark jedi wielding awsome power.
It's a shame the control issues and occasional poor level design weren't better addressed, otherwise - a very good game could have been great.
I have high expectations of the sequel coming out soon.
