Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Review
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has an interesting take in developing likeable characters, story, and gameplay. Fortunately, it does all of these very successfully. The Force Unleashed keeps you motivated all the way through with its interesting story and excellent gameplay, making you feel like the badass Jedi you always wanted to be.
The game takes place during the forty years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. The game starts off with the empire taking over the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk. Darth Vader is also present on the planet to exterminate the rogue Jedi warrior hiding there. After killing the Jedi, he finds his son and trains him as his apprentice. This is who you play as. For most the game, you’re doing missions for Vader, hunting down more Jedi. However, more story revealing occurs and much changes later on. Overall, I really enjoyed it, even if it’s not my favorite part of the game. Sadly, they're no story related collectables to enhance the story. To me, this was a definite missed opportunity. Having expanded lore in the Star Wars universe is a must for the titles that aren’t the main episodic movies. Even without this, it was still a good story with decent plot elements.
The collectables in the game are important for character progression but are also there as cosmetic items (i.e lightsaber color). Most of these give you force points, which is basically your XP bar. Once you level up, you get 1 level up point for the each of the three force attributes, providing you with new abilities, combos, and other things. Although these are good, giving you variety of ways to defeat your enemies, I never actually used any of the upgrades. I played the game on normal and stuck with the abilities you start out with throughout the entire game. One reason why I did this was because the basic combos were easily exploitable (mainly talking about the force lightning here). I was able to use force lightning excessively as an exploit to defeat the mini-bosses, as well as the end of the level bosses. No matter how good and fun the combat is, we can agree that it’s maybe a little too easy to use, and I’m hoping that the sequel does a better job with this.
With that being said, I still had a blast with the combat. Like I said earlier, the game makes you feel like that badass Jedi. Although quick time events are heavily used, (something that is genuinely disliked in most games) I feel like this is one of those games where it actually works. These QTEs activate when you're about to defeat a mini boss or big bosses (like Jedi or Sith). The mini boss QTEs are used excessively and get more boring the more it happens. Each Jedi or Sith boss, however, has their own unique QTE finisher and some are very cool to watch. Even with a few balancing issues, the game’s Jedi combat is hella fun all the way through.
With the game releasing in 2008, the game’s visuals aren’t great, at all. While the game ran fine performance wise during my main playthrough of the game, the game had extreme frame drops while I was playing the game’s DLC (this is the Xbox 360 version, running on Xbox One Backwards Compatibility). I’m unsure if this was emulator struggling or if this an actual problem with the game. With visuals, there some areas where they’re ok and even good (talking about Felicia, The Death Star, and Cloud City). However, they are in no way a worthwhile distraction from the rest of the game. The game’s visuals and performance are no doubt the weakest parts of the game, even on PC.
Even with it’s exploitable gameplay mechanics and poor visual performance, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is still a very fun game. It’s story is interesting and adds another possible aspect leading into the events of A New Hope. The gameplay, while exploitable, is still fun and no doubt the best aspect of this game. If you want to experience what it’s like to be a user of the force, this game does it extremely well.
