Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Star Wars : The Force Unleashed : An action/adventure game based on the Star Wars universe where players control an all-too-powerful dark Jedi knight, capable of incredible feats beyond anything seen in any of the movies. I’d rather not say that this makes Luke Skywalker and such seem like pantywaists in comparison to this “Starkiller” chap, and instead just say that your belief is going to be rather suspended, even by the standards normally held by the bizarre fiction that is Star Wars.

Story : Okay, I’d like to know what came first. Did the dev team conjure up the idea to do a Devil May Cry knockoff Star Wars games with the latest cutting edge technology on the market, and scoured the elaborate mess that is the Star Wars canon to find a convenient niche that they could fit the story of an army-slaughtering evil Jedi? Or did George Lucas feel that the storyline gap between the final prequel movie and the original Star Wars movie was important enough to be told, with a video game no less? If it’s the latter, then sorry George… I can say that I did not like this story at all. All of the characters feel robotic and uninteresting, and call it the nature of the game being a prequel but you can guess all of the events that happen in the game as they progress. Finally, I can’t stress enough how much I hated Starkiller. Besides his occasional moment of forced dashing hero-moments, he’s such a gullible character throughout the story, and lacks any sort of emotion or personality. With these traits in mind, wouldn’t it have been better that the game took the Jedi Academy/Knights of the Old Republic avatar route of letting the player create his Jedi character instead of playing as the lead singer of Linkin Park?

I can sum up The Force Unleashed quickly by saying its God of War with a physics engine and the John Williams score blaring in the background. Seriously. There are moments where the game just feels like it’s ripping off its Greek cousin a little too hard. It was one thing to see air combos – you know, where your character somehow stays suspended in mid-air to swing his sword around, regardless of whether or not there’s an enemy in the air with you. These were quite thrilling when they first appeared in Devil May Cry, and while I didn’t raise any questions seeing them in Ninja Gaiden or God of War, warning signs went up a bit when The Thing was floating in the air with punches in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Now they’re just getting a bit tiresome. Also borrowing too much from the God of War rulebook of death dealing is the quicktime event – where you press a sequence of buttons to initiate of a cutscene of Starthriller bringing a large enemy down. There’s one for every boss, as well as one for the many midbosses that you’ll fight throughout the game, and believe me, there are many. Hence, you will see the same mini-movie of Starkiller crumbling an AT-AT or poking a rancor in the eye many times over. It hurts moreso when you consider that some bosses will actually summon mini-bosses to fight for them!

Sometimes it’s the small and seemingly insignificant issues that make the biggest difference, like how God of War covered up this above problem through zooming the camera in on the action most of the time, instead of cutting away to the same fixed angle every time one of these events is initiated, as is the case here.

Now, where The Force Unleashed strays away from ripping off every “Stylish Hard Action” game of this generation is when Darth Dimwitted remembers he’s a mystical warrior from space and not a mystical warrior from Greek mythology. Namely, he can throw lightning bolts, as well as his enemies, using his mind. The player is given an unholy trinity of offense in the form of lightning bolts and Force-gripping most objects, along with his lightsaber attacks. Surprisingly, these elements are quite balanced and you’ll usually find yourself mixing up your attack to progress. This Force inbreeding continues when you upgrade your Starkiller by purchasing new attacks that unlock unique cocktails of death, like throwing a lightsaber into someone’s chest while you’re levitating them and then throwing lightning into the saber. (Again, this custom upgrade system is furthering the argument of a personalized avatar creation system for the game’s protagonist instead of this guy who tries so hard and comes so far but In The End it doesn’t really matter…because he’s a nimrod!)

Which brings me to the next major point of discussion about The Force Unleashed : physics. Physics Physics Physics. This game loves its physics. It seems like this game has some kind of physics engine in play for everything. There’s a physics engine for moving objects and simulating their weight, there’s a physics engine for bodies moving and falling, there’s a physics engine for water, there’s a physics engine for broken glass, there’s a physics engine for broken wood, there’s a physics engine for electricity, there’s a physics engine to simulate bodies being electrocuted, there’s a physics engine for smoke, there’s a physics engine for enemy intelligence, there’s a physics engine for finding enough John Williams scores to play throughout the entire game, and so forth. Admittedly, this does have its swell moments from all of these physics engines. Being able to casually throw storm troopers into incinerating force fields is always a jolly time. If this game strives to make you feel like a complete badass, its these natural moments of destruction that succeed at it, moreso than the over-the-top scripted death sequences of the quick-time events. And finally, it’s great to see a game where trees react to things flying at them by shattering into a hundred splinters instead of the norm in most games where, at best, the trees stands tall while you phase through it and at worst, the tree simulates a metal pole that can withstand the fiercest car collision…at Niko Bellic and his car’s expense.

These physics are also the game’s greatest downfall. It’s great to see that the player is thrust in a mostly realistic game world, but if this game taught me anything, it’s that death happens a lot in reality when challenging an army of clones. Many games and especially older games have a temporary knockback invincibility period – you know, the 2 second period after sustaining damage when your character kind of “flickers” on and off and is invincible from attack long enough to move out of the way.. I guess that was deemed too unrealistic for this far too realistic game, which is a shame since Starkiller needs it badly to kill stars, it seems. On countless instances, getting shot at from an awkward angle would cause Starkiller to fall down and slide down a gradual slope and spend an obscene amount of time for the ragdoll physics to animate before he thinks about getting back up again. All the while, enemies are chipping all of your health away, just as you were about to fall off into a bottomless pit. I’m okay with dying in a game a lot, so long as the death was some kind of twisted learning experience, and in death, I was able to progress a bit further. And while you won’t become one with the Force as often here as in certain other challenging games, the deaths almost always feel cheap, awkward, unwarranted, and ultimately annoying.

Likewise, I found that I needed to use these disturbances in the force to overcome some other bad design choices. I couldn’t tell you how I beat almost every boss in the game. If there was some kind of attack patterns I was supposed to pick up on and engage them accordingly, I didn’t learn them. Most of the battles were won through the enemy accidentally tripping on something and me taking out 85% of their health bar from slashing at them while the game took a questionably long time trying to process their body sliding across the floor before deeming the time right for them to get back on their feet. Even the climatic final battle, well the final climatic battle if you’re going for a dark side ending (yes, like practically every Star Wars Jedi-based game, there’s a light side ending and a dark side ending, and mercifully you need only do the last level over to see both. Spoilers be damned, but shame on you if you were expecting to be an evil villain throughout the entire game), I was never able to land a single blow on my adversary, until fate would have him somehow trip up on a loose tile on the floor, thus opening me to pounce on his body and obtain victory within a single combination of attacks.

Or maybe that’s the point, being that this game’s selling point is controlling an evil warrior, perhaps the game is trying to promote kicking your foe while they’re down. One of the loading screens promotes this practice.

For what it’s worth, I willingly finished the game in a couple of days. I’d say the game is about 6-7 hours long, which is the right length for this kind of game. Except for the frequent mini-boss fights and perhaps one “Purge Trooper” too many, I never felt like the game was trying to artificially lengthen the play time, which is worlds more than I can say for most other games today. Even though the game comes up with painfully contrived reasons to revisit old locations, perhaps in an attempt to get away with reusing some textures and such, the game is courteous enough to alter the level designs and throw in enough curveballs to keep things feeling fresh. At the least, I can say “better than Devil May Cry 4” when it comes to the matter of this game. I’d wager that most people who bought The Force Unleashed will like The Force Unleashed. If the thought of toying around with a legion of Storm Troopers with your mind appettizes you, then by all means. You just have to be able to deal with a good deal of other crap that the game will throw at you. But at the end of the day, like most big-budget games these days, popcorn entertainment. All of its advancements are the same technical advancements every major game seems to brag about, but bringing little new features to the table, and thus while fresh and fun as of October 11, 2008, will be rendered obsolete when the next big action game comes out.

Pros : Mercifully, you never feel like the game is bragging about these physics engines and is shoving them down your throat, like the oh-so-many stupid demonstrations scattered throughout Half-Life 2.

Cons : The visuals are approaching the uncanny valley – some aspects look so good that the flaws stick out more, like how robotic the Starkiller’s love interest it. I guess, ultimately though, the biggest thing I wish this game had was surprise, or lack thereof. Except for a late-game boss fight, nothing in this game was particularly memorable or surprising. Or maybe I’m only making a big deal of this from having just reviewed No More Heroes and finding nothing to rival battling a neurotic Superman-figure who fires lasers from his groin.

3 ½ stars.

Or maybe I have to embrace that the future of games will be more like The Force Unleashed – physics engines up the ass. Maybe the day when a massive screen filling explosion would only cause your character to flinch a bit and turn invincible long enough to shoot at the boss a bit are long gone.