- Confront and associate with familiar faces from the Star Wars films, including Darth Vader in addition to new adversaries such as fugitive Jedi and Force-sensitive Felucians
- Unleash and upgrade the Secret Apprentice’s four core Force powers – Force push, grip, repulse and lightning – throughout the course of the game, and combine them for ultra-destructive, never-before-seen combos.
- Examples of unleashing the Force in ways never thought possible: Secret Apprentice won’t just Force push enemies into walls – he’ll Force push enemies through walls, and will Force grip them in midair, zap them with lightning, then drop them to the ground
- Visit locations such as Episode III’s Wookiee homeworld Kashyyyk and the floral Felucia, the junk planet Raxus Prime, plus an Imperial TIE fighter construction facility
- Decisions made by players throughout the game will determine the path of the story, including multiple endings that will rock Star Wars continuity as they know it.
Amazon.com
The Star Wars saga will continue in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a videogame developed by LucasArts, which casts players as Darth Vader’s “Secret Apprentice” and promises to unveil new revelations about the Star Wars galaxy. The expansive story, created under direction from George Lucas, is set during the largely unexplored era between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. In it, players will assist the iconic villain in his ques… More >>
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Pros
- Good story and voice acting
- The visuals are magnificent- I found my self looking outside of Cloud City rather than killing stormtroopers at one point
- When you fight a jedi boss the game switches to a wide-angle pulled-back cinematic camera reminiscent of the duel between Dokku, Obiwan and Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. This is one of the best ways I’ve seen of taking advantage of the HD screen format and resolution. When you Force push your enemy across the room it really does remind you a lot of the movies.
- Sound track is good- some new themes and old themes are enhanced.
- Even though NPCs appear to have the ability to block your force powers or lightsaber blows, each one of them has a particular weakness you can exploit – so it’s not really a problem
Cons
- Locking on to objects is sometimes clumsy- PsiOps did it much better
- A few bugs here and there
- As compared to say Jedi Outcast / Academy it doesn’t have as rich a Force upgrade mechanism- mainly because the story doesn’t really lend itself to it
- Camera needs to be manually adjusted frequently
- Too short
- There are some frustrating jumping puzzles – especially with a problematic camera
Considering I’ve been waiting since Jedi Academy for another Star Wars game, and the fact that the average budget for a video game is over $40 Million, spending $60 on a decent Star Wars game seems like a bargain to me. I have no complaints.
Comparison to the Wii version:
- Wii version uses canned Star Wars musical score. Reminds you of playing the old Jedi Power Battles game.
- Wii controls are quite well thought out and does make Force wielding fun.
- But over time the Wii interaction does tend to get fatiguing.
- The visuals between the Wii and PS3 are night and day- including the cutscenes which are rendered using the in-game engine. The Wii’s visuals just look really dated/primitive compared to the PS3′s. E.g. on the first mission on Kassyk, if you look at what’s happening in the background on the PS3, there are stormtroopers on a beach-head in the distance slowly advancing, and shooting and then dying. It’s gratuitous but it’s beautifully done. None of this made it to the Wii. Of course this is understandable since the Wii is a less capable system.
- Wii provides additional game levels not provided in the PS3 game.
- The Duel Mode on the Wii can only be played with another player, rather than with an AI- too bad.
If you own both the PS3 and Wii, I recommend buying the PS3 version and maybe the Wii version when it goes on sale. TFU is visually the most stunning Star Wars title to-date and missing the opportunity to experience it’s full visual splendor would be a shame.
Rating: 5 / 5
This game is pretty good but could have, and should have been great but as usual they just decided to get too cute. Using the force powers to dangle stormtroopers in the air, throw them around, and hit them with lightning (as seen in the trailers) is lots of fun for a while but that doesn’t even come close to making up for all the areas of the game where the designers just thought it would be funny to frustrate the crap out of us. FYI…NOT A LOT OF SITH LORDS SPEND 20 MINUTES TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO CROSS A FREAKING JUNK PILE!!!! Oh and how the hell does a junked robot steal the force energy from me?!! Oh how I dreamed of the day when I could become a sith lord and fight a giant junk robot and spend a solid hour doing stupid jump puzzles and falling into lava. Why? Why do people think it’s funny to frustrate us? The game has a great storyline,almost as good as KOTOR, but that doesn’t make up for the glitches and frustrations. After not even 3 days of owning it, I beat the game despite the frustrations and glitches, that tells me they were a little short on content for it to have been hyped for so long.Don’t misunderstand, this is a must have for any Star Wats fan, but it is not worth the 59.99 price tag and doesn’t live up to the hype. Wait for the price to drop to at least 39.99 and then get it.
Rating: 3 / 5
I was looking forward to this game, the technology in it is impressive, however the controls are terrible and it has some strange added flaws, the camera on the opening boss fight with Darth Vader was buggy and it did not bode well for the rest of the game, how could they miss this in testing? The primary mechanic in the game is the use of Force abilities, however control of it is completely deficient, it’s the weakest part of the design. You cannot decide to target anything accurately because there is no reticle, just a box on whatever you are force targeting now. Moving this means the character on screen turns slightly and you’re left to guess where the heck the aim point is because the camera hasn’t changed & is under independent control. As a result, even after a lot of “aiming” and practice the force autolock ‘reticle’ jumps from object to object with no precise control and no way of guessing where your true aim-point is other than that hinted by the character orientation. It’s not merely that it lacks precision and finesse (and it lacks them indeed) it’s that it’s horribly broken with no feedback. Aiming anything requires continuous feedback, this game has NONE other that a very crude guesstimate based on the Jedi’s (Sith’s) orientation in your independently moving camera view. Stuff like force push is great but at times you literally cannot hit a barn door with it from two paces. Standing in front of a door your aim is determined by your 3rd person jedi’s character orientation (who is too cool to walk in a straight line so he sidles around and stands at an angle making things even worse). You press ‘o’ and he’s oriented the wrong way and blam you force push in some random direction and he’s often pointed the wrong way.
Control systems are somewhat arbitrary, and designers have a choice & make trade-offs, whatever committee settled on this control system ruined what could have been a great game.
The best game mechanic is force throwing stuff, it usually locks and manages to find a target, but forget about reliably aiming with this at anything, nonetheless throwing is satisfying, however picking things up to throw them and aiming with force push destroys the pleasure and the throwing only really seems good due to auto-lock and by contrast to picking up, again you cannot really aim with it.
The heavier enemy/boss fights are very God of War “simon says” affairs (after you beat their health down). You cannot take down a single AT without the right plodding button combos. You can slash at it force throw stuff push at it, but in the end you’ll be there getting whittled down unless you have to press the right button sequence as they appear to pull off an effective attack. Correction, unless it’s a true Jedi boss you can usually keep whittling it down without the GOW sequence and they get easier as you level up.
The levels themselves are linear with pretty much one way to progress. You’re a rat caught in a maze with no turns and the spawning is very uninspired. 5 storm troopers in this corridor, 3 rebels next, kill them and there’s a respawn there, but it’s very much one set piece after another from the minute to the large, even the trivial stuff is set in stone.
The graphics are stunning and the physics is impressive but the AI is surprisingly disappointing after the hype, you can stand out of range or hide in a corner and take pot shots at a boss. This game is a highly polished disappointment.
I have to add here that the save-load game facility is flawed making the manual save game illusion bizarre & pointless. No joke, you can save your game but when you load it jumps you to the last autosave even after cheerfully telling you you saved successfully and warning you of lost unsaved progress if you quit. I find this quirk beyond strange, it’s completely incompetent. Try getting the Sith Robe holocron in the junkyard, falling (and you will fall) means redoing the very tedious boss fight to get over the chasm, saving after the boss is killed does NOTHING. You’re always back to before the fight (I revisited this and this is inconsistent, there’s another autosave point just after but it didn’t work teh first time through, I have no idea why, it is definitely inconsistent). If this isn’t a bug then the designer has a lot to answer for and the damned game should tell you what the heck it’s bizarro-world meaning of save game is. I should have known this was trouble when the load game facility was up a menu level with the added inconvenience of forcing you to leave your game just to load a save…. only to find it’s not really the save you made, sigh.
Rating: 3 / 5
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a truly epic failure considering what this game almost could have been. The physics engine is amazingly powerful, the graphics are awesome, the story is pretty good and you can do some really, really cool things with force powers. So why 1 star? Well, because The Force Unleashed is so heavily flawed and broken that it ruins what could have been a game of the year. Here are the list of flaws:
1. Aiming. Its basically random sometimes. It can be very difficult to target exactly who or what you want with your awesome force powers. What is really frustrating is that in the demo aiming was substantially better. How does that happen?
2. Button-press boss kills. Those horribly annoying button press kills to finish off boss’s cinematically are everywhere. And worse is that they instantly fail if you happened to hit an extra lightsaber attack at the end of beating on the boss.
3. Character control is seriously flawed. By this I mean that you don’t always go where you want your character to go nor do you jump where you think you will go all the time. The Force Unleashed has several points that want to be a platformer, but character movement is horrible so that the heavy platforming areas just get to be frustrating chores. Especially the parts with instant-deah falls. The control problem is exacerbated by the next problem…
4. Poor camera angles. This problem doesn’t occur all the time, but it seems to occur mostly when you don’t want it, such as boss fights where the angle shifts suddenly so that you can’t get a good grasp on where you are in the environment or say when you get swarmed by a dozen stormtroopers.
5. Overly linear level design. You basically do nothing but follow the path in front of you. There are a couple of times when you have more then one option, but those are few and far between. And frankly it really doesn’t matter which option you take anyways. You don’t notice this right away, but eventually it starts to get to you.
6. Poor AI. The enemy AI very easily gets hung up on environmental obstacles. Its pretty annoying when you kill a jedi because he got stuck on a pillar in the floor.
7. Combat does not flow well. While you can do some amazing kills in combat (such as flinging enemies into one another), it can also be horribly frustrating. Sometimes when you get close in to your enemies you can swing your lightsaber and sometimes you can’t. You’re supposed to be a jedi (or a sith) and the combat doesn’t reflect that so well. Lucasarts should have played some God of War before they let this game out of QA.
8. Graphical glitches happen a bit too often. The physics engine is really powerful, so I’m somewhat leanient on deformable terrain clipping somewhat, but the parts when all of a sudden whole sections of the level blinked out were a bit too much. This wasn’t common, but it was almost a game stopper for me.
LucasArts used to make amazing games. If they’d only went back and updated Jedi Outcast instead of making this garbage they’d have had a fantastic game on their hands. Instead they created a pile of garbage
Rating: 1 / 5
The Force Unleashed is absolutely horrible. Do not buy it.
While the story line is good, the game is incredibly short. It only takes a day or two to play through the entire game.
Also, the game play itself is very weak, and it has no relationship to the Star Wars Universe. The main character has more force powers than 100 Jedi put together. He can blast through blast doors. He can throw people and objects hundreds of feet away, and he can even rip a Star Destroyer from the sky. Yet, for some reason, Darth Vader and the Emperor give him trouble later in the game. This is odd given that their force powers are no where close to this strong.
Perhaps the troubling aspect to the game was the main character’s weapon, his lightsaber. Starkiller’s lightsaber works like no other lightsaber. His works like a glowing baseball bat. Every enemy must be hit multiple times with the glowing baseball bat in order to kill them. It doesn’t cut through anything.
This isn’t exactly what one would expect from a Star Wars game. However, it is what everyone has come to expect from George Lucas: a sub par product with little thought given to how it fits into the Star Wars Universe that Lucas created over 30 years ago. This game is proof again that George Lucas has completely lost his touch. It is also proof that there’s no one at Lucas Arts who is willing to tell the Emperor that he has no clothes.
Again, this is a horrible game. Don’t waste your money on it.
Rating: 1 / 5