It’s actually both.
An explanation is due. At times Force Unleashed is great fun, as you slam electrified Tie-Fighters into people; impale Storm Troopers with your lightsaber, and so forth. But conversely there are times when you simply want to throw your gamepad at your incredibly expensive HDTV and damn the consequences, which are pretty much any time you have a boss fight. Couple with a myriad of other technical issues, Force Unleashed is another one of those Star Wars games that can be fun but is almost crippled when it isn’t.
As you probably know by now, you take control of Vader’s secret apprentice, codenamed Starkiller (Luke Skywalker’s original name in the first Star Wars script, apparently). As such you go around slaughtering Vader’s enemies through the game’s 9 missions. The plot of the game is pretty decent and if you’re in to Star Wars and have avoided spoilers, you may be in for a few decent surprises. Most of the characters are likeable, especially Starkiller’s best friend/sidekick/assassin, Proxy, a droid programmed to help the protagonist in his training by actively trying to kill him.
The game’s main focus point is the force powers, and they are very fun to use, even if there’s no need to use most of them, even after you’ve levelled them up by beating your enemies senseless. The main power you will use is the Force Grip, which lets you pick up boxes, people, exploding barrels, and hurl them wherever you want. It’s a very useful power because you can often just chuck enemies off cliffs, or in to laser barriers, or just in to each other, that is when the targeting system works properly which is about 70-80% of the time. In comparison, the other force powers don’t quite have the same appeal. Force Lightning can be useful, but only once you’ve levelled it up to maximum, and even then some enemies are resistant to certain force powers, which kind of defeats the point of being a force wielding death machine in some aspects. You will often use your lightsaber instead of the powers because it’s a lot easier to deal damage quickly, but again some enemies have the uncanny ability to block your sword made out of a laser with their bits of wood. Still when you’ve just killed three rancors in the space of five minutes, you don’t really complain, as when the combat works, it works well.
However the combat doesn’t work well against bosses. Aside from the boss in the game’s tutorial level, where you control Darth Vader, they are all incredibly frustrating. This may be due to the fact that there’s absolutely no consistency with them. We don’t mean from boss to boss, but you can fight the same boss five times in a row (and probably will) and lose for different reasons. When fighting against the game’s third level boss, no strategies worked the same way twice, causing death after death after death as well as almost causing the reviewer to have to pay for a new HDTV here at Gamestyle Towers. When the boss was finally defeated, it was due to attacks that for some reason started to work where they hadn’t before. This continues throughout the game, and continues even in one signature sequence where the “boss” is actually a Star Destroyer you have to drag in to the ground, which seems like a very cool idea, but just doesn’t work properly. There are a few technical issues through the game as well, a short list of which includes freezing, sound glitches, getting stuck behind and in scenery and so forth.
It’s not all bad though as the story is one of the best ones in Star Wars for quite some time, and makes up for some of the prequel trilogies failings (keep an eye out for Jar Jar in carbonite) and the voice work is actually quite good, along with the graphics. That said there are a couple of levels that are just plain ugly, mainly the two set on the fungus planet of Felucia. Also, all the women in the cutscenes have huge teeth. Not much for a complaint but it just looks odd.
So when Force Unleashed works, it works very well and we defy anybody not to chuckle as they hang a Storm Trooper over a bottomless pit and watch them flail and scream in mid air before letting the succumb to their destiny. However the problems with the game stop it from being able to achieve its full potential. A great game if you can stomach the bugs, but that’d be like trying to ignore somebody choking you from across the room.
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