Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
by LucasArts
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Product Summary
Brand: LucasArtsAudio: English (Unknown)
Format: CD-ROM
Published: 2008-09
Release Date: 2008-09-16
Platform: PlayStation 3
Model: 023272332389
Color: One Color
Publisher: LucasArts
Product features:
- 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.
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Video Game Reviews of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Customer Review: Wonderful universe, sub-wonderful game
Summary: 3 Stars
Product: Star Wars, The Force Unleashed I
Rating: 3/5 (good)
I'm a longtime Star Wars fan. I've seen all six movies during their original theatrical runs, and I'm a past vet of the RPG. I like the genre. That said, this game has some significant flaws that need to be mentioned.
Likes:
* UNIVERSE: The chief selling point of this game is the Star Wars universe itself. Star Wars enjoys the same foolproof safety net as pizza and nookie ... even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Despite it's annoying quirks and shortcomings, this game is still pretty good.
* ART: The artwork and cinematics in this game are great.
Dislikes:
* CLUMSY MOVEMENT: the movement system in this game is maddenly imprecise. It makes no sense to me that a highly trained jedi can be so oafish when it comes to simple things like climbing onto crates, boulders, or walking along a narrow ledge without constantly falling off.
* POOR TARGETING SYSTEM: the targeting system is weak too. It's bad enough that you have to select targets by turning side to side until a little blue square appears on something, but it's compounded by the fact that the number of turning directions are extremely granular (limited), and you can only target things that are selectable, and even then only at short and medium range ... points at long, extreme, and infinite are not selectable. 100% of all FPS games will let you do that, but not this one. It makes no sense that the game, in one mission, will allow you to reach out and tug on a Star Destroyer at high altitude, but it won't allow you to reach across a medium-large hanger bay to grab (or saber-toss) a sniper on a catwalk. Annoying.
* WEAK A.I.: I have a degree in Computer Science. IMNSHO, the coders who wrote the artificial intelligence for the opponents in this game should be horsewhipped. Here's an example: suppose you're in a medium-large featureless room, just you on one side and an Imperial Purge Trooper on the other. You're both facing each other directly, in plain sight. Suppose you're just beyond long range (roughly 30 meters in this game), so although you can see the purge trooper plainly, you can't select him for forcegrip, forcepush, or sabertoss (all of which are limited to medium range or roughly 20 meters). That's frustrating enough, but worse still, the purge trooper CAN'T SEE YOU AT ALL, even though you're in plain view. Even worse, if you tiptoe forward briefly (to just within detection range) he'll suddenly see you, but if you immediately step backwards before he moves, he'll immediately go dormant again and forget he ever saw anything. Oh, it gets worse. You can stand stand there, and use forcegrip to stack up a pile of objects between you (just in front of but slightly off to one side of him) with which to pummel him (any anyone nearby) senseless. Why ? Because the AI ignores inanimate objects. That's right - you can stand just beyond an enemy's detection range, and use forcegrip to waggle a crate right in front it it's nose, and it won't see the object (or you). You can even nail them with it with a toss, and they'll briefly yelp like a stuck pig, and then go right back to being dormant. The silliness doesn't stop there, because there's also no logic that allows enemies to learn even simple repetition. For example, it's easy to take out purge troopers, AT-ST's, and Rancors by simply standing behind an immobile obstruction and playing peek-a-boo with force lightning. Zap, cover, recharge, rinse and repeat. It's that simple. Takes some of the fun out of the game. You'd think they could have adapted something like the alert system and variable move/emote system used in Metal Gear Solid 4 ? Nope.
* NO DUCKING: It's unfair (and unrealistic) that opponents can completely evade deflected blaster fire by simply dropping to one knee, and also that you as a player are not allowed to do the same ... no ducking allowed. On a related note, I have no idea why they have lifts in the game, but you're not allowed to climb ladders.
* TAINTED PLATINUM: Because this game facilitates cheat codes (and has weak and easily bypassed safeguards against their use), the value of the trophies are somewhat tainted. Some of the trophies are also unnecessarily tedious - such as requiring 500+ kills for each of several different offensive force move combos. On a good note however, the game-win trophies are stackabe (meaning that if you beat the game on a harder difficulty, you automatically get the trophies for the easier difficulties without having to do additional multiple runthroughs ... something I wish more games did.
{Aside: the trophy system in this game was/is apparently an add-on feature that occured AFTER the game's original release, so if you're playing off an older disc, you'll need to make sure you download the latest software update for the game from the internet.}
* Linearity: As with many similar games, the missions are very linear ... every room has a specific number of foes, who always fight pretty much the same way. There are no random encounters, no non-combatant bystanders, and no non-sequiturs of any type. There's nobody to interact with, and no place to sit down and simply BE. In fact, in the entire game, you have one and only one decision to make, and it comes just before the final boss battle of the final mission. From a story standpoint and a role playing standpoint, that's very underwhelming.
* STORY/SHORT : There's only 9 missions in the core game, and none of them are very long ... in fact, missions 4 and 5 are only one third the length of the others, and together barely even count as one mission. There's also not enough cinematic time to develop the sub-stories that the overall plot raises. The fledgling bond with General Kato for instance, goes disappointingly underdeveloped, the story behind Starkiller's father is non-existent, and the budding romance with Juno is merely hinted at. The whole game feels more like a group of brief individual missions strung together with a few cinematics, than it does a full-fledged story ... far too short. I don't think they took full enough advantage of the space available on the blu-ray disc in order to provide a full quota of content to flesh this out. It was worth the $10 I paid for it, but I'd have been hard pressed to justify laying out the $60 it cost back when it was a new release.
* LOAD TIME LAG: There's an annoying load screen that lingers for 5-10 seconds every time you change menus or pause the game ... too slow ! Why they cant keep all the menus in resident memory, and only do a load for a submenu, is beyond me.
* FORCE UPGRADES: I'm disappointed that there are only 3 proficiency ranks in force power and force talents.
* SAVING/STATISTICS: The save system in this game is unnecessarily clumsy and confusing. There's also no completion indicator in the mission selection page, to let you know which missions are complete and which are not ... the only way to find that out is to load one of the nine missions, waste time sitting though the opening cinematic, and then opening the mission objectives page. There's also no statistics to see how many and of what time of opponents you've defeated, or how much progress you've made on each of the half dozen 500+ kills required trophies.
* NON-ABORTABLE CINEMATICS: most (but not all) of the cinematics in this game cannot be aborted, and if they directly abut a major battle that you're struggling with (example: the laser convergence chamber in the Death Star mission), the inability to skip the cinematic can get tedious in a hurry.
* CHEAT CODES: Why they allow cheat codes outside of the product development lab is beyond me. It cheapens the trophies, and teaches kids that cheating not only acceptable but good.
* COMBAT: The combat system, while decent, lacks finesse. The lack of an ability to move while blocking, for instance, is a real handicap when it comes to putting on a good duel. There are innumerable fighting games that the coders should have drawn inspiration from, and there was clearly insufficient time and effort put into playtesting.
* MORALITY: I won't spoil by revealing specifics, but there's only one decision point in the game that differentiates between the light and dark endings, and it occurs at the very end, between the last two boss battles. First of all, it's not nearly enough of an ethical distinction, and even if you make the "light" choice, the result is not even remotely enough to "redeem" all the wholesale slaughter your character commits thoughout the game. The overall result is a nearly complete void of any ethical flavor whatsoever to the game. They could easily have done far better on that angle.
* POSTGAME HOLOCRON HUNTING: The holocrons make about as much sense as the dumb floating coins in super mario brothers. Why would they be simply floating around in quasi-random locations (rather than being kept under guard), except to essentially force you into a vacuous Easter-egg type hunt that goes on long after the end of the game ? You can't get your platinum trophy unless you ferret them all out. It is always a bad idea to annoy loyal paying customers by treating them like 5yr olds.
Bottom line: With it's linear plot, clumsy movement, poor targeting, and weak AI, the game is not as good as it could have been ... but it's still Star Wars, and for some people that makes up for it's many shortcomings. Recommended, albeit only as a used game or a rental. Resist the urge to buy any DLC add-ons ... except perhaps for the the Jedi Temple.
Description of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
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 quest to rid the universe of Jedi - and face decisions that could change the course of their destiny. |
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Game Features:
- During the period between Episodes III and IV, players hunt Jedi in the role of Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice.
- 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:
- The Secret Apprentice won't just Force push enemies into walls - he'll Force push enemies through walls.
- The Secret Apprentice won't just Force grip foes to throw them aside - he'll Force grip them in midair, zap them with lightning, then drop them to the ground to explode like a bomb.
- In addition to new adversaries created just for the game, such as fugitive Jedi and Force-sensitive Felucians, players will also confront and associate with familiar faces from the Star Wars films, including Darth Vader.
- 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.
- The Force Unleashed is LucasArts' first internally developed title for next-generation consoles, and it represents the first in-game collaboration of talents and technology between LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic, two companies now finally under one roof at the new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio district.
- The Force Unleashed debuts Digital Molecular Matter from Pixelux and euphoria behavioral simulation from NaturalMotion Ltd.
- LucasArts is preparing an unprecedented promotional effort around the launch of The Force Unleashed, encompassing a full line of toys and game-based action figures from Hasbro, as well as a full publishing program from Dark Horse, Del Rey and Palace Press.
Meet the Cast
The Star Wars Saga will continue in 2008 with LucasArts' biggest-ever video game event. Set during the "dark times" between Episodes III and IV, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed portrays the previously untold story of Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice -- and now you can put a face to that mysterious character as well as the major supporting cast members as LucasArts unveils the actors set to star in The Force Unleashed.
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The New Technology of The Force Unleashed
With The Force Unleashed, LucasArts not only introduces a new chapter in the Star Wars saga, but also two completely new and innovative technologies -- Digital Molecular Matter by Pixelux Entertainment and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd. These groundbreaking technologies combine with Havoc physics to create true next-gen gameplay and the Force like it's never been seen or experienced before.
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