Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Xbox 360)

Kratos, a lightsaber, a gravity gun and Darth Vader: Will it blend?
9/17/2008 7:40 PM | 5 Comments | Page 2 of 3

But then there's the actual game. While the writers clearly understood what made Star Wars great, the actual game designers had no such insight. Instead, they've stitched together a sloppy God of War clone -- Kratos with a lightsaber -- and not a very good one at that. At least the fighting is animated nicely; the apprentice's fighting style, characterized by holding the lightsaber behind his back until he needs it, looks great. The interactive animations between clashing characters is almost on par with Assassin's Creed. But the actual hack-and-slash is a sadly limited set of combos that do nothing to suggest the awesome power of a lightsaber. Instead, The Force Unleashed relies mostly on Force powers, unlocked by a desultory and superficial role-playing game system.

But these Force powers are almost single-handedly scuttled by the lack of a functional way to target them. Picture Vader in the conference room in "Star Wars," raising his hand to choke the guy and then delivering the line, "I find your lack of faith disturbing." Now imagine if he raised his hand and instead accidentally crushed the speakerphone in the center of the conference table. Awkward. Would he pretend he meant to do that? Or would he fumble around and try again, destroying more appliances and furniture in the process before eventually choking the faithless guy? Because that's what would happen in The Force Unleashed. It's inexcusable that you're given these awesome powers to use in a mostly good physics engine, but you're left to fumble around and hope the right thing gets targeted when you want to Force Lift it, Force Push it, Force Grasp it, Force Lightning it, Force Throw Your Lightsaber at it, or Force Rush it. As it is, it's all a lot of Force Suck.

Here's where your choice of platform comes into play. Frankly, the biggest differentiating factor between the otherwise identical Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions is which gamepad you're comfortable with. Do you want to Force Grasp stuff with the mushier PS3 controller's trigger, or with the crisper analog trigger on the 360 controller? It's not much of a difference. There's no trophy support in the PS3 version, so the 360's Achievements are going to be a selling point for Gamerscore whores. But it's worth noting that the levels each have some a special optional objective that's almost like an Achievement.

Also inexcusable is the lack of quality assurance. There are weird glitches throughout, involving collision detection, frame rate, artificial intelligence, animation, scripting and hard lock-ups. I've fought boss battles from underneath the level. I've fallen outside the world. I've gotten stuck in walls and had to restart the level. I've managed to play with the graphics clicking along at one frame per second. I've been stymied, only to realize that the game wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. This passed muster?

Even if the lack of targeting and the glitches were fixed, there's still the problem of the overall game design. It begins promisingly enough, with an intoxicating sense of power. Things break obligingly and nothing can stand in your way for very long. You get a glorious sense of how great the Dark Side of the Force is for just breaking stuff. But as the game progresses, the designers grasp awkwardly for ways to curtail your abilities. It's the standard power progression of a videogame, but inverted. Instead of getting more powerful, you get less powerful. You're facing Stormtroopers with glowing "can't grab me!" shields, Felucian Warriors with lightsaber-blocking cutlasses, or quasi-impossible bosses immune to your best tricks. In fact, the boss fights are humbling experiences in having no idea what works and what doesn't. You die and try again, waiting until you manage to hit on something the impervious bosses don't feel like shrugging off. As the game world shuts down your bag of tricks, you feel weaker and weaker. The Force Unleashed should have been called The Force Leashed.