Customer Reviews

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(59)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'm a sucker for all things Star Wars, so I really wanted to love this game. I'd enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic and this was just going to be the same thing, only better, right? Nope.

This game is set in the Star Wars setting we all know and love, and the visual and audio effects for the lightsabers are fantastic, but the gameplay element of the game is absolutely atrocious. It's a bad game, with hideous camera and controls problems that suck all the fun out of playing. You spend more time wrestling the controls than you do slicing and dicing stormtroopers.

First off: targeting. Unbelievably, this game is worse at targeting than Zelda for the N64. Yes, it's that bad. You have no way to control what you are targeting other than facing towards it. No 'cycle through targets' button as is common in other games. This leads to the very common situation of you wanting to force grab or force choke an enemy right in front of you, but the game decides that really you wanted to pick up a box behind the stormtrooper on the complete opposite side of the room.

Dodging: Also worse than in Zelda. It's so bad that it's almost unmanageable. In order to dodge, you have to have an enemy targeted, much like Zelda. However, instead of simply 'locking on', you have to hold down R1 forever, as long as you want to have the enemy targeted. This quickly becomes unmanageable with the number of other buttons you have to hold down for lengths of time, such as R2 to grab. And you have to push the joystick, and L1, and still be holding R1 to dodge. Ridiculous.

And the game seems extremely sluggish and inconsistent in reacting to your commands. I had gotten used to the precision and speed with which the game reacted in Drake's Fortune or Assassin's creed. Here half the time, your 'double jump' command doesn't even execute the double jump. This is a shocking flaw, given that Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64 managed the double jump flawlessly.

The platforming sections of this game are atrocious. It would have been much better if they had been left out entirely. Prince of Persia this is not. It's not even Drake's Fortune. It's just a clumsy, inelegant, imprecise mess. You can't have a platforming game without ledge grab, yet this is precisely what this game does. There are far too many 'one way slippery ledge to death' situations. Remember the sands of time in Prince of Persia which let you rewind? Yep, no such thing here. Instead, you get to start over at the nearest checkpoint. And it's usually not obvious which ledge you can safely land on and which one you cannot before you leap. Terrible design flaw. Especially given the fact just the merest nudge sends the character plummeting off to one side...in fact, just the forward momentum of executing lightsaber combos can send him hurtling off the edge. This is a terrible design decision. If you use attacks and get to close to the ledge in real platforming games, the character grabs on and doesn't fall. The platforming here is as bad as it was in the original 2D Prince of Persia, and that's saying a lot. The designers wanted to get cute with making you use your force powers to lower ledges you could jump onto, but the whole thing is terrible.

It's not made any better by the camera. They're trying to provide a nice cinematic experience, by zooming the camera out and putting it in a fixed position in many key scenes. Sometimes it works great. More often, it's an absolute mess. Frequently you cannot see your character at all, being hidden behind a protrusion or even by the body of the person you are fighting. It's like the tested half the fights to get the right camera angles and just made poor guesses for the other half. Having a triple A title like this with camera issues where you literally can't even see your character is unforgivable. The inability to easily see what is around you is also bad given the area of effect attacks several monsters launch, where a spot on the ground begins to glow and if you are standing near it after a set amount of time, it explodes and you take damage. It's entirely possible to be near enough one of these spots to be hit, but it doesn't show up in your field of vision. Indeed, the game seems to take delight in arranging the camera angle so this occurs.

Oh, and that leads us to another unforgivable omission, one I thought the games design industry had long ago accepted as standard (but Force Unleashed is a step back in so many ways). You cannot skip cutscenes. This is abominable, especially given how many cutscenes there are, often some right before a tricky platforming session or boss battle you must watch over and over again each time. The cutscenes are visually impressive, but I don't want to have to watch them half a dozen times. Speaking of cutscene failures, there are cases where a cutscene is split. There's a custcene, then you can control your character for a half second, including taking damage from foes, then it goes right back to the continuation of the cutscene. I can't believe this is intended, and it's a rather glaring flaw.

But the biggest flaw in the entire game is the abomination of Raxus Prime. This is literally one of the 5 worst levels I have ever played. The color palette is painful to the eyes, and the level design is insipid and uninspired. Raxus Prime is supposed to be the 'junk pile' world, so there' just random heaps of black and yellow debris everywhere, funneling you down a narrow linear path. The colors are atrocious, it looks like someone vomited over a pile of chewed up legos. Everything is just a kaledeiscope of yellow and black, near objects, distant objects, ledges you can hold onto, ledges that just send you to your death...there's no real discrimination or attempt to draw a visual contrast between important elements and the background. Moreover, this level is home to one of the absolute no-nos of gaming...a mini-boss battle without a save point afterwards. Combined with the aforementioned terrible platforming, compounded by the uniform black and yellow vomit pattern of Raxus Prime, it means you may have to repeat a boss battle two or even three times if the game's jumping engine betrays you.

Even navigating the menus is an exercise in tedium and frustration. Each and every click you make takes you to another 'loading' screen before the submenu shows up. I've never seen this before and it really slows things down and breaks up the flow of play.

In short, this game is a major, major disappointment. The visuals (aside from Raxus Prime) are superb, the soundtrack, blaster sounds, lightsaber hum, are all terrific. But the gameplay is severely lacking almost across the board. If, like me, you loved KOTOR and are looking for more of the same, don't bother. Watch the movies again instead. Or find a friend who has played the game already and get him to show you the unlocked cinematics. Don't waste your money or time on this one.

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

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.

I enjoyed the demo for this game very much because I felt like a dangerous, powerful jedi. I was frying gangs of stormtroopers with my force lightning and wading through their puny blaster fire to cut them all down with my lightsaber. Only when I bought the game did I discover that the demo features a completely "maxed-out" character, and that the demo level's entertaining mayhem is not at all representative of the game as a whole.

Your character does not feel strong until the very end of the game, if then--a full combo of melee attacks doesn't kill some regular stormtroopers, and enemies with overpowered bazookas and flamethrowers (read--every enemy from about mission 5 on) can kill you from full health before you can even turn your camera to figure out who's hitting you. The big creatures like AT-STs and Rancors are pretty much all the same--throw rocks at their heads until they die.

The story is great. In fact, I wish I knew more about the characters I was introduced to. The cutscenes seemed to give you the bare minimum, as if I had already seen the movie and was playing the game.

Also, the game has a lot of frustrating bad design. If my character steps forward with each attack, don't make him fight on narrow catwalks. Game designers should have learned that players don't like enemies who can knock them down and juggle them to death a long time ago, too. I felt like I was being rewarded for being as cheap as possible, and wound up running straight through several areas after dying repeatedly. I really needed a "fire from cover" mechanic that allowed me to target items for the "force grab" maneuver without standing in the line of fire, and I was constantly pelted by off-camera enemies and enemies far outside my target range. Finally--I didn't like "press this button now" scenes on the old Dragon's Lair arcade game, I didn't like them in Resident Evil 4, and I don't like them now. This game's take on them is 100% pointless--if you miss the button, the guy breaks out of his headlock and you grab him again for another try--repeat as necessary. All in all, this game plays like a super-nice looking Nintendo 64 game.

In the game's defense, the visuals and sound are spectacular, and really immersed me in the "Star Wars" experience--that is, until the bad stuff brought me back down to earth (remember in the movies when Luke had to fight the stormtroopers with shields that blocked the force? Neither do I...) The only thing I can say against the graphics is that Juno Eclipse has really freaky huge teeth that distracted me during the cutscenes.
All in all, buy this game expecting it to be a beautiful button-masher and you won't be disappointed.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had the potential for a great story, great game play, and an all-around great entry in the abysmal field of Star Wars video games. Sadly, it fails to live up to its potential.

The story is mildly entertaining, but extremely predictable. The controls and gameplay are frustrating and difficult, often times working against you. The graphics and sound are good, but nothing spectacular.

* Gameplay
The first few hours are fun as you hack and slash your way through storm troopers. After the novelty of electrocution and throwing wears off, the game just becomes a repetitive exercise in button mashing.

The AI cheats on a regular basis and the rules of combat are asymmetric. Enemies can block your most powerful attacks while you are unable to block mindless storm troopers. Your force powers, while entertaining, cannot be used on many of the enemies. Major bosses can't be thrown; some are immune to lightening; nearly all of them can block your light saber indefinitely.

Most of the boss and mini-boss battles end with a special button-sequence you have to enter with the right timing. It's cheesy, pointless, and detracts from enjoying the well-done cinematic death.

The Apprentice also has a number of fighting problems. He steps forward when he slashes and will step right off a cliff to his death. He takes 4-9 seconds to get back up and is vulnerable to attack during. The same cannot be said for the enemies.

Saves are via checkpoint system. The checkpoints are not evenly spaced and some major battles have multiple waves of enemies without saves.

* Controls
The biggest problem is with the targeting system. If you've played Assassin's Creed, imagine that system with a sloppy camera and having dozens of inanimate targets in a room. More often than not, the targeting system will select a rock or barrel causing your camera and force powers to be misdirected.

You'll electrocute, push, or slash inanimate objects when you mean to attack the bad buy. This is especially a problem with bosses and later levels when they are able to kill you with just a few hits.

Fighting is all about combos. Combos may be difficult for some to master; this doesn't matter since most combos can be blocked by enemies. Worse yet, enemies can hit you while executing a combo and interrupt the sequence. You cannot do the same to enemies.

* The Force
Force powers are entertaining, but nothing special. You throw stuff, push stuff, and electrocute things. Many things are immune to your powers, including the later bosses.

Of particular note is one sequence late in the game where the Apprentice demonstrates power far beyond Darth Vader or the Emperor. This sequence is slow, boring, and pointless. It took upwards of 30 minutes to complete and the on-screen instructions you are supposed to follow is actually wrong at times. It also raises another question: why is Starkiller the "Apprentice" if he is this powerful? Shouldn't he be the Master?

* Summary
Download the demo. Play it, throw a few storm troopers out a window. Get your fill of being a Jedi and move on. If you can get the game used at a substantial discount, it may be worth it. Otherwise, save your time and money and get something else.

I'd like to preface my review by saying this is a great game. Everything you've ever wanted to be able to do in a Star Wars as a Jedi is in here. It's simply great.

Pros: As already stated, it's great when it comes to Jedi Powers. You can use lightning, force push, force field, deflect lasers, and the list goes on. Also, you can bust out some pretty crazy combos to infict tons of damage. It has a pretty long storyline and in-depth as well. You can also choose whether to be a Jedi or Sith in the end, although this decision is rather subtle. In fact, I wasn't really aware that I was actively choosing my path. I believe it has something to do with the holocrons (aka unlockables and powerups) you pick up - there are both Jedi and Sith holocrons. There are also tutorials on all your skills so beginners can get a hang of the controls easily too. The interactive environment that they designers created for your Jedi to explore is pretty great. Since this game was built for the newer systems, the graphics are spectacular as well.

Cons: Most importantly, replayability - or rather, a lack thereof. As soon as you finish this game, you will never want to pick it up again. Since the only mode is campaign, you'll definitely not play through that again. Each level there are certain objectives that must be met in order to advance the storyline (with a few bonus objectives on the side). As soon as you beat the game, you're definitely not going to want to go back and do the same exact objectives again on the same levels. Also, although I mentioned graphics in the Pros section, it goes in the Cons as well. This is because the environment they created for this game also has a few flaws. There are quite a few places I was able to get to that seemed as though I should not have been able to. I believe the designers did not do enough Beta Testing before releasing this game because there were so many places I could get to and things I could climb on that seemed as if they were really just decoration. I did however notice that a few of them WERE meant for this purpose as you would have to do some crazy acrobatics to reach some of the holocrons. The only other problem I had with the game was the stats not working halfway through. It could have just been my personal experience (I played the PS3 version) but after a few levels it started giving me "Null" as the bonus objectives. I thought it was just that level at first, but it continued throughout the rest of the game. It was pretty disappointing because I was not able to complete any of the bonus objectives after a few levels.

Overall, I'd definitely say this game it worth playing. As I stated, there were a few problems, most of them probably due to release deadlines being met and Beta Testing. However, it was totally worth it. I had a great time playing - being able to pick people up off the ground and simply throw them off a cliff gives you a pretty high confidence level and definitely was a grand ole time. What I would suggest is to play the game and sell it right afterward though, as chances are fairly high that you won't want to go through the game again and it will just collect dust on your shelf from there on.

Happy Gaming!

So far i have played is very good. Be sure to have the shockwave 3 to feel the power of the force !!!!