Lucasarts has given us more Star Wars games than I’m even familiar with on more consoles than I can count on my fingers. Some of these games follow the movies and some of them take place along different timelines and with different characters. We’ve been given star fighting battles, Lego adventures and tons of light saber action. Just when you think everything from the Star Wars universe has been covered, we get the most spectacular opportunity yet! Star Wars: The Force Unleashed puts you in the shoes of the apprentice to the most evil badass of all time, Darth Vader himself. “What is thy bidding, my master?”
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed takes place between the movie episodes 3 and 4. The premise is that it will fill in the gaps between the movies and answer a lot of your questions.
The game begins with you playing as Darth Vader, on a mission to kill a Jedi that managed to survive his assault at the end of “Revenge of the Sith.” Upon finding and killing the Jedi, he detects a strong presence of the force in the Jedi’s son, Galen Marek. Darth Vader takes the young boy as his secret apprentice. Several years later, you take over as the boy, now grown up and known as Starkiller. You have been trained in the ways of the Sith and are ready to begin taking on Vader’s dirty business.
One thing I found particularly interesting was that the game revealed how and why Princess Leia formed the rebellion against the empire, something that is left out of the movies. Also, if you know anything about the Sith, you know you are going to run into some serious plot twists throughout the game. That said, the story is fabulous and I don’t want to give away any spoilers, as the story really is a big reason why you should play this game.
The Force Unleashed has two endings that unfold based on your actions throughout your journey. One bridges the gap between the game and “A New Hope”, while the alternate ending takes you down a really interesting path that doesn’t follow the movies at all. Later this year; new downloadable content will be released that continues this alternate storyline. Unfortunately, a new “Ultimate Sith Edition” of the game will be released at the same time that will contain the ending to the alternate story, which you apparently can only see if you buy this version of the game.
The Force Unleashed is a single player action game through and through. What I liked about it was that it wasn’t button-mashy like so many other action games. While at times there can be lots of enemies on the screen, you have to be smart about the moves that you use or you’ll get your butt whooped. The game took me 9 hours to complete on the medium difficulty setting. Really the game is pretty short considering how many times I died. It would have been even shorter had I not spent a freaking hour and a half on the level where you crash a star destroying into a planet using nothing but the force. I just couldn’t get it right! I swore I was going to smash my controller!
There are a lot of really different levels ranging from a mushroom wilderness, starships, mining facilities, caverns, and of course the Death Star. Throughout each level are auto-save points so when you die you don’t have to restart the entire level. Once you complete a level it becomes available to return to and play again any time you wish, like most other action games.
Scattered throughout the levels are hidden items to collect that unlock things like more powerful lightsabers and different costumes, so there is incentive to go back and try to hunt these items down.
There is currently a lot of downloadable content including a mission pack in addition to the ones that are going to be released later this fall.
Finally, there are tons of codes that you can find on the Internet to unlock everything in the game and even additional characters to play as.
The Force Unleashed was everything I wanted out of an action game. There are a TON of different combos, force powers and moves that you can use in the game to keep the battles from becoming stale. You are basically a god on the battlefield. It just feels great to take down an entire squad of Storm Troopers in a matter of seconds with a combination of all of your moves. You get points for each kill you get, but you get additional points for killing the enemies in creative ways like using the Force to lift them, shoot them with lightning, and then throw them into a can filled with gasoline and blowing up another group of soldiers with them!
Throughout your quest, you get to customize your character as you level up from killing enemies. When you level up, you are given points that you can distribute into attributes like additional health and force power, you can learn additional abilities and lightsaber combos, and you can enhance your core force skills. I had a blast learning to use the plethora of abilities in this game, and stringing them all together and forming your own combos kept me hooked.
The games enemies are quite varied and they start out really easy to defeat, but as you progress, they get significantly more difficult, both in their own skill and in the amount of varied enemies you’ll face at once. On top of that, enemies will quickly learn your patterns of attack and adapt, so you’ll have to continually change your tactics if you want to take those bastards down.
The graphics in Force Unleashed as you can see are clearly beautiful. There are plenty of cg scenes that you unfortunately can’t skip through when you are replaying a level. The game utilizes the Havok engine for physics, which is standard stuff, but the real star of the show is NaturalMotion’s Euphoria engine that basically makes everything you see in the game realistic and alive. The grass and trees sway in the wind. Better yet, if you shoot lightning or do a force push, anything in it’s path will sway out of its way or crumble and be destroyed. Granted, not EVERYTHING in the game is destructible, but there sure is a ton of it!
Of course as in most Star Wars titles, you are presented with all of the familiar music from John Williams that we’ve grown to love and expect while wielding a lightsaber, but we are given something a little new as well. While you play the game, the music will adapt to the situation making it calmer when there is not much going on, and loud action packed music when you are in the heat of battle! That’s awesome!
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the perfect liaison between the new movies and the classic movies. It answers most of your questions as to how the events in “The Last Hope” came to be. Playing as Darth Vader’s apprentice is great, except in the middle when you start to get a emo and start to shift your alignment a little bit. Nonetheless, the graphics are great and the combo system and force abilities are unmatched in any other Star Wars game.
If you don’t own this game already, you can pick it up for 20 bucks brand new. But if I were you, I would probably wait to pick up the “Ultimate Sith Edition” later this fall to ensure that you get the entire alternate story, which in my opinion is much more interesting than the ending that bridges the story to the movies.
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