"PLAY AS DARTH VADER'S SECRET APPRENTICE."
It's a seductive enough proposition after years of iffy prequels and a tropical rain forest's worth of shared-world fiction slowly devouring the rest of large bookseller fiction sections. Play as the bad guy's baddest emissary, with abilities that make the Force function as a derivative of all we've come to see and know in movies that range from The Matrix to The Bourne Ultimatum. Who wouldn't sign up?
... difficult for mostly the wrong reasons ...
LucasArts wanted to draw the first and second Star Wars trilogies together more definitively by exploring the conflicted, resentful relationship between Darth Vader and his master, Emperor Palpatine. The solution: Make Vader a silent insurgent and give him an apprentice named "Starkiller" who acts at Vader's behest, hunting down the few remaining Jedi on backwater planets or out-of-the-way space stations, all part of a training program leading to Vader's usurping Palpatine's power with a little help from his protege. Along the way, players get to chat up known and new Star Wars characters and hit the high points of a one-way story that culminates in a redemptive act that further complicates and deepens the moral peculiarities of George Lucas' space opera.
Part of a broader project that's so far included a graphic-novel adaptation, an official game guide, a bunch of action figures and a practically gilded art-and-making-of coffee-table companion, The Force Unleashed video game takes the form of a third-person action adventure in which you gallop around the galaxy tearing things up with "Dark Side" Force powers. In Star-Wars-ese, that means lightning bolts, choke holds, grabs and throws, and all sorts of other telekinetic jedi-fu. If that sounds a little conventional, think an entirely new order of magnitude, like Darth Vader wired up to a nuclear reactor. If you've always wondered what it might be like to suck a miles-long Star Destroyer out of the stratosphere with clenched fists and some good old-fashioned grimacing, look no further than this game.
Otherwise The Force Unleashed walks you through a dozen shortish levels where you'll get to knock around Star Wars standby villains who charge like metal fillings sucked toward a lodestone. Special powers you'll purchase along the way increase the number of Force moves you can use to dispatch enemies who run the gamut from Wookiees and Jawas to rancors and stormtroopers. Those power also occasionally factor toward solving light logic puzzles, e.g. recharge three generators, sabotage seven pylons, and so on. At the end of each level, you'll fight something big or nimble, be it a rogue Jedi or an AT-ST or a spiny bull rancor.
Brief and unremarkable
I'd love to waste a sentence or two about Star Wars fans bumping the grade up a notch or ignoring most of what I'm about to say in protest of The Force Unleashed's crummy gameplay, but that's a dodge and a cheap way to mock devotees who live for the next limited-edition action figure or franchised collector's mug. No, if you're a Star Wars fan, you need to recognize that for all this game's beauty and decently written plot, someone badly fumbled in the Actual Game Mechanics department, and there's just no "devoting" around it.
Take the game's central premise, that you can interact with and pretty well tear apart the environment without laying so much as a literal finger or lightsaber on it. Trouble is, the "grab" interface is so dismally implemented that you'll be lucky to grab selectively at all. To target something, you "aim" at it with the camera, but since you don't have a pointing reticule or a way to tell what you're zeroed on, you're always winging it. It's hard enough homing in on rocks or bits of debris you want to bounce off a single opponent, but it's a total disaster when the enemies and objects pile up, which is most of the time.
You'll often reach for an object in a pinch and come up with nothing, or try to grab some stormtrooper behind a cannon but snag an innocuous piece of nearby debris instead. This ratchets up from annoying to infuriating in the game's later levels, like the one in which you're trying to pull down a star destroyer: You're firing lightning bolts and grabbing blindly to pummel swooping TIE fighters between intervals in which you have to twist the destroyer out of the sky--if you can't knock them down fast enough, you can't make inroads on the star destroyer before another wave comes a-shootin', snarling you in an exasperating catch-22.
Other minor issues aggregate like a dripping faucet to bring down the experience. The jump controls are too sensitive and animate too quickly, making it difficult to control where you land. The analog panning speed feels sluggish but can't be adjusted. The load times are simply atrocious, and not only that, but you have to sit through a loading screen for nearly every single menu option. Inexplicably, the levels actually dwindle in size and complexity as you progress, and since there's no multiplayer mode, any replay value's limited to revisiting those tiny levels to check off a few bonus objectives. Toward the close, you're effectively tossed into huge rooms thronged with enemies like stormtroopers plus super-stormtroopers plus AT-STs, all attacking simultaneously in a clumsy pyrotechnic orgy that's about as tactical as a WWF match in a mud pit.
I guess the bottom line for me, with all the little things that add up to big things, is that The Force Unleashed is difficult for mostly the wrong reasons, as well as too brief to earn the 60 bucks LucasArts is asking if you're looking at the 360 or PS3 versions. As such, it's definitely not the breakout game experience that LucasArts trumpeted, and that its parallel product blitz suggests it should have been.
All the franchise's tropes are present and accounted for: the grumpy anti-hero, the comic-relief droid (this time a droll tagalong whose prime directive is to try and kill you repeatedly). There's the male-female sex tension with the girl who went bad thanks to dodgy parenting, the traveling to seedy backwater planets to find elusive zen masters, the bad-guy-grows-a-conscience arc and, most importantly, the sense that what you're up to is The Most Important Thing That's Ever Happened (but no one knew about!) in the Franchise's History. Call it the price of "zero to hero" gameplay (consistency notwithstanding), I guess.
-Matt
