Star Wars the force unleashed, for xbox 360
Rating: 6.5/10; Above average
Hard to recommend. Fans of Star Wars and/or hack and slashers may enjoy this.
Force unleashed is a third person hack and slash game where you use a lightsaber and magical force powers to traverse linear levels and defeat enemies and bosses. As such, it suffers from many of the same problems that such games tend to have. The camera is bad, occasionally being so close to the character that you cannot see anything and occasionally so far that you can barely make out your character. It auto adjusts to the center of the screen, making any time you are trying to do something vertical (platforming or attacking an enemy below) a pain and it does not auto adjust based on what way the character faces. So of course you will be hit by enemies you cannot even see.
Though there is a button to snap the camera to the direction your character is facing, it is not bound to the analog stick and is awkward to use when you are pressing all kinds of other buttons for combat. This problem could be largely eliminated if the camera turning speed was not obnoxiously slow. Seriously, why can’t I whip that camera around as fast I can turn my head in real life? Ridiculous. Boss fights use a camera fixed to one end of the room, as if the normal camera was not already bad enough.
Now lets talk about level design. The levels that take place inside starships are cool, though once you get out into uneven and more natural terrain the levels go downhill, literally. Some of the terrain is inexplicably slippery, preventing your character from standing on it. You would think a master Sith could adjust his legs to different lengths through bending the knee joint to stand on a slight slope, or use the force to act like magnetic boots if the terrain really is that slippery. This caused me several completely unnecessary deaths by slipping and falling to my death and caused me to be very nervous about where I went and about platforming in general. Why is falling to your death even a thing in this game? A master Sith can’t use the force to boost him back to solid ground? No instead we get the last checkpoint loaded. And speaking of checkpoints, there was one point in the third level where you fight a junk titan and then have to jump to a bridge. Well I failed that jump 4 times due to inexplicably slippery terrain, and had to fight the junk titan 4 times?! Why isn’t there a checkpoint after killing the mini boss? More importantly, why is there an option to manual save if it does not actually save your progress in a level?
Levels also feature environmental puzzles, which involve using the correct force power on an object. Most are annoying and pointless, and some serve solely as padding (do this to X amount of things). A few stood out as particularly bad. At one point in the junk level, you have to bend scrap metal to shield from dripping yellow stuff. Failure to do so results in instant death, even though you could swim around in that stuff earlier without dying instantly. In the same level was a huge glowing plate with the goal of platforming on top of a ship. I could not figure it out though managed to bypass it by building a platform out of boxes and stuff. In the final level, you have a short amount of time to align 3 spinning rings and get through. If you fail, you die, if you abort to avoid death, the rings reset. Absolutely stellar gameplay right there.
So apart from puzzles, platforming, leveling up and collecting secrets, the game revolves around combat. Using force grip to telekinetically pick up objects and enemies and throw them around is a lot of fun. The game is definitely designed around this, with plenty of moveable objects and destructible environment. It still suffers from slow camera speed though. The auto targeting system is a mixed blessing. Thankfully, shooting objects has a little bit of auto aim (though it is not reliable), but the auto targeting frequently has trouble figuring out what you want to target like “No, I want to target the enemy, not the crate right next to him!”. The game would have been better served having a crosshair/cursor, or a button to press to bring one up.
The biggest problem with the combat comes from unresponsive controls and cheap enemies, which are most noticeable when you get into lightsaber combat. The game uses button sequence combo system for melee combat (which is something I inherently dislike), and it seems like the protagonist is unable to do any action until the current combo is complete, which frequently leads to swearing at the protagonist and mashing the button saying “Why are you NOT dodging/blocking/jumping/using a power etc?!”. The developers never heard of attack/animation cancelling? I can only imagine how obnoxious this game would be if they put in the protagonist voice acting “I can’t do that right now”. I expect my game characters to perform the action corresponding to the button I press, when I press that button.
And then there are the cheap enemies; stagger, stun and knockdown. Pretty much anything other than a standard blaster bolt will do one of those 3 things. You can completely avoid getting hit by stun guns and stagger is not that bad, but knockdown is terrible. The protagonist can do nothing while knocked down, and still takes full damage. There is a reason that so many older games have invincibility frames while a character is knocked down, and the knockdown state can last several seconds if you get sent far enough. Yelling at your character to “Get the F*** up” is a failure of game design, and I really wish the character could automatically shrug off more (like the auto deflect of blaster bolts) or be able to do something to mitigate knockdown.
Lightsaber combat was weak in general. The protagonist definitely seems more like a mage type. You would think that more enemies would be insta killed by a lightsaber (like how he can cut an AT-ST in half during the cinematic finish), with that being the trade off for closing into melee range during a gun fight. Sometimes it does feel like he is using a toy plastic lightsaber. Bosses tend to be very difficult compared to regular enemies and mini bosses, largely because of how difficult it is to get past their defenses. One in particular (Kazdan) is pretty much immune to lightsaber damage, which is ridiculous. Some other bosses are immune or highly resistant to certain force powers as well. Overall, boss fights were not fun, though they were made even worse due to simon says quick time events. Mini bosses also use quick time events to finish them, but it is optional. The quick time events are not hard, but they have no place whatsoever in video games, and distract from the cinematic. There are also times where you have to mash a button, waggle the sticks back and force and press a button at the right time as a meter goes around in a circle. None of this is fun, and none of it has any place in a video game.
The game is only saved from mediocrity by its Star Wars IP/story, and the cool telekinesis system.
Pro
- Good story and characters; just as good as the movies
- Tutorial where you play as Vader
- New game+
- Optional difficulty levels, which can be changed while playing
- Optional level objectives and collectibles are saved on new game+
- Some replayability to complete all optional content, and get both
endings
- New costume for every level, and can freely change it
- Progression system for upgrading powers, and passive abilities
- Can adjust lightsaber crystal for a unique benefit, and change color
- Force powers are fun to use (especially force grip)
- Some destructible environment
- Character passively deflects blaster bolts
- Using lighting on jetpack troopers is fun
- Boss fight vs a star destroyer is epic
Con
- Camera turn speed is way too slow, even at max setting
- Third person camera is sometimes awkward
- Fixed camera angle during boss fights
- Quick time events for finishing off bosses/mini bosses
- Silly mini games in combat, such as button mashing, waggling stick
back and forth, and rotating quick time like event
- Menu has loading screens; very poorly optimized
- Uses checkpoint saves despite having a manual save option. Manual
save does not save progress in a level, only level ups and secrets
obtained
- Checkpoints are too infrequent in some levels
- Platforming, inexplicably slippery surfaces, and falls to death
- Sometimes get stuck on terrain and have to jump over when it looks
like anyone could just walk past
- Puzzles involving figuring out what force powers to use on the
environment
- Stupid timed puzzle about aligning rotating rings before the death
star fires
- Cheap combat where enemies can easily stunlock you
- Sometimes unresponsive controls, and inability to stop what you are
doing to dodge immediately
- Some bosses are resistant or immune to certain abilities
- Can’t skip cutscenes
- Glitch where maris brood did not spawn, and I had to exit and fight
the skull rancor all over again
- Occasional sound glitches
- Not apparent at the end that there is a choice to make
- Can’t block and move at same time
- Poor enemy AI sometimes; especially when melee and tough enemies fail
to rush you to flush you into the open to be shot at, or just dick
around behind cover
- Lightsaber damage is awfully low
- Uses fighting game style attack combos (and there are too many)
