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Star Wars Force Unleashed

Star Wars Force Unleashed




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Star.Wars.Force.Unleashed.Ultimate.Sith.Edition-RELOADED

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Star Wars Force Unleashed Reviews

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Review

Does LucasArts deliver on years of hype and promise?

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September 15, 2008 - It's been a long, long time since we've seen a good action-based Star Wars game hit consoles. Raven did the PC right with a handful of Jedi Knight titles, but console gamers have been left out in the cold on Hoth for many years now. LucasArts hopes to change all that with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a game that's been hyped not solely on its license and story, but its technology as well. Featuring such technical buzzwords as Digital Molecular Matter and naturalmotion's Euphoria engine, the game has brought a ton of promise to the table.

Does it deliver? Yes and no. It does enough things right, especially with regards to giving players the ability to wield the Force like we've never seen before, to make it a play-worthy effort for Star Wars fans everywhere, but it does so with a number of missteps that won't easily be overlooked.


The game's story takes place between Episodes III and IV (or the new and old trilogy for you number-phobic readers out there), though much closer in the timeline to A New Hope than Revenge of the Sith. It's hard to talk about exactly why without spoiling anything, but I'll just say that the tale does a very good job of tying the two trilogies together and nicely sets up the current state of everything that you see in A New Hope. Kudos to the team for crafting a story that not only extends the fiction, but in a few small ways even expands upon the existing content.

The Force Unleashed is built around giving players the ability to, as the name perfectly implies, unleash the Force. This is a version of the Force that really hasn't been seen anywhere before, with over-the-top uses of things like Force Push. When you go to push a stormtrooper away from you, he won't just fall over, he'll fly. You can Force Grip soldiers and toss them into oncoming TIE fighters, stab someone with a nicely tossed lightsaber that happens to be electrified for extra coolness, or use a good old bit of Force Repulse to shove a group of soldiers away from you and off the side of a suspended bridge (which will also result in the bridge buckling from the blast).

When you first take control of Vader's secret apprentice, he's already pretty powerful with Force Push and Force Grip in his repertoire. But by the time you reach the end of the game, he's incredibly powerful. Stormtroopers that previously took a few swipes of a lightsaber to down now hit the floor in one swoop, and your Force powers will recharge quickly for repeated use. Being able to Force Push one guy off a ledge, electrify the guy next to him, slice down a third trooper and then Force Repulse all of their bodies off your standing within a couple seconds is flat-out awesome.

Using the Force powers is definitely the highlight of the game.
Much of what helps this progression is the leveling system in place in the game. For every person you dispense of (read: slaughter), you'll earn a handful of experience points, and when you've earned enough, you'll gain a level. Each level will reward you with one each of three upgrade points to assign, one for Force powers, one for combos, and one for "overall" stuff, like health or defensive abilities. Each level has a number of hidden Jedi Holocrons to find as well, some of which will give you a nice package of experience points, while others cut to the chase and give you a full point to spend on one of your abilities.

The cool thing here is that though I had found a good number of the hidden Holocrons in the game (I'd wager a guess that I snatched about 80% of them), I wasn't even close to maxing out all of my character's skills. So, while I spent most of my overall skill points on lightsaber damage and health attributes (like lowering the damage I took and increasing the amount of health I'd get from fallen enemies), other players may choose to decrease the amount of time that it takes for their Force meter to recharge, or lessen the cost of using a Force power. I'm a big fan of games that allow me to customize my play experience to what I like, and The Force Unleashed helped do that a fair bit. One downside to the implementation of this system is that the game kicks to a loading pause whenever you want to go to the upgrade screen, or even just the general options, which meant that I usually waited a while to rack up lots of upgrade points out of impatience before actually purchasing any upgrades.