The Sith were always cooler.
Indeed I decided to look back on some old star wars games, the ones that reminded me that this franchise isn’t dead just yet. Strangely enough I hadn’t played the Force Unleashed before as I knew the reputation Star Wars games had (with the only exception being the Battlefront series). As a result of this I decided to have a playthrough of this game and see if this would be the game that would make the Sith the true badasses they were.
The story is rather strange, you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice known as ‘Starkiller’ who acts as Vader’s assassin and is sent out to hunt down the remaining few Jedi. The game is set between the timelines of the prequels and the original trilogy and acts to link them together rather well. The story unfolds as you are introduced to your crew, your eyecandy pilot and psychopathic robot companion. The story is actually more enjoyable to watch than the prequels and that is mainly thanks to Starkiller’s vulerable yet badass character development, he is probably one of my favourite characters in the Star Wars universe.
Our badass of the day, Starkiller.
The game looks pretty decent for what it is. The environments are varied and each new planet you visit feels distinctly unique from the last, thanks in no part to the difference in both enemies and challenges you must face. The soundtrack however is the real clincher, the perfect soundtrack with original Star Wars sound effects and orchestrated pieces playing accordingly when needed. It helps to make the game feel just that little bit more like a Star Wars game rather than just some god game, that is unless it isn’t bugging out.
The gameplay itself could be considered a mix of God of War and the Star Wars universe, which is no bad thing. Starkiller is not only agile and adept but is ungodly amounts of strong. The force really is put into perspective as an all powerful, impossible to stop thing in this game. You can use traditional lightsaber attacks on your enemies or you can pick them up, throw them across the room, pick them up again, zap them with lightning, throw another enemy into them and then finish him off by slamming a power generator onto his head. The game even rewards you with more flashy kills, granting you more force points to upgrade your skills and abilities. This however is where some of the main problems seem to occur with the game that ultimately brings it down the the level of mediocrity.
Yeah… you really are this powerful.
The main problem this game faces is polish. I played the PC version, ultimate sith edition, and the controls were… well… awful. WASD doesn’t work with movement that needs to be this precise, especially on the boss fights in which the camera is fixed and you have to judge exactly how to use the controls to move even diagonally. This also affects the main force power you use in the game, Force Grip, in which you can lift up an individual object and throw it at enemies. The problem with this power is that grabbing the object you want is difficult and throwing it where you want to is even harder due to the complete lack of proper control, the game seems to judge where you want it to go for you. Sure there might be a giant robotic purge trooper ready to fire a rocket launcher at you but that piece of wall looks extremely menacing, I think i’ll throw this giant piece of metal at that instead. The other problem the game faces is the camera itself. You can’t get full control over it and sometimes you wish you could. Objects become slightly out of reach, enemies seem to appear out of nowhere and you can’t focus on the enemy you want because the camera seems to form an emotional attachment with a random Jawa somewhere off in the distance. Quick time events are also a thing in this game, during many boss fights in order to finish them off you need to do a quick time event. It’s cheap and it takes away from the spectacle of you actually killing your enemy because you’re paying too much attention to the button prompts. Finally the game is extremely buggy for when I played it. Music would sometimes fail to actually start, enemies seem to glitch in and out of scenery, even one of the downloadable missions I had crashed my PC whenever I tried to play it! I don’t know if this is just a bad PC port or not but it has salted my view on the game as a whole.
Overall then, a bit of a mixed bag. Sure you might feel like a badass Sith destroying all in your path in one minute. But in another you are fighting with the camera and dodgy controls in order to show that you are the one playing the game rather than the game wanting to just fight the enemies that it wants to. If you can get the game cheap and you are a Star Wars fan then take a look, but otherwise leave this one to rot with the remains of the Empire.
Jinx The Game Critic (Archive) 