Have you tried the little 8-hour romp that is The Force Unleashed yet? After literally years of teasers, the game has been…ahem…unleashed upon the Star Wars gaming public. Trouble is, there’s not a whole lot to it…certainly not enough to warrant the tremendous amount of hype and the late delivery.
I should begin by saying that I played through the PS2 version. I’m not quite ready to go next-gen but I was curious enough about the game to give the PS2 one more ride around the block. For an out-of-date console, this version plays very well albeit differently from the eye-candified Xbox and PS3 versions. More on that later.
The best thing about the game is its story. While it wouldn’t qualify as a literary masterpiece, the story here is inventive (moreso than most of the prequels) and it helps fill in the gaps between episodes III and IV. We get to see quite a bit more information on the birth of the rebel alliance which is interesting.
The gameplay is adequate even though it’s extremely derivative of the God of War games. Wait…not derivative…more of a direct copy. The only thing they didn’t copy is the ease of control and the excellent camera in GOW. The controls here are a bit clunky and the camera disorients you at every turn during big boss battles. The one improvement they made over the GOW scheme is when you have to respond the the “X”, Triangle, Square, Etc. prompts onscreen. They actually place the prompts relative to their positions on the controller which makes it easier to respond to (for me anyway).
The biggest problem here is that there’s a tremendous amount of reuse for an 8-hour game. You revisit some environments multiple times and they just aren’t that interesting. Maybe I’ve just played too many Star Wars games, but I found the level design for this game to be repetitive and boring. This is what we waited years for??? In fact the game as a whole is repetitive and boring. Force upgrades are almost completely unnecessary to win the game. The Jedi holocrons don’t open up anything useful. The saber customization has little effect. And the boss fights are some of the longest, most repetitive battles I’ve ever encountered in a video game. You know what that is? It’s sloppy! it’s lazy! It’s just plain bad game design!
I could go on but I think you probably get my point. I believe the PS2 and Wii versions of the game show the true gameplay flaws because they strip away much of the gorgeous visuals and you’re really just left with a cool story and several hours of work to do. Of course, I could be wrong. The next-gen versions could be much better but I won’t be able to tell you until I find that pot o’ gold at the end of Rambo.
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