Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was a sort of God Of War style beat-em-up Star Wars game released for all consoles in 2008. The Ultimate Sith Edition, which included all the DLC, was released a year later exclusively for PC and Mac. A few years before the events of A New Hope, the galaxy is on the brink of civil war! The evil galactic empire is ruling over the galaxy with an iron fist while very small rebellions happen on a few planets. Darth Vader takes on a secret apprentice, Galen Marek, AKA Deak Starkiller, to kill any remaining Jedi, stop the small rebellions, and to help him overthrow The Emperor! At first, things are going great! Starkiller kills (or at least badly wounds) a few Jedi and the small rebellions are making no progress! However, The Emperor soon finds out about Vader's apprentice and orders Vader to kill him, which he tries to do, but Starkiller survives. Vader orders him to start up a larger rebellion, one to rival the empire, to distract The Emperor so Vader could make a more elaborate plan to kill him. Can Starkiller, PROXY, Juno Eclipse, General Kota, Bail Organa, Princess Leia, and many more succeed in this rebellion, or is it all a trap? Play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to find out.
This game got positive reviews when it came out, and all the critics and gamers alike praised this game for its story, which is now non-canon and replaced with the Star Wars Rebels animated series and possibly the upcoming Rogue One movie. However, despite the good critical and audience reception, I just don't get it. In my opinion, this game is okay at best. It's not bad! It's just okay! Let me start with the positives. This game has some great voice acting, coming from the original characters anyway. The characters that are actually from the movies sound almost NOTHING like themselves that it's almost hilarious. I had the same problem with the The Clone Wars animated series. Great show, but by God, what happened with the voice acting?? Anyway, I'm getting off topic. This game has a great soundtrack, but maybe that's because it just reuses John Williams pieces from the movies. I used to get really mad about that, but then I played Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, and those games reuse movie songs too. Most Star Wars games do, with a couple of original tracks mixed in to keep things fresh, so I really can't get that mad anymore. This game also has some very creative level design. There is a part of the game where you go INSIDE a Sarlacc, and the finale of the game is set INSIDE one of the Death Star's turbolaser shafts! Awesome! The graphics look pretty good too. Other than that though, there isn't much good I can say about this game. The gameplay is really repetitive, and every attack propels you forward so that results in a lot of cheap deaths if you fall down a hole, or something. The controls work really well and the combat is really satisfying most of the time, if not a little bit clunky, but during boss battles the controls get all weird and really clunky! I don't really know how to describe it, but it sucks! The camera stops following you and zooms out to a fixed position, and that just really throws you off! The quicktime events during the boss battles can also go &$@?! right off! The story I thought was not good, it was really predictable and uninteresting (And pretty disrespectful to the original trilogy!). And speaking of uninteresting, I couldn't care LESS about the characters! Starkiller is a really punchable character! He's trying to be all "cool" and "#2edgy", but then during the cutscenes he constantly has these big puppy dog eyes and you want to give him a nice smack! And if you get the bad ending, he gets even more "cool" and "edgy" and that is not a good thing. I also refuse to believe that it was THIS GUY who started the REBEL ALLIANCE!!!!!!!! The other characters aren't any better. Juno is just a generic love interest, absolutely nothing more, Kota I barely remember at all, and I completely don't remember any of the other characters! Even the characters from the movies aren't interesting! The only character in this game that I sorta liked was Starkiller's droid, PROXY, but even then, his mere existence and primary functions raise more questions than they answer! He can create these perfectly realistic holograms of people, but at this time, holograms were still all blue and crackly! Holograms wouldn't get that good until the time of The Force Awakens! How is it possible for this droid to exist?? I know it's nitpicking, and irrelevant in the big picture since this is non-canon, but still! It makes no sense! This game is also really short, only about 8 hours. It's about 10-11 hours if you include the DLC, but that's it. I got this game dirt-cheap during a May The Fouth sale last year, so I don't feel ripped off or anything, but the regular price for this game is $23! For $12, you could get Knights Of The Old Republic, and that game lasts 22+ hours! You aren't really getting your money's worth if you pay full price. Overall, despite all that I didn't like about this game, I still had a lot of fun with it. Do I recommend it? Yes, but ONLY if you get it during a sale. Then you won't feel ripped off! I'd recommend it for ages 11 and up. The game is pretty much the most violent that Star Wars gets and some female characters don't wear much. I'd give this game a good old 3 out of 5 stars. Just take it for what it's worth.
Have you played Star Wars: The Force Unleashed? What did you think of it? Tell me in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment