Review: "The Force Unleashed"

If you like Star Wars alot, play this game, if not, it would be a more buggy and disappointing version of the God of War series. Being the former, I am able to look past the shortcomings of this game. Barely.

You play the secret apprentice of the Dark Lord Vadar, secret even to the Emperor himself. Together, both of you secretly plan to overrun the Empire. That is the basic gist of the game. You start off as Lord Vadar himself, slicing through hundreds of wookies (or stormtroopers if you like) and abusing his vast force energy and powers. From the very start, you begin the see two problems with the game: camera and the fact that your lightsaber is a giant glowy rubber bat. I take back my word on 'slicing wookies'...it should've been 'batting wookies off the screen'. Still, despite this, batting people away is amusing, so is flinging them off platforms.

Your character is this son of a long dead Jedi killed by Darth Vadar. As you progress through the game, you will gain either yellow, red or blue points (forget the specific names, I know blue = force, red = combos and yellow = stats). So there are 3 different tables, namely yellow, red and blue, for you to spend your respectively-colored points. Yellow points affect your total force power, regen, health, etc. Red improves your combat skills (via new combos and such) and blue is your force abilities (push, lightning, etc). It works just like the previous Jedi Knight series.

One gripe about this game that most people find irritating is the lack of invulnerability time at certain animations like getting up from the ground. In fact, the game has no invulnerability time for your character. When he gets knocked down, while getting up, he will still take damage from all the enemies smacking you as well as random rockets from off the screen. You can always try to 'tech' out before you fall, pushing away some enemies for a short distance, but there isn't even invul time for that so you still can get knocked down AGAIN by some random rocket while in the teching animation. Sometimes, a simple knockdown in the heat of the battle might just cost you the game.

Gameplay feel is pretty much the same as most of your hack and slash games. It mostly follows the cinematic style of God of War. The game feels edgy and stiff sometimes, as if something unintended is going to happen soon but it didn't. I managed to get myself under the terrain once but even so, it's hard to reproduce it. Still, it's fun because it's Star Wars.

Graphics are meh. Nothing much to comment other than it is very Star War-ish. As for the OST...it's Star Wars.

All in all, the main thing going for this game is its IP. Without it, it will be just another God of War wannabe clone and shelfed off to one corner of the world. Then again, in GoW, you don't get telekinetic powers.