The Critics 'Unleashed'
Reviewers say "Pass," I say "Kick @$$"
Somewhere, high atop a dark, single windowed tower, the Games Press sat in their glowing throne as Lucasarts stood shackled in front of them.
From beneath a hood, a raspy voice hissed out, "Every game that has been popular has become so according to our design. Your game, releasing down there on every console, is walking into a trap. It was we who allowed the gaming community to become excited about your efforts. They are quite safe from your pitiful little game. An entire legion of my most cynical critics awaits it."
Fear now visible in the face of Lucasarts, the Games Press grinned a yellow toothed smile and continued.
"Oh, I'm afraid our nitpicking will be quite operational when your game arrives."
So maybe I'm being overly harsh of our beloved paid industry pundits, but I have to wonder whether they all began reviewing "The Force Unleashed," and then suddenly looked down to find a dull ax lying at their feet and decided it was well over due for a grinding. When I hear such quotes as "too easy" and "uncomplicated" as criticisms, I have to wonder whether the definition of a good game has suddenly changed. Apparently "fun to play" is too mundane. If a game doesn't change your perspective on life as we know it, it has somehow "missed the mark." Allow me to respectfully and collectively disagree.
If you have thumbs and console, you should play "The Force Unleashed." I'm not saying it's the best game ever made, or even the best game I've played this year; it's just ridiculously fun to play. Whether it's the new canon story, the stunning graphics, the realistic materials modeling, or the endless fun of throwing rag doll stormtroopers to their death, there will be something about this game that is guaranteed to be new and unique experience.
The game places you in control of Darth Vader's secret Sith apprentice just prior to the events of the A New Hope. The story overall is passable for a Star Wars story and does fill in some gaps leading up to Lucas' original Sci-Fi masterpiece, but it's still a Star Wars story, which should be sufficient enough of a clue as to its artistic merit. Needless to say, the real appeal is in the games addictive gameplay.
Critics must have lost their imaginations. Calling the force grip mechanic repetitive is like calling the human arm repetitive because all it can do is pick stuff up, and picking stuff up gets old after the first few times. I think one of the strengths of "Unleashed" is the variety of things you can do with the game's core force mechanic. You can pick up a trooper and throw him in any direction, dangle him over cliff and drop him, smack him into his friends, impale him with lightsaber toss, hit him with a force push, zap him with lightning and toss him like a grenade, and on and on. I never tired of inventing new ways to dispose of baddies, and even to the very end of the game I still found myself grinning manically whenever I collided an unsuspecting trooper with the ceiling directly above him. No other game even comes close to pulling off the "moving/tossing stuff" mechanic in either fun or function like "Unleashed."
"Unleashed" is also the first Lucasarts game to employ "Digital Molecular Mechanics" which allows the environment to destruct and contort according to approximated real world materials physics. The wood splinters like wood, the steel bends like steel, the big jelly mushrooms jiggle like big jelly mushrooms, the snozberries even taste like snozberries (If you didn't get that one, I weep for you). Ok, so I'm exaggerating a bit, but the first time you bend open an enormous blast door, you will understand why every game in the future needs to use DMM. And while it's fair to say that "Unleashed" doesn't play up the feature as much as it could have, this is groundbreaking (quite literally) territory for game mechanics.
As much as I want to stay away from the negatives, I would be sacrificing my objectivity to say there aren't some unpolished spots on "Unleashed." The game is bit short, environments do tend to get reused, the quicktime events distract from enjoying the "finisher" mechanic, pulling down a star destroyer is not as cool as advertised (get rid of tie fighters and it's perfect), and you might get stuck in a physics glitch or two. But bearing in mind that no game is perfect, excepting Portal, the pure amount of good, wholesome, trooper-tossing fun far outweighs the game's occasional drift into the dark side of design.
I will admit that game may not have lasting appeal for those who don't care to seek out every extra lightsaber crystal and jedi robe, and therefore "Unleashed" may be more of a "rent" than a "buy." But however you choose to acquire "Unleashed" (as long as it isn't "steal"), you owe it to yourself and Lucasarts to play the best Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic. You, like Vader, deserve to look on this one "with your own eyes."
Dustin Anglin
Reader Comments (1)
I played through this game in about 7 hours total on the medium difficulty. I thought it was fun for a Star Wars game, but it just seemed a bit unrefined. The game had several annoying bits about it. The combat was extremely easy up until the last fight, and after I learned there was a block button, Vader went down quickly. Oh, that Vader fight pissed me off. Giving a boss unblockable attacks isn't increasing the difficulty, it just turns your life meter into a timed event. At least make the fight interesting with varying attacks and ways to dodge or block them.
The floors were not perfect, as in, I fell through them several times and was flying in space at the bottom, so I basically had to reset the game and because of that. I understand that the Deathstar is under construction and all, but it would seem to me that floors should be a top priority when trying to conduct massive melee fights.
I tried going through the game on Sith Master, but I was disappointed that I had to start all over again. It seems kinda stupid to go through the game once and then not be able to continue the same file on the next difficulty. Instead it just starts you at the beginning. No stage select, etc, so if you missed something along the way, you have to play up to that stage. Also, I spent a good chunk of time searching for all those holocrons that give you different skins and saber colors, and I wanted to use them on the next difficulty. It seems silly to me to have the badass looking black saber at the very end of the game if you can't use it on the next difficulty. Sure, removing the powers and lightsaber buffs makes sense, to avoid having an advantage, but the shiney things are soooo cool! It was great running around in a gimpsuit beating down stormtroopers with a purple lightsaber. You never see that in the Star Wars movies.
Another thing that irks me is that there are no statistic files in this game. They list the stuff you killed at the end, but don't bother to let you go back and say "Oh wow, I raped 1600 wookies! Go me!". In a game with achievements heavily based on kills and kill methods, it would seem to me that this is the kind of info a player would naturally want. We know the game actually does track this info, but it will not display it to the user. Hell, it doesn't even combine it for all save files, so if you want the "kill X 500 times with X" achievements, you have to do them all on the same file, which to me just seems lazy. Every other game out there has something of a stats page because it's probably one of the easiest things to do. I can go back to Mario Kart and tell you how fast I completed DK's Monkey Love Jungle track in about 5 minutes, or I could go load up Too Human and tell you how many kills of each type of enemy I have. I don't think it's too much to ask that they make a simple "Stats" option at the main menu, but then again they didn't spend 4 years developing this game.
It's a fun game, don't get me wrong, it just seems like it was pushed out a bit early to make it in time for the holiday shopping season. (Just like Warhammer, Wrath of the Litch King, and dozens of others)