Before we get to tallying up all that's good, meh, and just plain crummy about LucasArts' milieu-mashing Star Wars The Force Unleashed, let's recap a couple of interesting did-ya-know developments. First, the novelization of the game by Sean Williams debuted spectacularly at #1 on the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Didn't realize there was a novelization? Neither did I, so there you go.
Second, I was in a bookstore yesterday browsing the endcaps (the hip retailer term for the merchandize highlighted on the row ends) and ran headfirst into (a) the graphic novel adaptation, (b) the official game guide, (c) a slew of other Star Wars paraphernalia, and (d) the art-and-making-of coffee table companion. 'D' is amazing, incidentally, packed with concept art and heaps of background material that make this feel less like a game than Star Wars Episode 3.5 (where it fall, chronologically speaking). There's even a forward by Hayden Christensen, for those of you who enjoyed his performance in the prequels (i.e. under a certain age and female). "If the game is as good as this book, we're all in for a treat," reads the subject line of one Amazon review. Well the game isn't -- more on that in a moment -- but the book's pretty stunning, and if you're intrigued by the story about Darth Vaders super-secret apprentice, possible worth the $20 it's asking on sale.
Google shop 'The Force Unleashed' and you'll unearth specialty action figures, a deluxe lightsaber (thank you Hasbro), the audiobook adaptation, a supplemental campaign guide for the official Star Wars Roleplaying Game, and a booster for the Star Wars CMG (collectible miniatures game). Factor in a massive multi-platform launch that includes versions for the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, Nintendo DS (and if the rumor mill's right, eventually the PC). Couple that with a mobile push for the iPhone, N-Gage, and various unspecified java-equipped others.
Then realize, therefore, that Star Wars The Force Unleashed is not a video game so much as a force of nature. If it were a hurricane, probably a Category 5.
How's the actual game then?
In two words, "not bad."
In ten, "initially dull, eventually much better, and cumulatively, a trifle disappointing."
If you've played the downloadable demo, you know that The Force Unleashed is a third-person action game in which you play as Darth Vader's apprentice (unsubtly dubbed 'Starkiller') and get to blast the bejesus out of your surroundings using "dark side" force powers. For the Star Wars uninitiated (all two or three of you) that means lightning bolts, choke holds, grabs and throws, and all sorts of other telekinetic kung fu. If the last few Star Wars flicks felt a little Wachowski-influenced in terms of the fancy footwork and wire-enabled acrobatics, The Force Unleashed is like the apotheosis of Yuen Woo Ping and Firestarter. Think Neo meets Palpatine meets power levels on the order of Galactus (or near enough). If you've always wondered what it might be like to suck a miles-long star destroyer out of the stratosphere with clenched fists and some good-ol'-fashioned grimacing, for instance, here's your game.
Otherwise The Force Unleashed is a surprisingly brief jaunt through a dozen just as surprisingly short levels where you're knocking around Star Wars standbys who tend to charge you like metal fillings sucked toward a lodestone. Special powers you'll piece together along the way increase the number of force moves you can use to dispatch enemies who run the gamut from wookies and jawas to rancors and stormtroopers. Those power also occasionally factor toward solving light logic puzzles, e.g. recharge three generators, sabotage seven pylons, and so on. It's the same old "find the red key, then the blue key" gameplay, of course, swathed in telekinetic trickery that lets you nominally interact with your target points. At the end of each level, you'll fight something big or flashy, be it a rogue jedi or AT-ST or spiny bull rancor.
All the Star Wars tropes are present and accounted for. The grumpy anti-hero, the comic relief droid (this time a droll tagalong whose prime directive is trying to kill you repeatedly). There's the male-female sexual tension with the girl who went bad thanks to dodgy parenting, the traveling to seedy backwater planets to find elusive zen masters, the bad-guy-grows-a-conscience arc, and most importantly, the sense that what you're up to is The Most Important Thing That's Ever Happened (but no one knew about!) in The Franchise's History. Call it the price of "zero to hero" gameplay -- consistency notwithstanding -- I guess.
The opening level (also the only time you'll play as Darth Vader) establishes the fact that you're destined to be The Baddest Sith On The Block, with bridge-blasting, rock-slinging powers that encourage you to sit back and hammer out force combos and watch things crumble magnificently around you. The game looks great, for what it's worth, melding high-resolution environments with a kind of "color-pencilled" concept art look to backdrops and intermediary cutscenes that's refreshingly original. The junk planet you get to visit twice is particularly striking, with its eerie multitudes of debris floating and swirling against a sky cast in flickering pumpkin-orange hues.
The ballyhooed physics are pretty impressive as well. They're not as interwoven or comprehensive as those found in Crysis, but then you couldn't hurl boulders or sweep apart entire buildings with a single wave of your hand in that game either. You're baited with a taste of the pandemonium you'll get to unleash during the tutorial, playing as Darth Vader and strutting down swaying treetop bridges and rippling their planks while snatching wookies and hurling them howling into oblivion. That's also more or less what you do for the remainder of the game once you get control of Starkiller. That is, "grab and toss."
It's a problem, then, that the "grabbing" interface is so dismally implemented. To target something, you "aim" at it with the camera, but since you don't have a pointing reticule or a way to tell what you're zeroed on, you're always winging it. It's hard enough honing in on rocks or bits of debris you want to bounce off a single opponent, but it's a total disaster when the enemies and objects pile up, which happens to be most of the time. You'll often reach for an object in a pinch and come up with nothing, or try to grab some stormtrooper behind a cannon but snag an innocuous piece of nearby debris instead. This ratchets up from annoying to infuriating in the game's later levels, like the one in which you're trying to pull down the star destroyer: You're firing lightning bolts and grabbing blindly to scuttle swooping tie fighters between intervals in which you have to twist the destroyer out of the sky -- if you can't knock them down fast enough, you can't make inroads on the star destroyer before another wave comes a-shootin', snarling you in an exasperating Catch-22.
Other minor issues accumulate to hobble the experience. The jump controls are too sensitive and animate too quickly, making it difficult to control where you land (and easy to land badly). The analog panning speed feels sluggish by default but can't be adjusted. The load times (on the PS3 version, anyway) are simply atrocious, and not just that, you have to sit through a loading screen for nearly every single menu option -- yes, the game has databanks of data to plumb and oodles of force abilities to tweak, but you'll be discouraged from dawdling for all the time it takes to navigate around. And the game inexplicably crashed on me twice -- once while in the middle of a timed-button sequence (hit the right button as it pops up onscreen to polish off major one-on-one battles) and once again while loading between levels. Chalk the first up to entropy, but twice is disturbing.
The two most disappointing elements? The levels dwindle in size and complexity as you progress, and since there's no multiplayer mode, the game's replay value is limited to replaying levels to complete bonus objectives, like scrounging up jedi holocrons that help you raise your remaining force powers. Toward the end, you're effectively tossed into huge rooms thronged with enemies like storm-troopers + super-storm-troopers + AT-STs all attacking simultaneously in an orgy of pyrotechnics. Star Wars WWF, in other words, which is well and good as long as you don't mind dying a lot, and -- since the targeting and jumping controls are so wishy-washy -- only winning through by the skin of your teeth.
Now if you count yourself among the Star Wars faithful -- even if you're clear-headed enough to acknowledge that Episodes 1 through 3 were a mess -- you'll probably have a better than average time with The Force Unleashed. It's a little out there in terms of its gonzo interpretation of The Force, but it feels a lot more like old-school Lucas than new-school kid-in-a-CGI-candy-store. There's definitely a wish-fulfillment factor to a Star Wars game that lets you grab metal pylons and twist them into protective umbrellas against molten rain on a gorgeously wrought junk planet populated by weird creatures spawned from rubbish, or where you can charge your lightsaber with crackling force-lightning before wading into a sea of enemies who can be bowled over like tenpins by a well-aimed boulder.
I guess the bottom line for me, with all the game's small but cumulative blemishes, is that it's difficult for many of the wrong reasons, as well as too brief to earn the sixty bucks LucasArts is asking if you're looking at the 360 or PS3 versions. I hesitate to say wait for early adopters to flood the used market, but unless you're really into the Star Wars thing, it's not quite the breakout game experience LucasArts trumpeted, and which its parallel product blitz suggests it should have been.
