After the Star Wars prequel trilogy finished in 2005, the production of new Star Wars films went into a relatively brief (and possibly final) break. There was no end of ‘80s and ‘90s precedent to carry on making Star Wars video games regardless, finding new genres and new gaps in the story to fill with them. In fact, a reversion to making games without having to tie them into current films was probably a more comfortable position for developers. It’s not like the prequels had produced any classic Star Wars games, Star Wars Episode I: Racer being the unlikely closest thing to an exception.
The Force Unleashed finds its story gap by positioning itself between the prequels and the original trilogy. As for the genre idea, it sets out its appeal early by giving you control of Darth Vader in its prologue. You don’t just get to loom ominously and cut a swathe through a jungle and its inhabitants with a light sabre, but to use the force to magically shove them further out of your way. The appeal is in the raw, frenzied destruction available through embracing the dark side, not just setting it up as an equal opposite to an established light side in TIE Fighter style, but giving it its own unique character.
You control Starkiller, Darth Vader’s apprentice, rather than the man himself for most of the game, but the concept remains in place. It’s a game where you fight with a light sabre and it isn’t the most enjoyable bit, which is something in itself. As you look around, some objects have a blue targeting reticule appear on them. Press the trigger on the controller and you can lift them up with the power of the force, move them around and, with a push of the control stick and a release, send them flying.
Take out distant enemies with flung barrels, their demise confirmed through messages about crush bonuses. Charge your telekenesised objects with force lightning to rain down even more destruction. Lift up pesky enemies and fling their pathetic twitching rag doll bodies into each other. Your health recharges with each slain foe, their bodies just so much meat to be bent to your will until a nourishing death. It’s forceful and disturbing. That’s quite the unique angle, but the time when major game could explore a unique angle and be done with that had largely passed. The Force Unleashed has a lot more to it, and it’s not generally for the better.
The increasingly typical radio link guidance isn’t too bad, but other functions are less effective. The complex mechanisms of experience and skill upgrades granting new combos feel needlessly convoluted when none of the other aspects of combat ever catch up with flinging stuff around. Sometimes the problems are even more basic. Many times I tried to drop down vertical distances which had previously been perfectly allowable, only to find that because it wasn’t the way the game wanted me to go at that point, it meant instant death and being kicked back to a checkpoint to repeat some tough combat. The shoddiness even flows through to the awful spacing in the trademark Star Wars text crawl at the beginning. At times, as the game throws sequences of pointless contrivances things at you, it feels all too much like the game of Revenge of the Sith, or just any movie game without the confidence in its own mechanics. Which is bizarre for a game with such a cool central mechanic.
It’s not just mechanically that the game doesn’t follow through with confidence on its most compelling aspects, though. Narratively, the story is eventually one of redemption (with the typical out if the player wants to stay bad at the last minute), which after all of that earlier meat-flinging leads to a particularly strong feeling of trying to have cake and eat it. That’s not helped by the knowledge that downloadable content for the game and its sequel allowed the player to go full dark side throughout. That at least might feel more honest than trying to triangulate around making evil fun.
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