Final verdict: Shitty game.
Final playtime: Far longer than it deserved.
It has Star Wars in the name, so the chances of this game being good were always in a state of flux. When this game first got announced and the ideas and concepts were revealed, the internet went crazy and I felt like the only guy in the crowd who wasn’t whooping like a Texan’s drunken, inbred cousin.
This game could have been good. It could have been really good. But just as I expected them to, LucasArts dropped the ball and churned out something that’s nothing like what anybody was imagining it would be.
It looks okay I guess, I’ll give it that much, although the cutscenes look terrible. It definitely has some entertaining moments. Throwing people at TIE Fighters? Yeah, that’s fun for a little while. It gets more enjoyable towards the end when you have all your Force powers and you can screw around with things even more than usual, but come on, that’s nothing special and it gets boring. When it comes to gameplay, Force Unleashed is all about cheap thrills, nothing more.
Speaking of cheap thrills, everything in The Force Unleashed can explode. If you can pick something up and throw it, it can almost definitely explode. In some rare cases, things you can pick up might not explode. However, there is a 100% chance that you will throw it at something that does.
The Force Unleashed has some serious Ninja Gaiden 2 vibes. If you’ve never played Ninja Gaiden 2, let me elaborate: The game is hard because it throws far too many enemies at you at once, and they all have knockdown attacks that they can and will use repeatedly and ceaselessly, ensuring that you cannot get up and cannot fight back, meaning you have to sit and watch helplessly for a minute or two until they finally fucking kill you. It also makes sure to keep a bunch of enemies capable of long-ranged attacks off-screen that keep bitching you all the time just to make sure that it’s making you good and angry. That’s right, bitching you. It makes sense, shut up.
The boss fights are often ridiculous and unbelievable and feel completely unrelated to the rest of the game. You will frequently die in Force Unleashed without knowing how in the hell it happened, because nothing visibly touched you or even came within a hundred feet of you. The game is entirely unpolished, which makes it all that much harder to suspend disbelief. For example, during an early boss fight I was hit off a cliff. I landed safely – in thin air. Just laid there for a while, in the air, half way down the cliff, nowhere near any solid wall or floor. I casually stood up and jumped at the cliff face to try finding a way up, but instead hovered against the wall for a while, stuck in the jump animation, sliding left to right until I finally moved back and fell to my death.
Since the story completely shits all over the original Star Wars trilogy, and the game itself is terrible, I can only assume this is LucasArts’ idea of a joke and that the game is non-canon or takes place in an alternate universe. Incidentally, James Earl Jones does not voice Darth Vader in The Force Unleashed, meaning Darth Vader does not sound like Darth Vader, which is fucking weird to listen to.
Final verdict: Shitty game.
Final playtime: Far longer than it deserved.