CC.com Video Game Review: The Force Unleashed for the PS2
Posted by: Darth Danno 10.15.08 12:01am

The first thing you see when you load the game is an option to play the game in English or French.

That’s never really a good sign. It means that you are playing a snobby game, and snobby games almost never deliver. The starting game interface also screams “Cheap!” There’s something about the oversized font and lack of cool 3D graphics that reminds me of budget PC games. It’s little things like this that annoy me, especially since this game was touted as being so thoroughly developed. When you started Bounty Hunter, at least you had a console interface and an animated, 3-D reflection of Jango Fett staring back at you.

Next up, the loading screen on TFU looks like the opening sequence from the old Dr. Who... it made me hum the theme song.

And am I the only person getting tired of Star Wars games that start with the fanfare and the text scroll? Is it grating on anyone else’s nerves? I think I lost patience for it having to listen to it every ten minutes in Star Wars Lego games (which I would rate higher than TFU).

Give the opening score a rest already.

And stop polluting outer space with boring exposition.

The opening tutorial level, lets you play as Darth Vader raiding an outpost on Kashyyyk. It’s fun enough, but having logged too many hours on Battlefront II, I didn’t feel as though Krome’s Vader was particularly memorable. I kept wanting him to be able to do double-jumps and dashes, but Vader is too laid back to be bothered with such acrobatics. Plus, his cape behaves weird in the PS2 engine. It just kind of flaps up and down. You also learn pretty quick that you can just toss every Wookiee off the tree, which is only satisfying for the first five or six Wookiees or so (this is pretty much the way to get through Bespin quick as well...someone should have given enemies grappling hooks to climb back up). You end this sequence by kidnapping the padawan who will become your apprentice...and it’s time to bust out the popcorn.

The cinema scenes play out very uneven. For starters, they use the PS2 graphics engine, which means everyone looks like scary puppets. Vader’s gesticulations are a little too dramatic, and the voice actors, bless their hearts, just don’t seem to render consistent performances for the characters. One second, the protagonist is the brooding, psychologically-tortured, abject slave of Darth Vader, the next second, he’s a giddy prep school boy falling with the hots for his conveniently busty blonde co-pilot. Next thing you know, he’s a homicidal maniac. It never occurs to this evil, self-loathing, life-hating, force-choking Sith apprentice to say, use his powers to exploit his sexy sidekick. The love story between Juno and the Sith Apprentice is just too contrived to be believable, and the Apprentice’s abrupt transformation from ruthless killing-machine to self-sacrificing Jedi is as burdensome on one’s suspension of disbelief as Anakin’s transformation from Jedi to Sith in Episode III.

The story of this game is so jumpy and choppy that it’s easy to lose track of characters’ motivations. (At the very least, I had a hard time understanding why all the women were running around half-naked. When did Shaak Ti become such a vamp, and why is her new padawan Maris Brood dressed like a skank?) The co-pilot, Juno Eclipse, also progressively loses more clothing throughout the game. It brought back memories of Metroid’s Samus Aaron on the NES.

I suppose the game pretty much expects you to have read the novelizations of the story, which I haven’t, so I left the game feeling everyone was very shallowly scripted. Be warned, however, that the game does try to rewrite history, and there is at least one awkward cameo made especially awkward by the creepy puppet effect of the game’s graphics.

Speaking of creepy puppets, the game had remarkable potential by letting you unlock costumes by finding codes hidden in images of concept art that you pick up in holocrons along the way (or by just finding them all on the Internet). I’m assuming that these costumes are all used for the very cool looking multi-player mode that is exclusive to the Wii. Unfortunately, they are utterly wasted on the PS2 version because 1) there is no multiplayer or even versus mode in this version, and 2) they are only graphical skins (the animation and voice acting remains the same as when you are playing as the Apprentice).

Let me put this more simply.

You unlock the Mara Jade costume.

You get very excited because she is a cool EU character, and also a red-headed babe.

You activate the Mara Jade costume.

You are told that you will no longer be able to view cutscenes (which will certainly disappoint CC.com fans hoping to watch Mara and Juno lock lips on the Death Star in the final sequence).

Worse yet...you discover that Mara walks like a man.

Even more unsettling, Mara talks like a man (even when you play the game in French).

This leads you to the conclusion that Mara Jade must, in fact, be a man.

That being said, the high point of this game has to be playing as a French-speaking Admiral Ackbar that shoots lightning out of his hands.

The game would also be more fun if it allowed some more free-ranging about planets, or even your own ship, and if you could select levels rather than being set out on a forced march approach. The now out-dated Bounty Hunter allowed players to replay any level at any time and even watch the cinema scenes (which were usually rendered in next-gen graphics, unlike TFU).

The game itself is mostly a button-masher, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sure there were all kinds of physics engines thingamabobs that Krome was advertising as it developed this game but you barely even notice it on the PS2 version. There are no clever puzzles to solve. No using force powers to stack crates to reach special areas. Things behave realistically when you Force-push them into each other, which is cool, but you spend the game pretty much doing a bunch of square-square-circles, or circle-circles, or triangle-R1-R1-R1s. The game is a dummed-down rip-off of God of War, as others have noted, from the minimalist mini-boss battles (do amazing feats by just pressing the right button when signaled) to the floating experience point orbs that float around every time you kill something (am I sucking out their souls like some kind of Force vampire?).

To put it more succinctly, if you liked Transformers the Movie: the Game, then you’ll love TFU. Both games are full of glitz and fairly fun on the first time through, but weak when it comes to the extra features that make you love a game.

The programmers claim that the game has infinite replay value do to unique AI and the randomness of the game’s realistic physics. I find this to be thoroughly not true on the PS2. Once you have beaten the game, you have enough Force powers that the second run boils down to just electrocuting or Force pushing everything on screen. Other than the fairly useless costumes, there really isn’t anything worth replaying the game to unlock. It’s hardly worth looking for the lightsaber hilts, since you barely see it in game. It’s kind of neat to change the color of your lightsaber blade, but hardly worth snooping around for hours to do. If the unlockable costumes had been done right (or if there was a versus mode), this game could have had a lot of replay potential. As it is, the game is just a play-along version to go with the novelizations.

The PS2 version boasts a few extra levels, which really don’t make any sense. You return to the Jedi Temple to undergo tests, although it’s not entirely clear if you are fighting holograms of dead or ghosts. In any event, I feel bad for the poor stormtroopers who are guarding the Temple every time you return. I kept waiting for one of them to say, “Oh no, not again!” You’d think that by the third time the Sith apprentice showed up in his spaceship to kill everyone, the stormtroopers would have installed an anti-spacecraft cannon to shoot him down...or, you know, they’d call for back up to destroy the ship while you were inside the Temple. Just sayin’.

Actually, the game is full of accidentally comic moments like this...such as when Vader is conspiring to assassinate Palpatine with his apprentice, only to have the Emperor barge in, leading Vader to abruptly (nigh comically) stab the Apprentice in the back in a Homer-Simpson-Caught-Stealing-Doughnuts fashion. Then there is the scene where the Apprentice actually says, “If I even think about my past, Kota will sense it and know who I am.” One wonders how one can think about not thinking about one’s past without thinking about one’s past. And of course, there is pretty much any time a character tries to look clever, but really just comes off looking like a creepy puppet.

Unless you consider yourself a Star Wars video game collector, the PS2 version of the Force Unleashed is a renter at the $40 price point. I beat it in about seven hours (you can subtract the half hour I spent trying to jump up a wall because I didn’t see the elevator), and I played it the first time through addictively. I would definitely say it is worth a play through, especially for academic reasons if you are a Star Wars fan.

But Star Wars fans are sticklers for the little things. We notice the scuff on the X-wing, or the dent in Boba Fett’s codpiece. These things help to sustain the suspension of disbelief and tell a story. Likewise, we like games that notice the little things, like a level select, an ability to explore, and unlockable characters that don’t make us feel as though we are playing Sith Lords in drag. We also think its annoying to know that all of these cool characters are sitting on our disk, but that we can’t do anything cool with them because that right has been reserved exclusively for owners of another system. We also notice when characters’ mouths don’t move naturally, or when a game doesn’t have well-rendered cutscenes. Had TFU gone that extra mile for the PS2, it would have been a much better, and relivable experience.

The most critical flaw of the PS2 budget version of The Force Unleashed is that it feels more like The Force Unfinished.