Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

And I'm done, in just under six hours. The story "picks up" in the latter half of the game, in the sense that there are more cutscenes and exposition - but I really wish it hadn't, as it becomes trite, fanservicey "Oh look it's stuff you know from Star Wars!" garbage. The game's big revelation could have been at least good, if only the writing and direction weren't terrible, but it still suffers from one of the same flaws as the prequel trilogy: instead of writing new, legitimately interesting stuff, all it really does is lazily tie together existing endpoints in the established franchise. Which is a shame, because several ideas brought up in the game (Starkiller's conflict, General Kota's character, a droid scrap planet, Cloud City pre-Lando) could actually be pretty cool if properly utilized.

Anyway. The final mission is a little harder than it probably should be, but the combat stays fun all throughout, even for particularly irritating enemies (who fly, or throw thermal detonators, or are AT-STs, etc). I will say that no previous Wii game has made me this frustrated with occasional motion-control insensitivity. But by and large, it works well enough. The level design is pretty tired - environments are heavily recycled, and in fact one particular level is re-used for three different missions. As much as this bothered me during cutscenes though, while I was actually playing the game, I was paying too much attention to the enemies to bother caring about the levels very much.

Unlike many modern beat-em-up style games (and, as far as I've heard, unlike the Xbox 360/PS3 versions of Force Unleashed) this game actually challenges you to use more than just a basic one-two punch to defeat your enemies. Granted, there were some complicated combos that I still hadn't used by the end of the game, but I feel like I got great mileage from creative sequences of Force pushes, Force lightning, lightsaber throws, and so on. Executing Stormtroopers through liberal usage of these powers really made me feel like I was, if you'll forgive me, unleashing the Force.

Replay value: your customization options are as shallow - very - as the characters, and though the game has two endings, which one you get is decided entirely by a completely obvious choice in the final boss battle (incidentally, while the "bad" ending is terrible, the "good" ending is actually pretty bad too). After beating the game you can play through it again with your current stats and Force points, although why you would care to do this is an open question. You can also collect more Jedi Holocrons, which unlock concept art you can view in the pre-mission menu... but again, I have trouble caring about this.

Ultimately, Force Unleashed (the Wii version at least) falls short in virtually every area except controls/gameplay. Which is good, since it is a video game after all, but even this victory is sullied somewhat by the game's incredible shortness. Anyway, pretty good for a Star Wars game.

Progress: Complete