Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Pros
- Good story and voice acting
- The visuals are magnificent- I found my self looking outside of Cloud City rather than killing stormtroopers at one point
- When you fight a jedi boss the game switches to a wide-angle pulled-back cinematic camera reminiscent of the duel between Dokku, Obiwan and Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. This is one of the best ways I've seen of taking advantage of the HD screen format and resolution. When you Force push your enemy across the room it really does remind you a lot of the movies.
- Sound track is good- some new themes and old themes are enhanced.
- Even though NPCs appear to have the ability to block your force powers or lightsaber blows, each one of them has a particular weakness you can exploit - so it's not really a problem

Cons
- Locking on to objects is sometimes clumsy- PsiOps did it much better
- A few bugs here and there
- As compared to say Jedi Outcast / Academy it doesn't have as rich a Force upgrade mechanism- mainly because the story doesn't really lend itself to it
- Camera needs to be manually adjusted frequently
- Too short
- There are some frustrating jumping puzzles - especially with a problematic camera

Considering I've been waiting since Jedi Academy for another Star Wars game, and the fact that the average budget for a video game is over $40 Million, spending $60 on a decent Star Wars game seems like a bargain to me. I have no complaints.

Comparison to the Wii version:

- Wii version uses canned Star Wars musical score. Reminds you of playing the old Jedi Power Battles game.
- Wii controls are quite well thought out and does make Force wielding fun.
- But over time the Wii interaction does tend to get fatiguing.
- The visuals between the Wii and PS3 are night and day- including the cutscenes which are rendered using the in-game engine. The Wii's visuals just look really dated/primitive compared to the PS3's. E.g. on the first mission on Kassyk, if you look at what's happening in the background on the PS3, there are stormtroopers on a beach-head in the distance slowly advancing, and shooting and then dying. It's gratuitous but it's beautifully done. None of this made it to the Wii. Of course this is understandable since the Wii is a less capable system.
- Wii provides additional game levels not provided in the PS3 game.
- The Duel Mode on the Wii can only be played with another player, rather than with an AI- too bad.

If you own both the PS3 and Wii, I recommend buying the PS3 version and maybe the Wii version when it goes on sale. TFU is visually the most stunning Star Wars title to-date and missing the opportunity to experience it's full visual splendor would be a shame.

This game is pretty good but could have, and should have been great but as usual they just decided to get too cute. Using the force powers to dangle stormtroopers in the air, throw them around, and hit them with lightning (as seen in the trailers) is lots of fun for a while but that doesn't even come close to making up for all the areas of the game where the designers just thought it would be funny to frustrate the crap out of us. FYI...NOT A LOT OF SITH LORDS SPEND 20 MINUTES TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO CROSS A FREAKING JUNK PILE!!!! Oh and how the hell does a junked robot steal the force energy from me?!! Oh how I dreamed of the day when I could become a sith lord and fight a giant junk robot and spend a solid hour doing stupid jump puzzles and falling into lava. Why? Why do people think it's funny to frustrate us? The game has a great storyline,almost as good as KOTOR, but that doesn't make up for the glitches and frustrations. After not even 3 days of owning it, I beat the game despite the frustrations and glitches, that tells me they were a little short on content for it to have been hyped for so long.Don't misunderstand, this is a must have for any Star Wats fan, but it is not worth the 59.99 price tag and doesn't live up to the hype. Wait for the price to drop to at least 39.99 and then get it.

I'm a sucker for all things Star Wars, so I really wanted to love this game. I'd enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic and this was just going to be the same thing, only better, right? Nope.

This game is set in the Star Wars setting we all know and love, and the visual and audio effects for the lightsabers are fantastic, but the gameplay element of the game is absolutely atrocious. It's a bad game, with hideous camera and controls problems that suck all the fun out of playing. You spend more time wrestling the controls than you do slicing and dicing stormtroopers.

First off: targeting. Unbelievably, this game is worse at targeting than Zelda for the N64. Yes, it's that bad. You have no way to control what you are targeting other than facing towards it. No 'cycle through targets' button as is common in other games. This leads to the very common situation of you wanting to force grab or force choke an enemy right in front of you, but the game decides that really you wanted to pick up a box behind the stormtrooper on the complete opposite side of the room.

Dodging: Also worse than in Zelda. It's so bad that it's almost unmanageable. In order to dodge, you have to have an enemy targeted, much like Zelda. However, instead of simply 'locking on', you have to hold down R1 forever, as long as you want to have the enemy targeted. This quickly becomes unmanageable with the number of other buttons you have to hold down for lengths of time, such as R2 to grab. And you have to push the joystick, and L1, and still be holding R1 to dodge. Ridiculous.

And the game seems extremely sluggish and inconsistent in reacting to your commands. I had gotten used to the precision and speed with which the game reacted in Drake's Fortune or Assassin's creed. Here half the time, your 'double jump' command doesn't even execute the double jump. This is a shocking flaw, given that Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64 managed the double jump flawlessly.

The platforming sections of this game are atrocious. It would have been much better if they had been left out entirely. Prince of Persia this is not. It's not even Drake's Fortune. It's just a clumsy, inelegant, imprecise mess. You can't have a platforming game without ledge grab, yet this is precisely what this game does. There are far too many 'one way slippery ledge to death' situations. Remember the sands of time in Prince of Persia which let you rewind? Yep, no such thing here. Instead, you get to start over at the nearest checkpoint. And it's usually not obvious which ledge you can safely land on and which one you cannot before you leap. Terrible design flaw. Especially given the fact just the merest nudge sends the character plummeting off to one side...in fact, just the forward momentum of executing lightsaber combos can send him hurtling off the edge. This is a terrible design decision. If you use attacks and get to close to the ledge in real platforming games, the character grabs on and doesn't fall. The platforming here is as bad as it was in the original 2D Prince of Persia, and that's saying a lot. The designers wanted to get cute with making you use your force powers to lower ledges you could jump onto, but the whole thing is terrible.

It's not made any better by the camera. They're trying to provide a nice cinematic experience, by zooming the camera out and putting it in a fixed position in many key scenes. Sometimes it works great. More often, it's an absolute mess. Frequently you cannot see your character at all, being hidden behind a protrusion or even by the body of the person you are fighting. It's like the tested half the fights to get the right camera angles and just made poor guesses for the other half. Having a triple A title like this with camera issues where you literally can't even see your character is unforgivable. The inability to easily see what is around you is also bad given the area of effect attacks several monsters launch, where a spot on the ground begins to glow and if you are standing near it after a set amount of time, it explodes and you take damage. It's entirely possible to be near enough one of these spots to be hit, but it doesn't show up in your field of vision. Indeed, the game seems to take delight in arranging the camera angle so this occurs.

Oh, and that leads us to another unforgivable omission, one I thought the games design industry had long ago accepted as standard (but Force Unleashed is a step back in so many ways). You cannot skip cutscenes. This is abominable, especially given how many cutscenes there are, often some right before a tricky platforming session or boss battle you must watch over and over again each time. The cutscenes are visually impressive, but I don't want to have to watch them half a dozen times. Speaking of cutscene failures, there are cases where a cutscene is split. There's a custcene, then you can control your character for a half second, including taking damage from foes, then it goes right back to the continuation of the cutscene. I can't believe this is intended, and it's a rather glaring flaw.

But the biggest flaw in the entire game is the abomination of Raxus Prime. This is literally one of the 5 worst levels I have ever played. The color palette is painful to the eyes, and the level design is insipid and uninspired. Raxus Prime is supposed to be the 'junk pile' world, so there' just random heaps of black and yellow debris everywhere, funneling you down a narrow linear path. The colors are atrocious, it looks like someone vomited over a pile of chewed up legos. Everything is just a kaledeiscope of yellow and black, near objects, distant objects, ledges you can hold onto, ledges that just send you to your death...there's no real discrimination or attempt to draw a visual contrast between important elements and the background. Moreover, this level is home to one of the absolute no-nos of gaming...a mini-boss battle without a save point afterwards. Combined with the aforementioned terrible platforming, compounded by the uniform black and yellow vomit pattern of Raxus Prime, it means you may have to repeat a boss battle two or even three times if the game's jumping engine betrays you.

Even navigating the menus is an exercise in tedium and frustration. Each and every click you make takes you to another 'loading' screen before the submenu shows up. I've never seen this before and it really slows things down and breaks up the flow of play.

In short, this game is a major, major disappointment. The visuals (aside from Raxus Prime) are superb, the soundtrack, blaster sounds, lightsaber hum, are all terrific. But the gameplay is severely lacking almost across the board. If, like me, you loved KOTOR and are looking for more of the same, don't bother. Watch the movies again instead. Or find a friend who has played the game already and get him to show you the unlocked cinematics. Don't waste your money or time on this one.

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