Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

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List Price: $19.99
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Pros

Good story and voice acting

The visuals are magnificentI 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 goodsome 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 clumsyPsiOps 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 mechanismmainly 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 dayincluding 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 AItoo 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.

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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 Wars 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.

Buy Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Now

The Force Unleashed is absolutely horrible. Do not buy it.

While the story line is good, the game is incredibly short. It only takes a day or two to play through the entire game.

Also, the game play itself is very weak, and it has no relationship to the Star Wars Universe. The main character has more force powers than 100 Jedi put together. He can blast through blast doors. He can throw people and objects hundreds of feet away, and he can even rip a Star Destroyer from the sky. Yet, for some reason, Darth Vader and the Emperor give him trouble later in the game. This is odd given that their force powers are no where close to this strong.

Perhaps the troubling aspect to the game was the main character's weapon, his lightsaber. Starkiller's lightsaber works like no other lightsaber. His works like a glowing baseball bat. Every enemy must be hit multiple times with the glowing baseball bat in order to kill them. It doesn't cut through anything.

This isn't exactly what one would expect from a Star Wars game. However, it is what everyone has come to expect from George Lucas: a sub par product with little thought given to how it fits into the Star Wars Universe that Lucas created over 30 years ago. This game is proof again that George Lucas has completely lost his touch. It is also proof that there's no one at Lucas Arts who is willing to tell the Emperor that he has no clothes.

Again, this is a horrible game. Don't waste your money on it.

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Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a truly epic failure considering what this game almost could have been. The physics engine is amazingly powerful, the graphics are awesome, the story is pretty good and you can do some really, really cool things with force powers. So why 1 star? Well, because The Force Unleashed is so heavily flawed and broken that it ruins what could have been a game of the year. Here are the list of flaws:

1. Aiming. Its basically random sometimes. It can be very difficult to target exactly who or what you want with your awesome force powers. What is really frustrating is that in the demo aiming was substantially better. How does that happen?

2. Button-press boss kills. Those horribly annoying button press kills to finish off boss's cinematically are everywhere. And worse is that they instantly fail if you happened to hit an extra lightsaber attack at the end of beating on the boss.

3. Character control is seriously flawed. By this I mean that you don't always go where you want your character to go nor do you jump where you think you will go all the time. The Force Unleashed has several points that want to be a platformer, but character movement is horrible so that the heavy platforming areas just get to be frustrating chores. Especially the parts with instant-deah falls. The control problem is exacerbated by the next problem...

4. Poor camera angles. This problem doesn't occur all the time, but it seems to occur mostly when you don't want it, such as boss fights where the angle shifts suddenly so that you can't get a good grasp on where you are in the environment or say when you get swarmed by a dozen stormtroopers.

5. Overly linear level design. You basically do nothing but follow the path in front of you. There are a couple of times when you have more then one option, but those are few and far between. And frankly it really doesn't matter which option you take anyways. You don't notice this right away, but eventually it starts to get to you.

6. Poor AI. The enemy AI very easily gets hung up on environmental obstacles. Its pretty annoying when you kill a jedi because he got stuck on a pillar in the floor.

7. Combat does not flow well. While you can do some amazing kills in combat (such as flinging enemies into one another), it can also be horribly frustrating. Sometimes when you get close in to your enemies you can swing your lightsaber and sometimes you can't. You're supposed to be a jedi (or a sith) and the combat doesn't reflect that so well. Lucasarts should have played some God of War before they let this game out of QA.

8. Graphical glitches happen a bit too often. The physics engine is really powerful, so I'm somewhat leanient on deformable terrain clipping somewhat, but the parts when all of a sudden whole sections of the level blinked out were a bit too much. This wasn't common, but it was almost a game stopper for me.

LucasArts used to make amazing games. If they'd only went back and updated Jedi Outcast instead of making this garbage they'd have had a fantastic game on their hands. Instead they created a pile of garbage

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I enjoyed the demo for this game very much because I felt like a dangerous, powerful jedi. I was frying gangs of stormtroopers with my force lightning and wading through their puny blaster fire to cut them all down with my lightsaber. Only when I bought the game did I discover that the demo features a completely "maxed-out" character, and that the demo level's entertaining mayhem is not at all representative of the game as a whole.

Your character does not feel strong until the very end of the game, if then--a full combo of melee attacks doesn't kill some regular stormtroopers, and enemies with overpowered bazookas and flamethrowers (read--every enemy from about mission 5 on) can kill you from full health before you can even turn your camera to figure out who's hitting you. The big creatures like AT-STs and Rancors are pretty much all the same--throw rocks at their heads until they die.

The story is great. In fact, I wish I knew more about the characters I was introduced to. The cutscenes seemed to give you the bare minimum, as if I had already seen the movie and was playing the game.

Also, the game has a lot of frustrating bad design. If my character steps forward with each attack, don't make him fight on narrow catwalks. Game designers should have learned that players don't like enemies who can knock them down and juggle them to death a long time ago, too. I felt like I was being rewarded for being as cheap as possible, and wound up running straight through several areas after dying repeatedly. I really needed a "fire from cover" mechanic that allowed me to target items for the "force grab" maneuver without standing in the line of fire, and I was constantly pelted by off-camera enemies and enemies far outside my target range. Finally--I didn't like "press this button now" scenes on the old Dragon's Lair arcade game, I didn't like them in Resident Evil 4, and I don't like them now. This game's take on them is 100% pointless--if you miss the button, the guy breaks out of his headlock and you grab him again for another try--repeat as necessary. All in all, this game plays like a super-nice looking Nintendo 64 game.

In the game's defense, the visuals and sound are spectacular, and really immersed me in the "Star Wars" experience--that is, until the bad stuff brought me back down to earth (remember in the movies when Luke had to fight the stormtroopers with shields that blocked the force? Neither do I...) The only thing I can say against the graphics is that Juno Eclipse has really freaky huge teeth that distracted me during the cutscenes.

All in all, buy this game expecting it to be a beautiful button-masher and you won't be disappointed.