‘God of Star Wars’ is an action-packed hack ‘n’ slash adventure through familiar locations that gets a lot right, but an unwieldy camera and lack of polish stop it from being a classic.
| Developer | |
| Publisher | LucasArts |
| Franchise | Star Wars |
| Genre | Action |
| PSTV | Yes |
| PSN | EU/NA |
World-building & Story
Acting as a bridge between the stories of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope (the third and fourth Star Wars films chronologically), The Force Unleashed follows Darth Vader’s apprentice (dubbed ‘Starkiller’) as he’s tasked with hunting and exterminating the last remaining jedi, a job he begins to question as the game progresses.
It’s an incredibly interesting period of the Star Wars lore and to its credit, The Force Unleashed does a great job of fleshing out the story in a way that feels natural within the narrative of the films and offering a new perspective of this unique universe. It’s really enjoyable to visit all these familiar locations and come across the last remnants of the Jedi Order as they fight for survival and avoid the Galactic Empire who are relentlessly hunting them down and it’s helped by the appearance of some familiar faces from franchise history like Princess Leia and her father Bail Organa both of whom play a natural role within the plot. There’s plenty of twists and turns along the way too, although the game blasts through its content and does get confusing at points likely due to some chopped out elements for the handheld port.
Having said that, it’s probably not helped by Starkiller himself – although you see his journey literally from being taken by Vader right through to his relentless angst, he’s a rather unlikable blank slate who feels swept up in events rather than taking any real charge of them. This is obviously a writing choice given that you’re meant to make your own view about his path to the light or dark side of the force, but I’d have preferred him to have a bit more character. Thankfully the crew aboard his ship are better including pilot Juno with whom he shares some regular banter, helpful droid PROXY who dislikes receiving broadcasts from Vader himself and embittered Jedi Kota who comes along for the ride. The rag-tag bunch are a solid cast and engaging enough that I wanted to find out their eventual outcomes at the end.
The fact that you’ll be journeying through now-iconic Star Wars locations like Cloud City and the Star Destroyer make it all the more enjoyable to experience the tale here. I do think it could have been tidied up a bit, but as a companion piece to the films The Force Unleashed succeeds in telling a worthy story that slots in nicely with the overall world.
Presentation & Sound
Somewhere between very graphically impressive for a PSP game and a bit of a disappointment, The Force Unleashed is a very mixed bag which could’ve done with a lot more polish.
Character models look alright at first glance, with realistic proportions and you can do things like change the clothes of Starkiller in your ship which is a nice touch. When you’re in combat things move smooth enough too – you’ll deflect blaster shots with your lightsaber and the amount of ragdoll physics that you can unleash using your force powers is impressive, flinging around stormtroopers and all the different native enemies that you’ll face with ease. The problem is that in the cutscenes, characters move very jerkily (with none of the smoothness of higher-budget action games like God of War) which gives the game a lower budget feel, plus there’s a bit of a blurry vaseline filter over things at most points which again lowers visual fidelity.
However, the planets you visit hold up much better – they’re all based on Star Wars locations you’ll be familiar with like the plant life and strange fauna of Felucia or the wooden battlements and view-finding towers of Kashykk. It’s nice to be able to travel through them and see them so close and although you do pay a few too many visits to the Jedi Temple which is mostly just a collection of corridors without much life to them, there’s enough variety here to keep things feeling fresh. Best of all is the fact that they’re highly destructible – using your force powers, you can smash barriers, throw objects and knock down walls, which in the middle of a fightfire with red blaster shots and sith lightning firing everywhere looks truly impressive.
The downside for all this mayhem is performance, which at best is abysmal and at worst is one of the poorest-running PSP games I’ve played. During combat things are often unstable and moving between different parts of a level will often be met with screen freezing, slowdown and just general lagginess – although levels are somewhat open, it shouldn’t come at the cost of such issues. I’ve also had the game hard crash on me multiple time if I put the Vita in sleep mode, tabbed out of the game or left it alone for about 30 seconds without playing all of which was very frustrating – I’m someone who generally puts up with performance issues (see my review of Jak II), but here I found the game testing my patience far too often.
At least there’s tonnes of solid voice acting here, along with a nice orchestral soundtrack that re-uses plenty of motifs from the film. While it’s a bit jarring not to have James Earl Jones or Carrie Fisher reprise their roles as Darth Vader or Princess Leia, it’s not immersion breaking enough to say that I didn’t enjoy the experience overall.
Gameplay & Content
An ambitious mix of the epic hack ‘n’ slash gameplay of God of War with the lightsabers and force powers of Star Wars, the gameplay in The Force Unleashed is initially brilliant – but some issues with the camera, repetitive content and some janky elements leave something to be desired.
In the game, you’ll progress level-by-level carrying out objectives – you have a ship that acts as a sort of central hub between missions that is simply a series of menus where you can do things like change your outfit, adjust the settings of your lightsaber and increase your force powers. See, aside from being a fairly adept acrobat (who can leap in the air with x and dodge with the shoulder buttons), Starkiller is also a skilled lightsaber user (who can combo together attacks in both the air and on the ground) and wielder of the force, which means he’ll get many different powers at his disposal with which he can play with his enemies.
These are all what you’d expect based on Star Wars – he can cast lightning from his fingertips, choke enemies into submission from afar, send blasts towards them to knock them off edges, pull them towards him or any combination of these together. The game gives you full reign of these from the start and it’s incredibly satisfying to just mess around with these to find different ways to dispatch his foes – adding to the enjoyment is the fact that levels are littered with objects that you can pick up and throw, giving even more opportunities to play how you’d like. Some of my favourites include the ability to rip up a turret and use its firepower against stormtroopers or pushing them back then blasting them with lightning mid air in an explosive barrage.
After fiddling around with your powers for a little while though, you’ll begin to notice problems appearing. While it’s always satisfying to crumble a tower with stormtroopers at the top by blasting them with the force or take down an army of Felucian Warriors with an explosive that you’ve lobbed towards them, these moments are often tricky to pull off as the auto lock-on aiming will regularly target different objects in the environment – it’s incredibly difficult to actually pick up what you want. There’s a faint blue glow around the item you’re focused on but this often isn’t enough in the heat of battle to commit to it and it meant that I found myself relying on things like lightning and my lightsaber instead.
These abilities are also hindered by the fact that there’s no real camera control in the game and you’ll have to rely on the automatic camera catching up with where your character is, which often doesn’t work and faces angles that are completely counter-intuitive meaning you’ll just take free hits from bad guys without any real ability to react. Thankfully, health canisters are plenty in the environments (you can also grab Jedi Holocrons which unlock artwork rewards and the like, as well as permanent boosts to your health and force gauges) meaning you’re rarely at risk of dying and even if you do, you’re mostly just checkpointed to a minute or so prior with a minor hit to your currency.
That currency which is dropped from enemies is used to buy upgrades to your force powers which don’t change much other than the power of the attacks, but it’s nice to be able to customise the skills you use most early on. You can also upgrade your lightsaber by using hilts and crystals which are found by exploring the levels (which are designed to be linear, but feature big open spaces every now and again – something I appreciated) and again this doesn’t do a whole lot, but perhaps the most enjoyable addition is that you can change its colour meaning it was nice to be able to go for purple, a colour previously reserved only for Mace Windu!
Perhaps the biggest draw of The Force Unleashed is the huge boss battles you can fight, allowing you to take on everything from the Rancour to the rogue jedi. These require a lot more skill and nuance and you’ll be wielding force powers, going in for hits where possible and running away to find health at every opportunity – again reminiscent of games at the time like Dante’s Inferno or God of War. The problem for me is that I found they ran on way too long, constantly blocking attacks, healing or just generally being difficult to take down – and they often relied on a specific strategy, which felt at odds with the free-form nature of giving you all of these force powers. They’re also littered with quick-time events as was commonplace during the period the game released in, which can become frustrating particularly in light of the jerkiness and lag.
Aside from the main story mode, there’s the ‘Force Unleashed’ mode which lets you fight specific scenarios taking place during the execution of Order 66 or even has you fighting as Anakin Skywalker against Count Dooku, but these were more of a minor distraction than a meaty part of the game. It’ll probably take you 6-8 hours to see all the narrative content, but that depends entirely on how much the game crashes on you – I lost two chunks of 30 minutes progress each thanks to the sleep-mode-restarting errors I encountered, which rapidly sapped my enthusiasm for actually seeing the adventure through to the end.
Conclusion
An ambitious gameplay take on the Star Wars IP that intertwines with an interesting part of the lore, The Force Unleashed gets a lot right thanks to its array of force powers which are fun to mess around with and story that actually offers a decent take on a unique time period. Yet its wide-ranging issues from the difficult camera control during combat to the frequent crashes, slowdown and lag during transition scenes mean this isn’t the polished experience it should be – if you’re looking to slash some stormtroopers in style you could do a lot worse, but don’t expect a revolution whether you’re a fan of Star Wars or not.
6.5/10
kresnik258gaming 