Star Wars: The Game of Force Grabbing.

See that sounds sexual, and fun, very different from the real game.

I just finished playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. This game looked pretty nifty from the commercials, it seemed to have the same physics engine as crysis but... with the force...

Anyway, ill get to a review (if you want the basics, skip to the white at the bottom):

This is one of the rare games that you can beat it on the harder difficulty and get the achievements for beating it on the difficulties below that. This means I figured "why not, Ill play through on hard, and get a good 75 (beating it on easy) + 100 (beating it on normal) + 100 (beating it on hard) and + 20 (getting the good or evil ending)". For this game hard isnt the hardest difficulty, after you beat the game once there is a sith master (really hard) difficulty available.

To start off you go through a prologue as Darth Vader. What this means is: you walk real fucking slow. Oh and getting to fight wookies, which hardly seems fair that a guy wielding a plasma-blade should be able to cut wookies into itsy-bitsy-bits: nope, they just kinda... fall over... real easy. Anyway because your given fully powerful Darth Vader its a cakewalk and a half, even on the hard difficulty. It ends with a moving battle against some random-ass rogue jedi, then Darth Vader picking up some kid and killing some stormtroopers.

The first part of the actual game you play as that little random kid (now named: Starkiller. who the fuck names a main character STARKILLER and thinks that is a good idea?) from the DV prologue, all grown up. First you have to go through some stupid tutorial on how to use force throw. Then you get chucked into the some star station as Starkiller - who is wonderfully crappy in the force ability section, only having force push, and force lift. Here you have to fight both Rebles and for some reason you need to fight the Imperials too. Anyway you go through the level, but apparently the Jedi were careless and dropped 15 holocrons around for you to pick up and nicely give you experience boosts (oh yes, it has an experience/level system... although you level up but don't have an actual level). Levelling up grants you one point to put into each force upgrades, meele skills, and buffs. At the end of this level you have to battle some Jedi that apparently thought he was going to be fighting Darth Vader and got lame-ass Starkiller. The fact that on the hardest difficulty you can kill this jedi by shoving him all over and jumping about as Starkiller, clearly shows that this Jedi couldn't have stood any chance against Vader. During this fight you get detached from the space station and you and him fight in the falling observatory as it plummets toward the surface, and apparently you somehow can survive it crashing into the planet.

The next level is some crazy ass scrap yard place where you fight a bounty hunting species and crazy 'force powered' robots. By now I've only died like... 20 times... but this is where it all goes... well... badly. About half way through the level there comes a huge junk-giant. This thing has the ability to kill me (on hard) in 3 hits. The best way to damage this thing is by throwing energy coils at it with force throw, however apparently the lock on for force throw decides to send it flying towards well... more of the energy coils - destroying more of them. This took me a frustratingly long amount of time and a lot of deaths because well... its stupid hard to fight something that takes about 2 minutes of continuous-uninterrupted lightsaber attacking that can kill you in 3 hits. Oh not to mention every time you die you have to restart back at a check point that means you have to re-watch the ingame cutscene again (every time). After you beat that you end up having to fight 3 more (at separate times) later in the level. Then you go onto a boss which is... well... just easy once you figure him out. He's this little shrimpy bastard that jumps all over. By now you have unlocked force lightning so all you need to do is force lightning him, and then force throw him off the edge a bunch of times (because you die once from going off the edge, he takes 300 times).

Anyway by now im getting pretty friggen sick of the game, and have realized that all the normal badguys can all be easily killed by force throwing them around.

The third level was some jungle piece of crap, where you fight some really stupid limier monkey type things that are able to kill you pretty fast if you don't throw them away first. Also if they have a 3 hit combo which if you don't block the first one, you get hit with all 3 parts of it, and that is about 2/3 of the health bar. Anyway this level was balls, considering you have to fight 4 Rancors in the course of it, 2 of them at once. Now, if you know star wars you would know that the Rancor is that big ass creature in Jaba's palace, however you still wouldn't notice these rancors:. Once again George Lucas rapes our childhood. After you fight all of them you have to fight some stupid orange chick. Now you have force pulse, which is like force push, but you use it when blocking and it goes "BWOOSH" out all around from you. This is a stupid battle again, because there are little bubbles on the ground that do about 1/6 damage to you if you hit them. However once again she's a piece of cake, force repulse sends her flying then from there you can force lift her and slam her into the ground bubbles to do some OK damage to her.

Blah, Blah, Blah, some stupid shit happens and then we skip ahead some levels. Somehow you end up captured in a hospital room, and you have to break out. When you do a force field goes up and some gas pours into a room - which kills you rather quickly. To get out you have to spend a good amount of deaths just to find the power supply for the shield so you can deactivate the shield. Now you have to escape the space station filled with Imperials. Sounds easy right? You know... just force throw everyone around, easy. Ha! No! Lucas Arts decides to invent a couple new types of troopers, just for this game. First are troopers with shields, which generally can fully block any force power you throw at them. Second are purge troopers; these are 8 foot tall giant steel stormtroopers, with arm shields (which can block pretty much anything while raised) and a heatseeking missile that kills you in 3 hits - and which has the ability to kill you quite quickly, considering it will knock you down if it hits you, and then by the time your bastard gets back up the purge trooper has fired another one.

Then some random shit that I don't remember happens, because by now I'm starting to hate this game, and the only reason I still played it was for the achievements.

I'll just skip on toward near the end of the game. At one point you have to stand around and pull down a Imperial Star Destroyer. Now that sounds like a blast... but its probably the single most infuriating thing about this game. I'm just going to start by saying: Yoda took a bit to pull a xwing out of some mud, so how random-ass Starkiller can pull down a huge spaceship confuses me. So anyway for this part a whole bunch of tie fighters fly at you and you have to jump around and force lightning them. After all of them are defeated you are told by the floating voice that you need to rip the star destroyer out of the sky. When you try to force grip it, you get little joystick pictures that you have to follow to put the stardestroyer in the right position to pull down. These joystick commands are really stupid because they suck. The joystick pictures will eventually show flat, so you would think "alright, its in the right position". If only that were true, because know you have to guess a whole lot to get it perfect (everyone knows force powers are finicky), then you can start pulling it down. You have to do this quickly because the tie fighters come back and you have to stop pulling and fight them. It takes about 4-5 times of destroying the tie fighters, re-righting the star destroyer, and pulling it, to actually crash this. That is you know... if the game works properly. Sometimes the tie fighters come back extremely quickly, sometimes the directions don't work AT ALL, and sometimes it just wants to be stupid and not let you do it. This took me about... 50 minutes to do, thats how fun this was...

Then some more shit happens and you end up inside the deathstar. This game is supposed to take place between the third and forth movie so I'm not sure why they have a fully operational Death Star. The very beginning of the level you start off in a hanger with 2-4 purge troopers, an AT-ST, 3 snipers, 4 Gatling guns, and a whole lot of storm troopers. This hanger has been called "The Hanger of Death" because there really is no way to do fight your way out on a difficulty higher then Normal. You have to just run away. Anyway so then you run through the deathstar, and have to go down one of the firing tubes... while it periodically fires. Now not only is this part stupid, and involves a lot of running and hiding, it also doesn't make sense that the Death Star is firing at all. Later in the level, aftar a whole bunch of stupidly stacked against you fights you have to fight Darh Vader. He doesn't take all that long to beat but this has a stupid ass throw move he does any time you jump. This move cannot be dodged, and cant be broken out of, no matter how fast you press the action button. After you beat him you get some stupid ass cutscene, and then the choice to go and fight the Emperor or Darth Vader again. This leads to either the good ending, or the bad one. Seeing as my game glitched here, I was forced to fight the Emperor. To sum this up quickly: I died about 30 times before i gave up and reloaded my game. Which meant I had to do the first Darth Vader fight again, and the game didn't glitch this time, so I was able to fight vader. Yippie. So I killed him and beat the game, and scored some pretty sweet achievement points.

This is one of those games that really needs to be patched to fix all its friggen bugs. That or it needs to be incinerated in a fiery pit. Infact this was probably one of the only games that I have felt like burning half way through, and I might have if I had owned the game (seeing as I had just borrowed it). The game actually only consists of like... 4 levels, you just end up going back to them.. yay. The game's gap in difficulties is ridiculous, but that still doesn't change the fact that almost all the bad guys can be dispatched by force throwing them around.
In summarization: if this game didn't have some fun achievements I probably would have stopped playing it.