By Edge
The game of the series that’s not based on the films but set between them.
ImageThe Force Unleashed casts you as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, tasked with carrying out his dirty work all over the universe and scouring the last remaining Jedi from their boltholes, all the while keeping your existence secret from the Emperor. That means no survivors, and since the game is set in the gap between Episodes III and IV while the Jedi scramble to escape the Empire, there are plenty of insufferable do-gooders to terminate.
The title indicates the main aim of the game: to play as a Force user at the full height of their planet-crushing powers, able to throw things around with a thought, crash starships with a flick of the finger and casually slice things up with a red lightsaber for the sake of an evil laugh.
The interest in the license is the sheer amount of money that LucasArts can afford to throw at the technologies that construct the gameworld: Pixelux Entertainment’s Digital Molecular Matter imbues any object in the game with the real-world properties of that object, so glass will shatter, metal will warp, and plants will bend according to the specific force and direction of your actions rather than responding to stimuli with a fixed animation. Examples of this are the steel shutters that block progress through a TIE fighter factory – these can be wrenched open with a Force blast, but importantly each one slowly peels open and eventually gives way in a different manner to its predecessor, dependent on the apprentice’s distance and angle from it.
Of even more potential, however, is NaturalMotion’s Euphoria engine, a slice of sophisticated behavioral middleware that simulates decision-making in your enemies. Holding an enemy in the air with a Force grab may make him clutch at a nearby railing or one of his comrades – in which case his friend will attempt to pull him down; if you lift both higher a third may get involved, or the second one may decide to cut his losses and let go before you lift them both too high.
When the two technologies combine (and the Havoc physics engine is in there, too) they can bring about the sort of incidental detail never previously seen in videogames: destroying a TIE Fighter at one stage (by throwing a metal beam through the glass cockpit) sees it spin off into a nearby wall, with one of its solar panels falling on two enemies underneath, who react accordingly to their chests being trapped rather than simply going through a single death animation.
Visually, the game has a strong and faithful adherence to the Star Wars universe that lends many of its environments a familiarity – and allows the use of some clichéd settings without them necessarily being noticed as such. That’s no great problem, and the presence of TIE fighters and Stormtroopers delights the inner child as much as ever, and there’s some welcome fleshing out of races and planets that have never been anything other than hinted at, as well as familiar locales such as the Wookie homeworld of Kasshyyyk. (The former group includes Raxus Prime, a dumping ground for waste that became so large it eventually gained its own gravity and became a planet, and the plant world Felucia where the inhabitants have their own limited connection to the Force.)
Combat might seem a straightforward thrash through much weaker enemies, but it’s made more challenging by each group of enemies having their own response to the threat of an incoming Jedi: the Empire’s Stormtroopers, for example, are well-drilled and good marksmen, and will only panic when they’re actually being whirled through the air towards a chasm, while Felucians have shamen that use their basic Force abilities to heal groups and disorientate your approach.
None of them are capable of your power, however, which consists of four basic abilities: Force push, Force grip, repulse and lightning. That may seem meager, but the key to them is that they can all be combined with one another. You can simply Force grip someone, hold them in the air and casually toss your lightsaber into their stomach before calling it back. Or you could push them towards a wall from that starting position 50 feet in the air. Or lift them, electrocute them and throw them down like an electrical bomb into a group of their fellow warriors. The possibilities aren’t limitless, but they’re extensive enough to make experimentation a necessity and fighting the inevitable large groups of enemies again and again more bearable
The Force Unleashed is shaping up well, and we shouldn’t forget that Star Wars has provided a comprehensive backdrop to several great games. The only worries concern the relatively meager variety of enemies seen thus far throughout the levels, and the risk that only four powers may come to seem too few if the combinations aren’t as extensive and distinct as promised. But that’s picking holes in a game that has been heavily invested in, and looks like it could deliver the promise in its title. It certainly deserves any preview resisting the temptation to finish with a Star Wars quote.
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Man i can't wait for this game
