The Force Unleashed is an awesome addition to the Star Wars saga, a pretty good game and the tip of the ice berg of a cool story. The light it sheds on the original trilogy is pretty cool. It doesn’t warp the whole universe, but it does twist things around ever so slightly. And the twists are exciting and not completely obvious. The story bridges the gap between trilogies well. It does not wrap up everything we’ve never seen but it transitions very well using Vader’s secret apprentice as a vehicle to do so.

The gameplay itself is pretty good. There are some bugs and glitches. My system froze up in mid attack three times now, I’ve become stuck on an incline once or twice unable to free myself, and during one of the final battles, my opponent stopped reacting and I could no longer affect him/her with any attack and he/she stopped doing anything. I was forced to slowly kill myself in a force field of some kind. I found these to be annoyances, but nothing close to game breaking.

The complaints over frustrating spikes in difficulty do have merit though. You’ll be blasting away, oblierating entire forces and then get to a battle that is so frustratingly difficult, you may throw things. I recommend a nice soft hat. The interesting thing is, that I have found through talking to different people that these moments happen at very different points in the game for each person. The second Jedi I faced gave me so much trouble whereas my friend found him easy as cake. Later in the game when a surprise character makes an appearance, I had little problem defeating him/her but my friend found it incredibly frustrating. So what that says about the difficulty, I’m not sure. Perhaps that the different battles are dynamicly different and the game actually caters to different player types throughout. I found it important to note that the battles against other force users were frustrating in that all if a sudden your attacks that no other enemies could stop are now at a stalemate. These battles felt like two superpowers battling it out, deflecting each other’s attacks. Which is what I suppose it us supposed to be. The contrast is just difficult to get over. Damaging the opponent in these cases can be just down right hard to do. And unlike other games, the ‘boss pattern’ was less emphasized and harder to exploit. The patterns were there, but the battles were more of endurance battles than trials of strength. They left you feeling acomplished though.

Unleashing your bad assness through the rest of the game is really fun. It’s like a faster, less technical, more arcadey Devil May Cry. But with the force. It’s simple and a bit repetitive but still fun as hell. I found the Force Grip to be my favorite power. Level it up and you can grab three things/enemies at once, zap them with lighting, and then slam them straight into the ground and grab them again as they bounce and launch them straight into the sky. The ‘scoring’ system could be better. In fact, I don’t really know much about it at all. You score better by varying your attacks and they are listed on your screen as you execute them, but a ranking system tip off from DMC would have been cool. The quick time finisher events become kind of stale over time, but the first time you see it done to each type of enemy is really cool. There are a few variations but ought to be more. The boss ones are awesome, but kind of distract from the awesomeness that is being played out on screen. I found it kind of lousy, although it saved my ass a few times, that there is no consequence for messing up a button press, you just start over.

There is some really cool core story elements present, but I think a lot of the subtler elements are left out of the game. I will definitly check out the novel. The secret apprentice is a cool charater, he’s got a saucy fem pilot and a sweet ass droid friend who’s role is really awesome. The other character that joins along the way could easily fill some pages and I imagine does so. The Force Unleashed is easily worthy as an entire chapter, if not another trilogy in the Star Wars universe. I hope it gets fleshed out a lot more in the book and that these characters make more than one appearance in the new Star Wars live action show that are coming down the road.

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