| | |  | Desktop Publishing | Home » » Star Wars: The Force Unleashed | | | | | | | Description: | | The Star Wars saga will continue in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a videogame developed by LucasArts, which casts players as Darth Vader's "Secret Apprentice" and promises to unveil new revelations about the Star Wars galaxy. The expansive story, created under direction from George Lucas, is set during the largely unexplored era between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. In it, players will assist the iconic villain in his quest to rid the universe of Jedi - and face decisions that could change the course of their destiny.
 Join the Dark Side |
 You are Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice View larger. |  Use The Force to disable your enemies View larger. |  Artwork of the Jedi "Maris" View larger. | As its name implies, The Force Unleashed completely re-imagines the scope and scale of the Force by taking full advantage of newly developed technologies that will be seen and experienced for the first time: Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), by Pixelux Entertainment, and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd. Paired with the powerful Havok Physics™ system, these new technologies create gameplay only possible on the new generation of consoles. DMM incorporates the physical properties of anything in the environment so that everything reacts exactly like it should - wood breaks like wood, glass shatters like glass, plants on the planet Felucia bend like plants on the planet Felucia would, and more. Meanwhile, as a revolutionary behavioral-simulation engine, euphoria enables interactive characters to move, act and even think like actual human beings, adapting their behavior on the fly and resulting in a different payoff every single time.
Game Features:- During the period between Episodes III and IV, players hunt Jedi in the role of Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice.
- Unleash and upgrade the Secret Apprentice's four core Force powers - Force push, grip, repulse and lightning - throughout the course of the game, and combine them for ultra-destructive, never-before-seen combos.
- Examples of unleashing the Force in ways never thought possible:
- The Secret Apprentice won't just Force push enemies into walls - he'll Force push enemies through walls.
- The Secret Apprentice won't just Force grip foes to throw them aside - he'll Force grip them in midair, zap them with lightning, then drop them to the ground to explode like a bomb.
- In addition to new adversaries created just for the game, such as fugitive Jedi and Force-sensitive Felucians, players will also confront and associate with familiar faces from the Star Wars films, including Darth Vader.
- Visit locations such as Episode III's Wookiee homeworld Kashyyyk and the floral Felucia, the junk planet Raxus Prime, plus an Imperial TIE fighter construction facility.
- The Force Unleashed is LucasArts' first internally developed title for next-generation consoles, and it represents the first in-game collaboration of talents and technology between LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic, two companies now finally under one roof at the new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio district.
- The Force Unleashed debuts Digital Molecular Matter from Pixelux and euphoria behavioral simulation from NaturalMotion Ltd.
- LucasArts is preparing an unprecedented promotional effort around the launch of The Force Unleashed, encompassing a full line of toys and game-based action figures from Hasbro, as well as a full publishing program from Dark Horse, Del Rey and Palace Press.
Meet the Cast The Star Wars Saga will continue in 2008 with LucasArts' biggest-ever video game event. Set during the "dark times" between Episodes III and IV, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed portrays the previously untold story of Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice -- and now you can put a face to that mysterious character as well as the major supporting cast members as LucasArts unveils the actors set to star in The Force Unleashed. The New Technology of The Force Unleashed With The Force Unleashed, LucasArts not only introduces a new chapter in the Star Wars saga, but also two completely new and innovative technologies -- Digital Molecular Matter by Pixelux Entertainment and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd. These groundbreaking technologies combine with Havoc physics to create true next-gen gameplay and the Force like it's never been seen or experienced before. | | | Features: | |
• Confront and associate with familiar faces from the Star Wars films, including Darth Vader in addition to new adversaries such as fugitive Jedi and Force-sensitive Felucians
• Unleash and upgrade the Secret Apprentice's four core Force powers - Force push, grip, repulse and lightning - throughout the course of the game, and combine them for ultra-destructive, never-before-seen combos.
• Examples of unleashing the Force in ways never thought possible: Secret Apprentice won't just Force push enemies into walls - he'll Force push enemies through walls, and will Force grip them in midair, zap them with lightning, then drop them to the ground
• Visit locations such as Episode III's Wookiee homeworld Kashyyyk and the floral Felucia, the junk planet Raxus Prime, plus an Imperial TIE fighter construction facility
• Decisions made by players throughout the game will determine the path of the story, including multiple endings that will rock Star Wars continuity as they know it.
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 6.75 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.25 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.5 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Package Length:
| 6.7 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.6 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.25 pounds | | Release Date:
| September 16, 2008 | | Average Customer Rating:
| based on 191 reviews |
| | | Game Information: | | | Platform:
| PlayStation 3 | | Media:
| CD-ROM | | Item Quantity:
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| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
( 191 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
53 of 60 found the following review helpful:
Works for meSep 20, 2008
By J. Leigh
"jleigh7"
Pros
- Good story and voice acting
- The visuals are magnificent- I 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 good- some 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 clumsy- PsiOps 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 mechanism- mainly 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 day- including 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 AI- too 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.
64 of 76 found the following review helpful:
Should have been a great one but.....Sep 18, 2008
By ShowtimeMike 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 Wats 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.
19 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Play the downloadable demo first, let down by controls and linearitySep 20, 2008
By Angus M. Dorbie
"dorbie"
I was looking forward to this game, the technology in it is impressive, however the controls are terrible and it has some strange added flaws, the camera on the opening boss fight with Darth Vader was buggy and it did not bode well for the rest of the game, how could they miss this in testing? The primary mechanic in the game is the use of Force abilities, however control of it is completely deficient, it's the weakest part of the design. You cannot decide to target anything accurately because there is no reticle, just a box on whatever you are force targeting now. Moving this means the character on screen turns slightly and you're left to guess where the heck the aim point is because the camera hasn't changed & is under independent control. As a result, even after a lot of "aiming" and practice the force autolock 'reticle' jumps from object to object with no precise control and no way of guessing where your true aim-point is other than that hinted by the character orientation. It's not merely that it lacks precision and finesse (and it lacks them indeed) it's that it's horribly broken with no feedback. Aiming anything requires continuous feedback, this game has NONE other that a very crude guesstimate based on the Jedi's (Sith's) orientation in your independently moving camera view. Stuff like force push is great but at times you literally cannot hit a barn door with it from two paces. Standing in front of a door your aim is determined by your 3rd person jedi's character orientation (who is too cool to walk in a straight line so he sidles around and stands at an angle making things even worse). You press 'o' and he's oriented the wrong way and blam you force push in some random direction and he's often pointed the wrong way.
Control systems are somewhat arbitrary, and designers have a choice & make trade-offs, whatever committee settled on this control system ruined what could have been a great game.
The best game mechanic is force throwing stuff, it usually locks and manages to find a target, but forget about reliably aiming with this at anything, nonetheless throwing is satisfying, however picking things up to throw them and aiming with force push destroys the pleasure and the throwing only really seems good due to auto-lock and by contrast to picking up, again you cannot really aim with it.
The heavier enemy/boss fights are very God of War "simon says" affairs (after you beat their health down). You cannot take down a single AT without the right plodding button combos. You can slash at it force throw stuff push at it, but in the end you'll be there getting whittled down unless you have to press the right button sequence as they appear to pull off an effective attack. Correction, unless it's a true Jedi boss you can usually keep whittling it down without the GOW sequence and they get easier as you level up.
The levels themselves are linear with pretty much one way to progress. You're a rat caught in a maze with no turns and the spawning is very uninspired. 5 storm troopers in this corridor, 3 rebels next, kill them and there's a respawn there, but it's very much one set piece after another from the minute to the large, even the trivial stuff is set in stone.
The graphics are stunning and the physics is impressive but the AI is surprisingly disappointing after the hype, you can stand out of range or hide in a corner and take pot shots at a boss. This game is a highly polished disappointment.
I have to add here that the save-load game facility is flawed making the manual save game illusion bizarre & pointless. No joke, you can save your game but when you load it jumps you to the last autosave even after cheerfully telling you you saved successfully and warning you of lost unsaved progress if you quit. I find this quirk beyond strange, it's completely incompetent. Try getting the Sith Robe holocron in the junkyard, falling (and you will fall) means redoing the very tedious boss fight to get over the chasm, saving after the boss is killed does NOTHING. You're always back to before the fight (I revisited this and this is inconsistent, there's another autosave point just after but it didn't work teh first time through, I have no idea why, it is definitely inconsistent). If this isn't a bug then the designer has a lot to answer for and the damned game should tell you what the heck it's bizarro-world meaning of save game is. I should have known this was trouble when the load game facility was up a menu level with the added inconvenience of forcing you to leave your game just to load a save.... only to find it's not really the save you made, sigh.
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Beyond the hype and beloved franchise, terrible gameplay leads to a disapointmentNov 17, 2009
By J. Davis I'm a sucker for all things Star Wars, so I really wanted to love this game. I'd enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic and this was just going to be the same thing, only better, right? Nope.
This game is set in the Star Wars setting we all know and love, and the visual and audio effects for the lightsabers are fantastic, but the gameplay element of the game is absolutely atrocious. It's a bad game, with hideous camera and controls problems that suck all the fun out of playing. You spend more time wrestling the controls than you do slicing and dicing stormtroopers.
First off: targeting. Unbelievably, this game is worse at targeting than Zelda for the N64. Yes, it's that bad. You have no way to control what you are targeting other than facing towards it. No 'cycle through targets' button as is common in other games. This leads to the very common situation of you wanting to force grab or force choke an enemy right in front of you, but the game decides that really you wanted to pick up a box behind the stormtrooper on the complete opposite side of the room.
Dodging: Also worse than in Zelda. It's so bad that it's almost unmanageable. In order to dodge, you have to have an enemy targeted, much like Zelda. However, instead of simply 'locking on', you have to hold down R1 forever, as long as you want to have the enemy targeted. This quickly becomes unmanageable with the number of other buttons you have to hold down for lengths of time, such as R2 to grab. And you have to push the joystick, and L1, and still be holding R1 to dodge. Ridiculous.
And the game seems extremely sluggish and inconsistent in reacting to your commands. I had gotten used to the precision and speed with which the game reacted in Drake's Fortune or Assassin's creed. Here half the time, your 'double jump' command doesn't even execute the double jump. This is a shocking flaw, given that Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64 managed the double jump flawlessly.
The platforming sections of this game are atrocious. It would have been much better if they had been left out entirely. Prince of Persia this is not. It's not even Drake's Fortune. It's just a clumsy, inelegant, imprecise mess. You can't have a platforming game without ledge grab, yet this is precisely what this game does. There are far too many 'one way slippery ledge to death' situations. Remember the sands of time in Prince of Persia which let you rewind? Yep, no such thing here. Instead, you get to start over at the nearest checkpoint. And it's usually not obvious which ledge you can safely land on and which one you cannot before you leap. Terrible design flaw. Especially given the fact just the merest nudge sends the character plummeting off to one side...in fact, just the forward momentum of executing lightsaber combos can send him hurtling off the edge. This is a terrible design decision. If you use attacks and get to close to the ledge in real platforming games, the character grabs on and doesn't fall. The platforming here is as bad as it was in the original 2D Prince of Persia, and that's saying a lot. The designers wanted to get cute with making you use your force powers to lower ledges you could jump onto, but the whole thing is terrible.
It's not made any better by the camera. They're trying to provide a nice cinematic experience, by zooming the camera out and putting it in a fixed position in many key scenes. Sometimes it works great. More often, it's an absolute mess. Frequently you cannot see your character at all, being hidden behind a protrusion or even by the body of the person you are fighting. It's like the tested half the fights to get the right camera angles and just made poor guesses for the other half. Having a triple A title like this with camera issues where you literally can't even see your character is unforgivable. The inability to easily see what is around you is also bad given the area of effect attacks several monsters launch, where a spot on the ground begins to glow and if you are standing near it after a set amount of time, it explodes and you take damage. It's entirely possible to be near enough one of these spots to be hit, but it doesn't show up in your field of vision. Indeed, the game seems to take delight in arranging the camera angle so this occurs.
Oh, and that leads us to another unforgivable omission, one I thought the games design industry had long ago accepted as standard (but Force Unleashed is a step back in so many ways). You cannot skip cutscenes. This is abominable, especially given how many cutscenes there are, often some right before a tricky platforming session or boss battle you must watch over and over again each time. The cutscenes are visually impressive, but I don't want to have to watch them half a dozen times. Speaking of cutscene failures, there are cases where a cutscene is split. There's a custcene, then you can control your character for a half second, including taking damage from foes, then it goes right back to the continuation of the cutscene. I can't believe this is intended, and it's a rather glaring flaw.
But the biggest flaw in the entire game is the abomination of Raxus Prime. This is literally one of the 5 worst levels I have ever played. The color palette is painful to the eyes, and the level design is insipid and uninspired. Raxus Prime is supposed to be the 'junk pile' world, so there' just random heaps of black and yellow debris everywhere, funneling you down a narrow linear path. The colors are atrocious, it looks like someone vomited over a pile of chewed up legos. Everything is just a kaledeiscope of yellow and black, near objects, distant objects, ledges you can hold onto, ledges that just send you to your death...there's no real discrimination or attempt to draw a visual contrast between important elements and the background. Moreover, this level is home to one of the absolute no-nos of gaming...a mini-boss battle without a save point afterwards. Combined with the aforementioned terrible platforming, compounded by the uniform black and yellow vomit pattern of Raxus Prime, it means you may have to repeat a boss battle two or even three times if the game's jumping engine betrays you.
Even navigating the menus is an exercise in tedium and frustration. Each and every click you make takes you to another 'loading' screen before the submenu shows up. I've never seen this before and it really slows things down and breaks up the flow of play.
In short, this game is a major, major disappointment. The visuals (aside from Raxus Prime) are superb, the soundtrack, blaster sounds, lightsaber hum, are all terrific. But the gameplay is severely lacking almost across the board. If, like me, you loved KOTOR and are looking for more of the same, don't bother. Watch the movies again instead. Or find a friend who has played the game already and get him to show you the unlocked cinematics. Don't waste your money or time on this one.
18 of 22 found the following review helpful:
Epic FailureOct 28, 2008
By Long Time Gamer 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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