lolcat Metallica:

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President Barack Obama will close a secret network of CIA prisons immediately.

This is a review of one of the games I got for Xmas, which I just completed.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (SW: The F.U.) is a great concept with some excellent moments, all smothered in a thick layer of suck.

WARNING: Spoilers below.

First, on the technical side, the game features ludicrous load times for the weirdest things -- even entering the various sub-menus from the pause screen summons a load screen. I managed to actually crash the game twice (I'm playing the PS3 version) when I seemed to trigger a Quick Time Event sequence at the same time as killing an enemy.

From a gameplay point of view, the game seems to cycle between tediously easy to monstrously hard without a good sense of balance. It also does the oh-so-common mistake of randomly switching the gameplay style during one of the boss fights: It's a fantastic bit where you are using the force to bring down a star destroyer, but it plays out like a cheap 80's arcade game with awful controls. None of this is helped by an awful checkpoint save system, which means that a stupid and random death (say, falling off a cliff due to poor camera controls) results in having to re-clear an area from scratch.

A completely unforgivable sin is that the game appears to have no level selection screen, not even after having beaten the game. This is particularly disappointing as some of the levels are really unfun (Felucia, I'm looking at you). I think it's ridiculous that the best example of good level design for this sort of game is still the Jedi Knight series -- with the game from **1997** being particularly noteworthy for having really expansive levels with incredible vertical sections. SW: The F.U., on the other hand, is played in tiny, enclosed sub-areas connected by claustrophobia-inducing corridors. The end result is a very artificial-feeling level design, with dumb and contrived fighting arenas. The only good level is the first "real" one (after the prologue) -- it's fantastic and definitely reminiscent of the Jedi Knight series. The rest is all suck.

This game also suffers from severe Power Creep. Your character has truly awesome force powers, but to keep them in check you start to run into more and more enemies with super-armor that can ignore your various force powers or that aren't affected by your combo moves (such as knock-ups). The RPG-like aspect, where you level up and gain points that you can assign to various force talents should have been awesome....but a lot of the possible options only get unlocked as you progress through the game. On top of that, you get so many points to spend that at any given time you basically have most of everything that's available to you...so there's not that much to the decision-making process. Again, this part of the gameplay is the most successful at the start of the game where you're allowed to fight against swarms of "normal" stormtroopers/rebels and where how you spend your points is actually meaningful because you have so few. It's most tragic at the end of the game, where the real example of Power-Creep-meets-Jumping-the-Shark happens. Your character fights Darth Vader. And wins. And then fights the Emperor. And wins.

That brings us to the story which, frankly, I thought was fantastic. About midway through the game it ties into the Original Trilogy in a way I totally didn't see coming, and I love it. Good job! On the other hand, the game designers also include the requisite love story with a degree of subtlety and finesse that makes the Anakin/Padme relationship palatable in comparison. Seriously guys...wtf? If you'd just left it as a subtext, it would have been brilliant. Instead, it's like getting hit with an anvil in a couple scenes...including the very last line of dialogue in the game. It doesn't help that the love interest has the least successful voice acting in the game. (The other characters are REALLY well done.)

Ah ha! I just did a quick look-up on the game and guess what! The love interest was NOT originally a part of the game...until a certain fuckhead got involved. Yup, the same idiot who can't seem to help himself when it comes to destroying an otherwise brilliant story: "Lucas [...] encouraged the developers to create a love interest." Asshole.

Seriously, the game needs about 90% less Juno Eclipse (Ye gods, what a name) and about 1000% more Maris Brood.

One of the design goals of the game was to "to make players think they are 'actually, finally, in a Star Wars movie'". Star Wars: The F.U. certainly accomplishes this...in every way. Fucking Lucas.

EDIT: Let me note, however, that the game WAS entertaining enough to finish. The huge variety of ways to defeat your enemies was very satisfying. You can fling something through the window of a spaceship and watch as they get sucked out into space. You can combo a series of lightsaber slashes into a force-powered knockback off a cliff. You can zap one of the jetpack-equipped stormtroopers with lightning and watch as they get launched in random directions. One of the most memorable kills wasn't even something I did directly -- the ebb and flow of a fight resulted in a gaggle of stormtroopers being in just the right place to be disintegrated by the test-firing of the laser cannon inside the deathstar.