Lucasarts

Disney’s buyout of the Star Wars franchise has been met with mixed reactions. The best part is the amount of products made since, from movies to shows and even anime. The problem is the very ideology of the quantification of the quality of said product. The other problem is the content that was built around the series previously. One of my favorites was the Force Unleashed games. A power fantasy and open-ended experience, all within the backdrop of the gap between episodes three and four. To show the unambiguous nature of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed we must analyze the combat and visuals.

The combat is purely based on the God of War series with basic button-mashing combos and very simple puzzles. A cool part is the double lightsabers you wield which can provide very fast combat. My biggest problem is due to the imposition of the hack-and-slash formula or the style of which God of War created, the combos can be very simple and just not as entertaining to learn. Also just like said franchise it can be very easy to just use the same move over and over again due to the lack of crucially to the combo goals. In this game, the move is the force of lightning. I get that they tried to prolong that factor by making it only available later on in the game. My other problem is the force powers that are only used in 2 different attacks, which makes it a puzzling ability rather than a natural factor in any situation. Other than that, I do appreciate the style of this game, since it isn’t purely a Jedi game, which allows you to have a forceful classification like the Sith. Reddit user, Agnol117 believes that it is a very janky game.

“See, The Force Unleashed isn’t a good game. There are parts of it that make me want to call it a bad game.” They continued by stating, “Fighting Jedi/lightsaber opponents is frustrating, the PC version still has glitches that were present ten years ago in the original console release.”

The character design is mainly motion capture with the same actor’s facial scan. However, the assets were mainly from the second Playstation quality. They were very ugly and had classic-looking games. The colors varied depending on different planets. Game Journalist, Gareth Payne feels the graphics are very neutral and very bleak, Speaking of monotone, Unleashed has a visually drab art style with an uninteresting, basic-level design. They Perpetuate on, as they postulate, It couldn’t have been great back then and it isn’t great now, and this port only reveals how lacking in detail the environments are.

Overall, the game is great, however, I wish there were deeper stories of the force that the books were built around, by which the pneumatological held a higher meaning.  Unfortunately with the buy-out, most games and media pre-00s were mainly de-canonized.