After 3 years of production Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is ready to turn our consoles to the dark side of the force. It promises character customization, filling up the cliffing hole between Episode 3 and 4 and giving the player full controll of the force. But does it hold up it's promises or does it truly turn to the dark side?
Story
Kashyyyk, a couple of years after episode 3: The empire trys to capture the Wookie's homeplanet and wants to enslave all Wookies to send them to the whole universe. However the Wookies offer so heavy resistance that Darth Vader himself has to get on the planet and fight for the emperor's goals. After he cut down all resistance he finds a Jedi master. After a short fight the Jedi's little son shows up to protect his farther. Confused Vader kills the farther along with all empirials on the scene to secretly keep the son as his apprentice.
After a 10 year jump in the future you will find yourself controlling that boy as Darth Vader's secret apprantice Starkiller, who atcs as Vader's personal assasin to wipe out the last remaining Jedi from the face of the galaxy. As character sidekicks there is the training robot Proxy, aswell as the pilot of the Apprentice's ship, the Rouge Shadow, Juno Eclipse.
The overall story is great with much unexpected twists and turns that will kepp the player guessing untill the end and Star Wars fans will defenetly get they money's worth. Some heavy stuff goes down that is going to change the Star Wars universe forever. A real problem however is the storytelling, which is done via way too short cutscenes. The dialogs are so short and the action is often so rapidly changing that it feels like the developers were too lazy to do the cutscenes right.
Story rating: 8
Package
From a full priced game you would expect a decent lenghth campaign mode and a multiplayer mode, online or off. Well, none of these matches Force Unleashed. There is only one gamemode here to speak of and that's the painfully short campaign mode, with lasts only 6-8 hours. There are 6 different locations, but the levels are all designed the same way and it gets pretty repetative after you spend a while playing the game. That doesnt mean that there is nothing to explore though. There are hidden holocrons, 15 in each area, which unlock new lightsaber colours, new outfits or credits called "Force Spheres". These are bound into the ingame leveling system, which allowes you to buy new combos, force abilitys or character abitlitys. You gain XP by killing enemys and even more XP by killing enemys in a specific way like crushing them against a wall. Fill up your XP bar and you will get a levelup, which again gives you "Force Spheres" to unlock special abilitys. After you've completed the game you can play through the quest once again with all your powers from the first run.No, none of that is wildly imaginative but it adds some to the game's dephth.
A minor dissapointment is the absents of any kind of multiplayer mode.
Package rating: 5
Gameplay
Gameplay is as simple as it gets. You have one button for jumping, one for force push, one for force lightning, one for force grip and one for your lightsaber attcks. You can bring these together in combos, but its hard to differ them from each other, because they tender look the same. There is also the feature to lock on targets and block enemy attacks but these options are almost never needed. Most of the time you find yourself running through the linear levels killing enemys with the same combos over and over again.
The highlight of each are are the bossfights, but these don't fare better. It basically is made of 2 parts: Bashing the enemy with your combos over and over again, and then finish him with a boring quick time event.
Overall the gameplay gets pretty boring after a while and the only thing that is still fun, even in the 3rd run, is throwing enemys around like ragdolls.
Gameplay rating: 6
Sound
The soundtrack is just what you would expect from a LucasArts production. The epic John Williams score Star Wars is known for kicks in at all the right moments giving you the feeling of realy being a part of a Star Wars movie.
Combat sound is less short of amazing. The lightsaber always sound different depending on what ground it hits, or better said what enemy.
The voicework is pretty mixed. Breathtaking when Darth Vader starts speaking, and ridicolous when the emperor kicks in.
Sound rating: 9
Graphics
Using the Ronin Engine for effects and animation, the Euphoria Engine for the physics and DMM for realtime rendered deformed material Star Wars: The Force Unleashed looks great. Count in the fantastic art design of each location and you realy begin to see where the developer team put their most efford in. The only dissapointing point about the graphics is the level of detail, it's just too low. But if you throw an enemy through a big room and see how he reacts with cold steel all this is forgiven.
Graphics rating: 8,5
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is not the overwhelming experience the developers praised it. The good graphic- and sounddesign can not let vanish that the game's dephth just isn't very big, the leveldesign is too repetative and the gameplay is just simple buttonmashing. Some more of the game's credit should have defenetly gone into the gamedesign instead of the gameplay and this is why The Force Unleashed is just an average game.
OVERALL RATING: 6,9
~Review made by Ridley
and i understand y u didn't give it a good rating but... 
