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- Rating:
- Price: $9.99 (Get It)
- Version: 1.0.9
- Developer: THQ Wireless
Bearing the same name as the console version, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the iPhone and iPod Touch is a simpler, less action-packed version. In SW: TFU, you use gestures to invoke Force powers to advance from scene to scene, getting past obstacles, destroying enemies, and solving puzzles. You play on the Dark Side as an apprentice to Darth Vader.
As the game start up, you’re asked if you want to enable sound, then you’re faced with the by now familiar Star Wars theme music and an intro scene telling the story at that point as it scrolls up your screen. The main menu lets you start a new game, and in the beginning you’ll only have access to the Story mode. Eventually you’ll unlock the other two modes; Chapters, which allows you to replay a specific chapter, and Survival which has you constantly battling to reach a high score. Survival is broken up into five Battles, and each one allows you to choose from Normal or Hard difficulty. Once you die, you’re presented with a screen of your results and statistics of the battle.
There’s also a journal in the menu, which is basically statistics that track kills, times died, favorite Force powers, and more. There’s also an in-game instructions, and you can change settings in the options menu. Options are the ability to raise and lower sound volume and reset game data.
The main menu is, at times, quite annoying. It doesn’t seem like it was specifically tailored to the iPhone and iPod Touch. First, you have to scroll the choice you want to the left and right, and the scrollable area that you have to touch is thin. Then you have to tap it once the choice you want is centered. Also, text throughout is very tiny and hard to read, and is in bad need of antialiasing. Choices like at the beginning to enable sound, or to go back in the menu, or to open the menu while playing, the text is tiny and flush against the edge of the screen, making them frustrating to tap. It’s just bad UI decisions all around.
As you play in Story mode, you advanced from scene to scene, using Force Powers, and more often than not you’ll come across cutscenes where dialogue can be read; there’s no actual spoken dialogue. Hard to see, but there, in the lower-right corner is a button that allows you to fast-forward conversations. For the most part the story is predictable and not terribly exciting. I grew up watching the original Star Wars when it came out, and I thoroughly enjoy the (pre-Episode 1) Star Wars. The story in the game just doesn’t do it.
As mentioned before, controls is done exclusively by gestures. If you’ve used mouse gestures before, then you’ll understand how this work. Gestures are created by drawing on the screen in a particular pattern or shape to invoke Force Powers that you want. For example, Force Heal is done by doing a counter-clockwise circle. Force Push is two fingers on the screen, drawing upwards. Force Pull is the opposite, two fingers dragged downwards. This is the entire game, you don’t control your character, or interact with anything.
Visually, it looks pretty good, although the method of using pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D characters and objects is an old one. The early Resident Evil games were known for this, as were other survival horror PC games such as Nocturne, the Blair Witch series, and more. Which is why the characters in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed look good, because they don’t need to do much of anything else in 3D. Each scene has a different camera angle, and while most of them are fine, some of them make it difficult to make out where you are, and which direction you’re likely to go; the developers went more for style than function. Due to this, the game feels disjointed as you advance.
The sound is fantastic, and I imagine the developers had access to the official Star Wars sound archives. Laser fire, force powers, and more are all familiar. The music score is equally impressive. There’s no doubt that the audio has the most production value in the game.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a big-name game with a lot of production value, but boring gameplay mechanics. Gesturing for Force Powers is fun the first dozen times you use it, but after that it becomes predictably repetitive. The puzzle element to the game is as mild as it gets, because the Force Powers you need to use in each scene are highlighted over the heads of enemies and objects. If they didn’t show you what Force Powers to use, though, it’d be a frustrating experience playing the game. The audio and music is the highlight of the game, but the rest is too gimmicky to be fun.
this game is so bad, you can’t walk around, it moves for you. No lightsaber battles, just swipe your finger and the game plays it self.