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STAR WARS : THE FORCE UNLEASHED |
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*kssh* The
Force is strong with David Hollingworth *kssh* |
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It's impossible
- for us at least - to actually sit down in
front of a Star Wars game and not feel that
first little thrill of excitement as the
music blares over the top of that now iconic
text crawl. The one that opens The Force
Unleashed informs you that Darth Vader is
still up to his Jedi hunting tricks just
after the Clone Wars come to an end; he's
trying to hunt down one of the last of the
Jedi, hiding amongst the still cranky
Wookies of the arboreal planet Kasshyyk. |
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And then the
game lets you play him. |
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As a gambit to show you the
full potential of the Dark side of the Force, there are
few more appropriate options. And potential there is, as
Vader barely needs to even raise his lightsaber to
defeat his enemies, the hordes of leaping and pouncing
Wookies that stand between you and your prey. You can
push them aside with ease, pick them up like ragdolls
and smash them together, and you barely ever run out of
force energy. |
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And if a few random
Stormtroopers happen to get in your way, well, there's
more my friend where they came from.
However , the phenomenal
cosmic power doesn't last that long - once you best that
first Jedi in a pretty destructive boss fight, Vader
discovers what he was hiding. The Jedi had a son, even
more powerful in the ways of the force, and once the
Jedi is dead Vader takes him as his apprentice. |
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The truth is that having now
played the game, we really cannot wait to get back to
it, and September is a long bloody time away! A part of
that is of course that this is simply one of the
prettiest games we've played in a long time, but a
bigger pull - for a Star Wars fan, anyway - is that it
really does have that epic feel to it. And not just in
the gameplay, either (though, we do admit, the first
time we blew a TIE Fighter to pieces using nothing more
than the POWER OF OUR MIND we may have a giggled
maniacally). The story is suitably wide in scope; Vader
is training his apprentice so that they can one day take
on the |
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Emperor,
which was exactly what Vader wanted to
do with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.
Knowing that you're a part of that great
tale is pretty neat. |
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And, of
course, it's not all sore on the eyes. |
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The
brilliant combination of the Havok
physics engine and Digital Molecular
Matter simply cannot be overstressed.
All of those videos of Stormtroopers
holding hands as you try to fling them
about might have looked a bit funny, but
it rarely happens in the game. It can,
but the pacing of the game makes it more
of an aside than a feature - a stunning
technical achievement of an aside, yes,
but not the focus of the action. Rather,
you're able to stride down corridors,
flinging control panels, pushing aside
barriers and other cover, arcing
lightning into the environment and then
throwing it at your enemies... the sheer
combinations of things to do and ways to
do them is almost boggling. The frame
rate, even at this stage, is super solid
on the 360, and the environments we
looked at either free of drop-in or
well-designed enough so that it's never
noticed. |
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The controls
play well, too, and are also suggestive
that simply hacking away with your saber
is not the prime way to face down your
enemies. The controls combine well, so
that you can use the trigger to lift
something, then move it with your
thumbsticks; if you want to throw it,
simply point a stick in the direction
you want to throw and release the
trigger. With just a little practice, we
were flinging enemies literally over our
shoulder, or simply bring them closer so
that they could be impaled on the
elegant Jedi weapon of choice. |
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You may have
already worked this out (and we did give
it away somewhere up near the first
paragraph) but we're really looking
forward to getting back into
Starkiller's dark Jedi shoes. We're
expecting some very good things - once
again - from The Force Unleashed, and
we're now expecting it to deliver. |
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For Further
Information, please buy a copy of Atomic @ myNEWS.com
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