Review – Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

If you hate graphics, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Nintendo DS is your game.  Not only are the visuals horrible and antiquated, even by handheld standards, but you’ll spend most of your time looking down at the second screen anyway, choosing what you want your pixely Jedi to do.

It’s hard to figure if this game is a result of trying to port a more complex game to the DS and failing, or deciding to do too little and succeeding.  As mentioned above, you won’t be looking at the eyesore on the top screen all that much as you’ll be tapping and dragging icons on the lower touch screen.  Then you have the pleasure of looking back up and watching your Jedi wave his lightsaber at a wookie the exact same way he did the last ten times.  Or gasp in amazement as an ill-defined piece of metal slides towards a slow-moving droid and possibly touches it, causing it to explode (or perhaps the robot decided to self-destruct so it could escape the game it was trapped in).

In lieu of proper combat controls, odd mini-games are thrown into the mix during boss battles.  Who needs a well-balanced fighting system when you can rotate a lightsaber or drag “force” spheres into a whirlpool instead?  These would make more sense if they were extras (a collection of Mos Eisley Cantina Bar Games, perhaps?), not as the main weapon in your battle to defeat an enemy you’ve spent five minutes not enjoying a level to fight.

If you want a better Star Wars game for your DS, try Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga instead.  It’s a fun game with a good sense of humour that rewards fans of the series with unlockable extras, satisfying hack ‘n slash gameplay, and good-looking cut scenes.  You read that right – the cut scenes in Lego Star Wars are graphically superior to The Force Unleashed.  Review Over.

1 star (out of five)

Take the feeling you have while looking at this screenshot and multiply it a hundredfold. That's what it feels like to play "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed" for Nintendo DS.

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