I’m not going to do a detailed write up on this but I’ve always heard that The Force Unleashed was a really good set of Star Wars games that are still worth playing today, if not for the game at least for the story. That wasn’t my experience at all.
This is just my opinion and experience but the first game is awful to play in 2024. Most of your abilities miss the target every time. Picking up objects with the force has a 50% chance of picking up the wrong thing, sometimes from way off screen and often missing stuff in the foreground. Throwing them is also incredibly inaccurate, often times you’ll just throw things at walls or the sky. The combat isn’t balanced whatsoever and it’s basically unplayable at higher difficulties.
Your force grab and throw abilities make most enemies pointless and your light saber does surprisingly little damage even with upgrades. Far better to just bounce people off the wall. Then what’s worse is later on they introduce shields that stop you from using the force on some enemies. They do pretty much the same but with the lightsaber getting blocked. Rather than encouraging variety, they just leave a giant hole in the combat. It’s dreadful. The mechs are also ridiculous to engage and can’t be engaged in melee should they stomp you to death. The even worser part is, the story is 6/10 interesting and the boss battles are a mess.
Then the second game, oh boy. On PC it’s almost entirely broken. It crashes and most of the cutscenes don’t play unless you patch the game (I did) and even then, crashes happen often. I had about 10 over just 4-5 hours. Textures also glitch and slowdown is frequent. I played both games with a 60fps patch (necessary imo) and the performance issues exited with or without that patch. Awful.
The good news is the second game has a decent story and surprising visuals. The combat is much improved and a lot more balanced honestly. It’s just that the gameplay is incredibly dated. The whole game is mostly just go to room, door is locked, enemies appear, you kill them, door unlocks, repeat until boss fight. There’s also platforming here which is… bad. Inaccurate controls and imprecise movement makes that hell. So the second game is much better even with the issues, but I still barely had fun with it.
Seems to me like these games rode by on the gimmick of the dark side and extreme power. In their time, both games were pretty good. All of my friends seemed to like them. But in this year? I don’t think there’s any reason to play the first, and only novelty in the second. Just watch the cutscenes are movies.
I’m sure many people have nostalgia for this though. These games used to be more unique and the story was unusual for the time. Sadly we aren’t likely to see a continuation and finish to this series. Thoughts?
It was a euphoria engine showcase back in the day which really made it feel next gen without that as a wow factor I can see why it might not line up to it’s historical hype
I actually think both games look really good for when they were released. Even now, TFU2 looks really decent with facial animations. The graphics are a shining moment in both games but the PC port is absolutely broken and ruins the visuals of both. Plus being stuck at 30fps in an action game unless you use mods (that break some aspects of the game btw) is kind of disappointing. I wish EA would’ve given us a proper port or remaster by now
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Does the Wii version use motion controls? I’m assuming it does. If so, that would make way more sense and I can definitely see how it’d be way more fun to experience that way.
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I have a lot of nostalgia for The Force Unleashed, but even playing it back then I remember thinking the combat was kind of rough. I can only imagine how dated the gameplay must feel for someone picking it up for the first time these days. The idea of being this unstoppable Force-user was cool, but from what I remember the game struggled to live up to that promise. Like pulling down the Star Destroyer. It was everywhere in the marketing to show just how powerful you were going to be, but in the game itself it was just this tedious section that dragged on longer than it needed to. At least that’s how I remember it.
There are several sections like that actually in both games where you’re stuck in sequences for way too long. Both games have a habit of having you sit there mashing a button for 20-30 seconds before anything interesting happens on screen and it’s just not great when games nowadays have moved on from anything like this.
Totally agree. I bought these on sale earlier this year, and I was like, “THIS is what everyone kept recommending?”
They can be fun, but they’re PS2 God of War meets Star Wars. I think if you have no nostalgia for them, they’re 6.5/10 at best.
Older God of war games are a really good comparison, especially with the QTEs.
Oh, I agree. The older GoW games are perhaps my favorite of their era.
TFU1 was a lot of fun for me - I 100%ed it on Xbox and had a blast. I remember spending time learning all the moves and becoming a flowing river of death with the combos. The story was pretty cool at the time, but you have to realize it was only competing with the films at that point, and people were hungry for more Star Wars back then.
TFU2 was fucking garbage and I think I played it for all of 45 minutes before going “Nah”.
Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were miles better. It’s hard to say what they did so right compared to Force Unleashed but it’s a shame these ones sucked.
It’s easy for me to say why Jedi Outcast/Academy was better:
-more reactive combat(lightsaber combos based on your movement)
-force powers were more fun(You could do crazy combos with force powers that could be chained one after another)
-The enemies were more fun to fight.
-the characters and story were so much better
-The multiplayer was basically Unreal tournament with Jedi(Also you had multiplayer)
-MULTIPLAYER
-GTK radiant so you could build custom maps and stories.
In my memory people considered them meh at best but I had some fun. I remember the DS version in particular being pretty dope.
I also have good memories of it but was hesitant to replay in case it doesn’t hold up to them anymore.
Honestly the game play is very dated but nostalgia would go a long way to grease the wheels of this game to make it more entertaining. But I wouldn’t recommend playing on the harder difficulties and I wouldn’t play it on PC period unless you’re okay with some bad glitches. Either way they’re both short games so you’re really not wasting too much time to play them again even if they’re disappointing somewhat. It’s also still very fun to fling people around in both but especially the first game.
Hard agree. I vividly remember having such a blast tossing enemies around with the Force, but if I think just a little harder I remember the jank and clunk of everything around those moments. It was fun for the time, but with the sheer explosion of truly outstanding games in recent years it wouldn’t stand a chance of catching any attention if it was released today.
It’s worth playing just for the Darth Vader slaughtering of Wookies, imo. But yeah, the rest is pretty bad.
