I was very torn on reviewing this game...
The game belongs in the basic button mashing, kill everything you see, get powerups category. Which, for Star Wars, is pretty awesome, right?!
Well, let me get right down to it.
The GOOD:
The Force Unleashed is not just a tagline. The starting powers your character has are phenomenal, and they get stronger as the game carries on. You'll unleash combos that, really, every Star Wars fan has secretly wished to see on screen- it advances far past any of the movie action. Force Lightning, Choke, Push, etc etc...all done in glorious (gorious?) detail.
The storyline is interesting - you are Darth Vader's apprentice. Now I realize that for this game to be canonical at all, your character can't survive and do anything important; however, I've heard that there are multiple endings, and that there is a big twist in the game. No, I haven't seen it, and yes, I really want to!
The game is easy. To me, that's a plus- may not be for everyone, but it definitely made the game easier to appreciate from my perspective. You get multiple autosaves, and you respawn from the last saved point. To express how easy it truly is....well, if you enter a room and there are maybe 2 mid-level bad guys, you get an autosave. If there's a boss, you get an autosave from the beginning, at the cutscenes, and when you find a holocron (which you always see in plain sight). The creators of the game know when your character is about to die, too, so whenever your health goes below 50% you have a pretty high chance of randomly walking into a health kit during the middle of any given battle.
The BAD:
Oh....man.
I wish I knew where to start.
I guess the most obvious problem with the game is that the camera is literally always awkward. Remember how I said you had to button-mash? That's because you need to hit an enemy, and to make contact it can take up to 10 button presses. If you're just walking around, the main character is seriously blocking the camera- I can't ever see what's ahead of me! I just stumble around and then see half of a bad guy appearing mostly off screen and then I button mash- it's the only real thing you can do.
Bosses are even worse. Cutscenes where you have to win a duel usually end with the characters kicking off from each other- and when you reenter the battle mode, the characters are inverted, sometimes. So let's say you win the duel, and your character very obviously kicks the other character off to the left. So right when you gain control of your guy again, you dash off to the left to chase the opponent- except, eh, maybe he'll be off to the right. It switches without notice, during the same battle.
If you're in a corner, one of two things will happen- if you're in the front corner of the screen, you'll literally see half of your characters head and have no idea what you're doing. If you're in the back corner, you won't be able to tell which character is yours, so you'll constantly be trying to get away from the corner only to find out that you had your opponent trapped.
The controls....oh god. The CONTROLS! By the third mission I was literally like, "Why are they giving me more powers? I won't remember that combination. Wait, that's....so I press this three times and then press this other button and then HOLD that button? But if I just press it instead of holding it I get....this other power." I really only use maybe 3 powers throughout the game, out of something like 12 or more. The combos are simply too complicated to remember, and if you press a button, even the final button of the combination, too many times....it cancels out the combo. UGH!
Redundancy, though, is the most annoying problem. After one mission, hey, cool, you got the hang of it! After the second mission, okay, hey, now you're a real pro. No big. After the third mission, you just want to pay someone to play it so you can advance through the plot. Like I said, I'm halfway through, and I just turned it off because I don't have enough energy to run around killing things for half an hour, it's killing my brain cells.
Redundancy presents a huger problem than that, though! Maps. You have one tiny map in the corner of the screen, and you see a few blips that continue moving as you get closer to them- I guess to symbolize if you're going in the right direction or not. So you get out of the ship, run through a bunch of hallways that you can't tell apart, and get into a big battle- and then when you finish the battle, you have no idea where to start walking. Several times I've reached the second to final area, had a battle, and accidentally turned around and ran all the way back to the starting point. FRUSTRATING!!
Overall, give this game a whirl only if you're going to play it for about a half hour per day for a week or so. Otherwise it will get boring, FAST, and all the more frustrating. The plot is a must-see for Star Wars fans, however, so if you've seen the movies, live the experience through this game!