Channard's Journal: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS3) reviewed.

Here's a tip for any games designers out there. If you're taking an existing franchise and introducing a hitherto unknown character, it's a not a good idea to spend the very first level of the game reminding fans how great the old character was. It didn't do Metal Gear Solid 2 any good, and it certainly doesn't do Star Wars: The Force Unleashed any favours either. TFU's first level has you playing as Darth Vader, striding purposefully around the planet of Kashykk, kicking wookie arse. Then all of a sudden the level ends, and Vader is relegated to the position of co-conspirator. Instead, you end up playing as Galen Marek, Vader's apprentice, who looks like he was kicked out of a nu-metal band for being too angsty. Granted, Lucasarts never said Vader would be the game's main character, but you can't help but feel that The Force Unleashed would have been a better game if Vader had taken centre stage.

Fortunately, Marek, or 'Starkiller' as he's also known, does prove to be a halfway sympathetic character. It's clear from the very beginning that, while he does have all the power of a dark jedi, he also has doubts about his role as Vader's apprentice. But he doesn't really have much choice in the matter, so off he wanders, doing all those dirty jobs Vader can't be arsed doing himself. Which is where you come in. Playing as Starkiller, you've been tasked with hunting down those few rogue Jedi who weren't killed off at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Naturally, you can't just send them a polite message challenging them to a one on one duel. Instead, you have to roam across a variety of levels, using your force powers to dispatch a legion of minor foes before finally taking on each Jedi. The game's locales include a giant junkyard, a mushroom filled planet, an Imperial shipyard and more. Although a couple of levels do end up being repeated, something you wouldn't usually expect from a Lucasarts game.

But what of the Force Powers you have at your disposal? A lot the buzz surrounding The Force Unleashed has been about these powers. And they are indeed pretty damn cool. New powers are unlocked as the game progresses, but right from the word go you can pick up objects, people, and even small spaceships and hurl them around with great abandon. Some of the enemies will even try to jump out of the way of flying objects, or grab onto things to avoid being thrown, which is fairly impressive to witness. But there's a problem - specifically, the game's auto-targeting system hates you with a vengeance. So much so that there's a good chance that it will lock on something other than the object or person you were trying to grab onto. And given that there's no way to manually select a target, this becomes a real source of frustration. How difficult would it have been for Lucasarts to let you choose the target you wanted to grab? Or at the very least cycle through the targets on screen? Not very, I suspect.

In fact, that's The Force Unleashed through and through. For every cool feature that makes you grin like an idiot, there's a corresponding problem or glitch that takes you out of the game. Here's another one, a feature that was shown off in the tech demos that Lucasart bandied around before we even got a look at the game proper. When you thrown an object at something, the item smashes or breaks in a realistic manner. So instead of just crumbing in a scripted manner, a tree will splinter, leaving chunks of wood everwhere. And you can restart the level, smash the tree again, and it will always smash in a slightly different way. Pretty awesome, eh? At least it would be if the debris didn't disappear right in front of your eyes about five seconds after it landed. Yes, all the supposed realism - well, as realistic as a Star Wars game can get - that Lucasarts had been going on about goes right out of the window. I can understand that having loads of chunks of wood and glass lying around would slow the game's engine down, but the game could at least wait till they were out of view before magicking them away to become one with the force.

Here's another example. The game's storyline is, by and large, very well written. Perhaps because of, or in spite of, the fact that George Lucas had a hand in it. There are plenty of twists and Starkiller does grow as a character, and you do find yourself wondering what's going to happen next. But the game also features one of the most blatantly shoe-horned in love interests ever, an Imperial pilot by the name of Juno Eclipse. She's bland, boring and has no real purpose other than to fly Starkiller's ship, the Rogue Shadow. She's not funny, she's not clever or interesting in any way at all. And if that wasn't bad, she has the worst voice-acting I've heard in a long, long time. And then there's the quick time events - I could go on for ages about how these have no place in modern day games. But suffice to say, there is no reason this earth to require you to complete some stupid reaction timer test in order to dispatch a boss, when you've just spent the last five minutes throwing objects at it and dodging its attacks.

The Force Unleashed is a disappointing game. Not because it's a bad game through and through - it's not. It certainly looks great, the music's suitably Star Wars-y, and when things are going your way it is fun. But then you run into another problem and suddenly the game's a whole less enjoyable than it was a couple of minutes ago. Then tack on the fact that there's no multiplayer mode, and you're looking at a game that's worth a weekend's rental at best. It's not the worst game ever, but it could have been so much better.