Add Star Wars to anything from a USB drive to a coffee mug and I get a little excited. It’s an excitement mixed with a hard learned truth: some Star Wars stuff is shit. So I was surprised by how enthusiastically I raised my virtual hand when TMG passed out review games from The Mac Gamer’s Super Secret English HQ. Star Wars Force Unleashed: Sith Edition (SWFU:SE) was among them, and I couldn’t help it.
The title alone suggests the quenching of a thirst that I’ve had since I first devoured the original trilogy on Laser Disc (yes, Laser Disc). It was a yearning to know – nay, FEEL – the force. To abuse its powers in seemingly limitless combinations, to answer that old schoolyard question of “What would you do if you were a Jedi/Sith?”. I admit most of my answers mirrored the wonderful cameo that Patrick Stewart did on Extras. I could hardly expect that a Lucas Arts game would allow me to strip girls naked, but it would unleash the force, which seemed like more than enough. Except it wasn’t. And nothing was unleashed.
The premise of the game is superb, and any game that weaves its way through the gaps of Star Wars lore is a welcome plus for me. SWFU:SE fleshes out the story of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and how Vader uses him for personal ends against the Emperor. Given the quality of the writing, I desperately wish that the script writer for SWFU:SE had penned the script for Phantom Menace.
The game boasts some truly superb artwork. Much of the gameplay environment is destructible, and what I saw of the game running at 1920×1200 looked gorgeous, even though my iMac ran it with jitters. Speaking of which, I reviewed this game on a 2008 3.06 Core 2 Duo iMac, which is a competent if not fantastic system. The game was utterly unplayable at the highest resolution and I ended up playing on my secondary 15” monitor just to get a decent frame rate. The only option that you can tweak is to toggle off high detail, which helps a little. I realize that this is a physics-heavy game and that all my Wookie flinging into chasms takes a bit of machine muscle, but I interpreted this as the first sign that SWFU:SE for the Mac wasn’t a top-notch port.
One crippling problem is control. Since SWFU:SE is a console port, I expected my issues to stem from using a keyboard and mouse, but that wasn’t actually half bad. In fact, having played the console version after this review, I think that force gripping enemies and whipping them about with my mouse is much more gratifying than doing so with a controller. Well, gratifying when I could properly target them – the game suffers from some horrifically imprecise targeting mechanics. There’s so much stuff on the screen that begs to be picked up, force pushed, and gripped to bludgeon enemies with, half the time I mistakenly targeted a box instead of an enemy, or I ignored the enemy closest to me and targeted one farther out.
In some of the more frantic fight sequences with dozens of enemies that swarm on your position, I found myself targeting a fucking pipe while some droid finished me off with a few blaster shots. I found this infuriating, and it made me want to hurl something at someone. What’s even sadder is that the only force which I truly felt was unleashed was this very force grip that caused most of my problems. Sure, there are several other powers that you can unlock and level, but I found it hardly worth the bother. Force Lightning was basically a stun – a stun! – and with it I could only pump showers of sparkling light into foes so they would freeze for a bit and then return to fight me again. I understand the need to broaden the fighting mechanism, but, frankly, shooting bolts of lightning into a three-foot-tall Jawa should fucking destroy him. Poof. Gone. And goodbye.
Force Push also makes its appearance, and it’s fun except that it uses the same targeting system that I criticized earlier. And since that sucks half of the time I sent massive, undulating waves of forceness into the menacing gap of air that exists between enemies. This limits its usefulness. Similarly, the light-saber throw is underwhelming. It felt pointless since it had all the gravitas of tossing a frisbee. And so the only power that I suggest leveling is Force Repulse, which is basically idiot-proof because you radiate force energy in a circle around you, catching everything in its wake.
The AI was pretty inconsistent too, but I beat the game nonetheless. At times the enemy would swarm upon me like a colony of ants, other times I could walk up to an enemy who ignored me until I was very nearly on him. Likewise, some boss battles felt truly challenging and satisfying because they required a God of War-like button matching sequence. Other boss fights such as the Star Destroyer felt overwhelmingly repetitive since it basically involves following the on screen prompts as you force grip the destroyer and slowly bring it down. Watching The Apprentice wiggle his hands felt like he was trying to sign to someone on the ship.
When I sat to write this review I felt a bit like the fanboy who stood in line for hours to watch the Phantom Menance premier. I want to justify myself just like the fanboy who defends Jar Jar Binks, even though he knows it’s a futile argument. I want to defend this game, and I want to care enough to mention that it’s the “Sith Edition” with (gasp!) three extra missions. But I can’t. Three extra missions of a poorly ported game is like an extra feature on the Phantom Menace DVD that offers deleted scenes of Jar Jar Binks.
After all that pain, I really commend the game’s story writers, but they have nothing to do with the Mac port. If the story intrigues you, either rent it on a console or wait for a fan film that splices together SWFU:SE’s cutscenes.
Gosh, when I first found out about the game, I was so excited to play it. Flash forward to today, haven’t even saw a gameplay video, let alone play it, I so want to play it on a PS3 though I unfortunately do not own one… Gonna try it on PC, it’s a real shame they don’t do native ports and use the friggin’ piece of you-know-what Cider to make ports, just hate it…
Given the physics heavy nature of the game and the stalling tactics LucasArts was using to put off bringing Force Unleashed to computers by saying computers don’t have fast enough CPUs, or at least not sufficiently threaded, I think this game would have been a good candidate for OpenCL GPU accelerated physics. It wouldn’t help most Macs, but could be useful for iMacs with the HD4850 or Mac Pros and PCs with multiple GPUs since even a low-end secondary GPU like the GT120 makes a good GPGPU accelerator. Maybe for Force Unleashed II?
The PC, at least, is a launch platform for Force Unleashed II so it’ll presumably be more optimized rather than a port after the fact, which will hopefully lead to better performance.
To A. Emre Ünal:
Force Unleashed for Mac was a native port, because Aspyr was responsible for porting both the Mac version and the PC version simultaneously. Cider wasn’t used and the PC version has been reported to have performance issues as well.
Yayyyyyy !
A Macintosh gaming website with REAL opinions that don’t bend over & pull thier pants down to kiss the mod’s ass ….
And yess — I’ll be buying this game, despite the genrally negative reviews.