Lucas Arts' 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed™'—  Epic and Beyond.
The Epic Star Wars saga will inevitably continue in the latest offering from Lucas Arts Entertainment Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which casts players such as Darth Vader's "Secret Apprentice" and promises to unveil new revelations about the entire Star Wars galaxy. The rather expansive story, created under very very close direction from George Lucas, is set during the largely unexplored time period between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. In it, players will assist the iconic villain in his quest to rid the universe of Jedi— and face decisions that could change the course of their destiny. As its name implies, The Force Unleashed completely re-imagines the scope and scale of the Force by taking full advantage of newly developed technologies that will be seen and experienced for the first time: Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), by Pixelux Entertainment, and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd. Paired with the powerful Havok Physics? system, these new technologies create game play only possible on the new generation of consoles. DMM incorporates the physical properties of anything in the environment so that everything reacts exactly like it should— wood breaks like wood, glass shatters like glass, plants on the planet Felucia bend like plants on the planet Felucia would, and more. Meanwhile, as a revolutionary behavioral-simulation engine, euphoria enables interactive characters to move, act and even think like actual human beings, adapting their behavior on the fly and resulting in a different payoff every single time.

The Force Unleashed is Lucas Arts' first internally developed title for next-generation consoles, and it represents the first in-game collaboration of talents and technology between Lucas Arts and Industrial Light & Magic, two companies now finally under one roof at the new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio district. Okay... we already knew that principle characters from the Star Wars films will be involved in Unleashed's story— Vader, Leia, Shak Ti and even Bail Organa— and that the game will take place between Episode III and Episode IV. As it turns out, the developer is following George Lucas' rules of story telling: love interest, a mentor, redemption, a robot side-kick, etc., so you can expect all of those staples to make an appearance. Your character will also undergo trials and tribulations as Vader's secret apprentice, leading you to become instrumental in certain events which occur in the classic films. We don't know much, other than the fact that your character is involved somehow with the rebellion, but you can probably surmise the rest from there.

The action approach to the game is a step away from the combat in the Jedi Knight games, which some (including yours truly) were making obvious comparisons to when the first details began to arrive. Now after seeing Unleashed in action and nearing completion, there look to be more similarities with recent third-person action button-masher franchises. But third-person action is no stranger to the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars: Battlefront took its cues from the Battlefield series, and that turned out to be one hell of a game. For Unleashed, it looks like the cues are coming from God of War. The game has QuickTime events a-plenty during a rancor battle on the planet Felucia. With the correct combination of buttons, a cinematic shows the hero tossing his light saber into the eye socket of a rancor, bringing it to the ground (think Cyclops battles from GOW). You can upgrade abilities (think Athena's blades in GOW), which we didn't get a chance to see in action, by collecting force points when you destroy opponents. At the end of each level you can invest these points into a variety of traits: force powers, combos, talents, increased damage, and extra health, to name a few. And these upgrades will help a lot, considering force powers will be the meat of the game play. Of the many powers available to your character, there are two abilities we've seen the most of: force push and lightning. Push— as you can see in some of the game play videos— uses the force to literally push a variety of objects, hurling crates (or sometimes storm troopers) towards enemies. Lightning seems to be the more devastating of the two, especially during the rancor battle— you can pick up a Felucian native, shock him so full of lightning that he turns into a bomb, and then hurl him at the huge beast.

Other levels, like a TIE fighter construction facility or Raxis Prime (a planetary junkyard), each have their own take on the physics engine's rules. On Felucia, a force push causes the mushroom-like trees to wave back and forth or you can cut them all down. The TIE fighter construction facility allows you to grab TIE fighters out of the air and toss them at enemies, and Raxis Prime has broken engines lying around which you can pick up, use force lightning to reignite, and use as a propellant weapon. But until we get the controller in our hands to find out just how much interactivity there really is in each level, whether these objects are Unleashed's version of Half-Life 2's plethora of explosive barrels, with nothing physics-related happening unless triggered with these specific items, remains to be seen. It's also hard to gauge the difficulty of the game or the intelligence of the A.I. at this point. Sure, enemies have behavioral patterns in the coding, but in game play demonstrations, they don't look to serve as much more than fodder for your character— which, granted, we've only seen in god mode— as he travels towards the next QuickTime event or level boss. We have yet to see a complete level from point A to B, so how linearly the levels progress is not currently apparent. And with no mention of multiplayer components from the developer, Unleashed still has plenty of curiosities to put to rest before its release. UB


    

Home | UPBEAT Staff | Contact Us | Submit Content

Copyright ©2008 Bridget Petrella Media Relations. All Rights Reserved.