Incoming from Comic Con: Hands-On with The Force Unleashed

"Force Unleashed" as everyone has called it, was a fantastic. The demo was very different from my time with Dead Space. Instead of the one-on-one experience of you and the booth-worker inside a secluded area from the convention, it was you and the booth-worker and a large crowd of people in middle of the exhibition hall. When I would brutally kill a Stormtrooper, people would cheer. It was exhilarating.

First off, for those of you that have been watching this game, yes. It is as good as you've been expecting, maybe better. I would go almost as far to say that this combat is more satisfying than that of God of War. By the end of each battle, you've destroyed so much of the environment you know you aren't coming back there.

The demo starts out where you are in a star destroyer and you have to kill all rebels and imperial troopers alike.

"Leave no witnesses. The emperor must not know of your existence."

Awesome. In other words, go nuts. Have fun. The first room explains how to use your force telekinesis and then takes you into a room with a ton of imperial soldiers. The booth-workers did a phenomenal job of telling you a new way to kill your enemies with every mob encountered. The first trick was simply throwing an object into an enemy. There were actually two ways to do this: one was the slower method of pushing an object forward and letting go of the force so that momentum would do all of the work for you. The second one was to use force push on the object, sending it flying in the direction you have it aimed in at very high velocities. The second method was much more expensive but effective for quickly dispatching foes in the middle of combat. You would control telekinesis by using the right analog stick for the x and y axis and the left analog stick for the z axis.

The force meter regenerated very quickly. It always regenerates a small amount but when you lay off the force for a moment it regenerates incredibly fast. The most interesting part was that you could actually go into the "negatives" with your force meter, requiring your meter to regenerate longer than usual. It was hard for me to know what I did to get into the negatives, but it always seemed to be after I really started to abuse my powers.

Force Lightning was also something that could get used willy-nilly. You could shock enemies to death, or shock objects that you throw with telekinesis into your enemies as electric bombs. You could even pick up an enemy, impale them by throwing you lightsaber into them, shock them with force lightning, and then throw them into a crowd as a lightning bomb. It was beautifully gruesome.

You could always pick up soldier and throw them, no matter how much health they had. Being able to abuse enemies in such a way wasn't as advantageous as I thought it would be because you always fight large hoards of enemies.

There was a quick force push that was good for quickly knocking enemies away without really taking the time to aim. You could also charge it for a much larger force push. The left trigger was force dash, which was very nice for running around or dodging enemy attacks. The defend button would completely keep you still but you would deflect all projectiles. The best use of defend would be when your force meter is out and you need to take a moment to recharge. There was also a lock-on target button but I never even used it because I didn't feel that I needed to.

I found myself using the lightsaber a surprising amount less than the telekinesis. There were just too many enemies to rely on the lightsabers short range for dispatching enemies. This probably wouldn't have been the case if I relied on some of the more advanced combos, like ending a sword slash with a powerful area of effect force push or charging the lightsaber with force lightning that would arc to other enemies as I slashed entirely different ones.
Another neat trick was by pressing the "slash" and "jump" buttons simultaneously would initiate a cinematic throw that would instantly kill an enemy.

The vicious ways you annihilate your opponents felt almost like the game should be "M" rated, but managed to stay Teen. Your enemies never bleed, they're just heavy on rag-doll physics.

There environments were really destructible. You can rip it apart to throw parts of it at your enemies, or you can lift a beam up in the path of a tie-fighter to cause it to crash and explode.

I found out from one of the developers there that the reverse lightsaber style was so that you could see his lightsaber at all times while you were running around, as a constant reminder that you are a Sith badass.

At the end of the demo, you fight a hoard of imperial soldiers alongside an AT-ST walker. You damaged it by stunning it with lightning, hitting it with air combos, or throwing enemies right into it. At the end, you had to defeat it by inputting a sequence of buttons in a God of War style execution sequence where you cut the freaking AT-ST in half.

The Force Unleashed is something new. Some games have had telekinesis and lots of games have had swordplay. What makes this game unique is the synergy between everything. Every enemy and every object is a weapon. All of your force powers can some how be used in conjunction with one another. I would say that The Force Unleashed is the Jazz Band of the stylish action genre that God of War and Devil May Cry act as precise orchestras in.

Nick L.