Beating up on Balrog isn't a hate crime.

Wow, the year's almost over. Good riddance. It's been a pretty tumultuous year for myself, and I'm sure a few others.

If 2009 was a person, I'd kick it in the balls, repeating my attack until the poor beast becomes sterile.

Hopefully 2010 brings us all much joy and tranquility.

Time for a review:

I've been taking a break from the fighting game arena to play more lengthy, involving action games.

Before I wasted all my time on assassin's creed II, I was on the verge of completing a few other games.

We'll start with the force unleashed.

I'm a huge star wars fan, I even sat through the prequel trilogy in all of it's overproduced, underacted glory. They're not particularly great films, though episode III deserves some kind of merit, since it was the most enjoyable out of the three.

once I heard about the force unleashed, and how it's supposed to bridge the gap between revenge of the sith and a new hope, I was instantly intrigued. Let's backtrack to late 2008 when it came out. I enjoyed the demo immensely, and had contemplated many times on picking it up.

Finally, over a year later I decided to grab a copy for 12 bucks.

that feeling of wonder and nostalgia washed over me, thinking to myself, "wow, this game is canon to the series? Color me excited."

Then we get to the vader part. It was depressingly disappointing. You can't do much with vader when compared to starkiller. You'd think vader would be given the abilities to do pretty much anything a sith can do. But no, all you can do is use your light saber, jump once, not even a double jump, force lighting and force grip.

I was in shock at how amazing the voice acting was. The voice acting in this game beasts the acting in the entire prequel trilogy.

The story is engaging, and unfortunately, is the only thing that keeps me playing this mess of a game.

The first couple of levels are okay. It doesn't start getting retarded til' you reach the junk planet.

By then, you're starkiller, you may have leveled up a few times before you reached this part of the game. By this time I started sperlunking my controller without a bungie chord or parachute, I invented new curse words, and pretty much argued with the screen like a bouncer at a punk show.

You'll die more times before you reach a checkpoint. There are a ton of unfair deaths, imperial soldiers and guards seem to have the upper-hand on a supposedly indestructible warrior of the force.

You'd think that with all these powers, you'd be able to plow through these guys. Not even with decked out upgrades would you be able to succeed this feat because they're always gonna throw you some wacky AT-AT walker that uses magnets to mimic your force powers.

Royal Guards take you out like a flyswatter, storm troopers and the like actually have ability. I remember in the films, these were just common banter for jedi to plow through. Not in this game.

There are also really ugly camera and pop up issues.

The platforming is dumb because I couldn't figure out how to get to the other side without dying 100 times, then finding out that I needed an air dash upgrade.

What. The. *#@+!!!!???

And here's the worst part in the entire game:

That stupid #*@+ing star destroyer sequence where you have to spend like, an hour and a half trying to force it down with your force powers while hordes and hordes of tie fighters try to take you out.

Not only that, the sequence was flawed because it'll signal you when all the tie fighters have been destroyed. But sometimes it'll signal you while there's still a random tie fighter flying around and you can do anything because your too busy taking down the star destroyer. And you'll probably end up dying, or canceling the sequence only prolonging the agony.

There are also plotholes in the game and in order to access them you need to buy the missions (ex. starkiller talks about his involvement in the jedi trails before he reaches the death star.)... I guess "digital molecular matter" was all these developers were thinking about, and even that's half assed. You mean I can take down a tree with force powers but I can't slice a random stone? I can't split a small shrub in half?

This game does more wrong than it does right.

It's an okay game for it's current price tag and story, but other than that, developers thought they'd bitch out on the actual GAMEPLAY and focus on "digital molecular matter" and running the game on three different physics engines.

I'm getting a migraine just thinking about it.

tl;dr

Game sucks, story's good, you have to pay to play plotholes in the story when it should've BEEN added to the game already.

This game easily deserves a 5 maybe less, but if you're a sentimental star wars fan it gets a 6.