CUTTING EDGE: The Force Unleashed

By VikingBrent

For as long as I can remember, I've sacrificed g'yoklings and prayed to The Moon Mother for two things: to wield a lightsaber using the Wii remote and to play a Star Wars title that doesn't suck. When Star Wars: The Force Unleashed makes planetary landfall on September 16th, all this shall come to pass.

Though recent winners like LEGO Star Wars have been a joy to play, I can still remember the dark times when LucasArts' only strategy was to fork their most famous IP into as many gaming sub-genres as possible. But things are different these days (the lack of a Star Wars-branded Guitar Hero edition proves this), and LucasArts is poised to dispatch a Star Wars title that not only delivers the goods with a blitzkrieg of force-powered-lightsaber-awesomeness but also may finally pay off on the promise of what next-gen titles are supposed to be.

Falling somewhere between episodes III and IV, the game's story follows the exploits of Darth Vader's secret apprentice: a menacing young lad who, along with his mentor, appears to be continuing on the grand ole' Sith tradition of backstabbing other Sith. This should provide the player with a decidedly unique look into not just the Star Wars universe but particularly the inner-workings of the Sith. What's bleed-from-the-eyes cool about the game's story is that its canon. As in official, as in approved and sanctioned by King Flannel himself.

It’s easy to recognize that games have a unique ability to blend the story-telling aspects of film or tv with an interactive experience provided by no other medium. Still, it’s encouraging to see a hugely successful film franchise like Star Wars entrust a game with delivering such an important addition to its established mythos. It will also be interesting to see if the events of this game, in turn, fold into the forthcoming live-action Star Wars television series.

As if playing a lightsaber-wielding Sith badass in a totally new addition to the SW timeline wasn't enough, TFU is also charting new territory in how players interact with the game, and how the game reacts to the player. With the Euphoria engine driving the bio-mechanical physics, and DMM or Digital Molecular Matter handling the (mostly destructive) interaction with the game world, LucasArts is delivering more than just a title that looks better. TFU represents a big step in the direction games are rapidly evolving: an AI-driven experience where the same thing doesn't happen twice and the player can do almost anything they can imagine.

Metal weakens and bends to the power of the Sith arts, glass shatters from the concussive shock-wave of force blasts, wood splinters and breaks as our protagonist uses ewoks as a battering ram (I hope, those furballs aren't good for anything else). And we haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet. Players will certainly know the power of the Darkside when they use it to levitate stormtroopers into the air and watch them flail in vain, grasping for anything and anyone to keep them from falling on their genetically identical heads.

What's impressive about all this is that its not baked character-animation, the game engine is pulling from a huge library of motion-capture data and applies animation on-the-fly to AI characters depending on what situation they're in. Similarly, the physical materials don't need to be traditionally animated, DMM understands the material's composition and relative strength then manipulates them in real time, according to what forces are acting on them. Nothing behaves the same way twice, no one reacts the same way twice, the game plays slightly differently every time you pick it up. That's next gen, and it’s about time.

I hope this title, and others like it, raises the bar for how developers approach game-interaction and what players expect a next-gen title to be. I hope this generation of console gaming is remembered as the era when the term "immersion" became as ubiquitous as "3D": not a feature games have, but simply what games are. And I also want to decapitate a whole squad of stormtroopers by boomerang throwing my wiimote around the living room. Yeah, that too.