Gaming with Greystone:
Gamer Review:
Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Well it’s time to dust off that retractable light up lightsaber that’s been sitting in your closet for about 10 years and embrace the dark side. Trying to have a good Star Wars jedi/sith game is like hoping for a good Batman game. The developers and team may have a good idea where they want to take the game but it just doesn’t give you the experience you hope for. Well The Force Unleashed (TFU) thankfully doesn’t suffer from that problem. Now while I’ll have to admit I’m not a big SW fan (but I’m familiar with the movies), I find that TFU actually pulled me into the SW universe like none of the previous SW games I’d played ever did. TFU actually made me want to go out and buy the complete SW movie collection just so I could get more (my friend can attest to that). As soon as the game started out with that classic John Williams score, with the yellow text scrolling up the screen, I knew that it was going to be an awesome game. Heck, when I was watching the cut scenes I forgot I was even playing a video game. It was like seeing the missing SW episode. Sure it looked great, but how did it play you ask.
The gameplay like most of the rest of the game was pretty dang solid. Using force powers felt like you’d been doing it all your life. I mean I even had a bit of a geek moment going around the first level force choking Wookies. I have to admit that trying to direct force push can be a little frustrating when fighting enemies, though. The force powers were so easy and fun to do that most of the time I forgot I even had a lightsaber and really only used it as a back-up weapon whenever I ran out of force energy. One of the problems I had was despite having all my force stats leveled up I still wished my force energy meter would replenish faster than it did. I mean when you have force grab and force lightening you don’t need anything else. All you quick-time event lovers should have fun killing the bosses/mini-bosses because it’s full of it. The only down side or good side (depending how you think of it) is that each different mini-boss has its own QTE but it is the same for each of the same creatures.
Something else that I wished they would have changed, but I can understand from a creators stand point, is that there are basically only 5 different levels. As Vadar’s apprentice he sends you to a couple different planets in search for jedi. Once you find yourself on the receiving end of Darth Vadar’s rage, you then go back to the same planets, now overrun with storm troopers, and try to liberate them. Even though there is only 5 unique levels it still does not take away from the beautifully detailed levels themselves. Probably my most favorite level is going through the Death Star and witnessing the inner workings of it.
Overall, I think the force is strong with this one and I give it 4 Boop BOOPS out of 5.
Crackdown: In anticipation for Crackdown 2 I figured the only way to tell if I truly wanted to buy it when it came out was to check out the first one first. Crackdown is a third-person shooter sandbox game. Before I played Crackdown I thought games like Spider-man 2 or inFamous were true sandbox games (which in their own regard are) but Crackdown is like a parent dropping their kid off at the beach then driving to the nearest mall to enjoy some alone time. You literally get dropped off into an open world and are told, “Have fun and do whatever you want.” Ok not LITERALLY but basically. Right at the beginning you have open access to go anywhere you want to go and kill whoever you want to kill. There are 3 islands run by 3 different gangs with your police HQ directly in between them all. The 3 different gang ethnicities are Mexican, Chinese, and Russian. The islands, in that order, are also slightly more difficult than the last. What the game wants you to do is eliminate all signs of gang activity from the islands. Each island has 1 head honcho which you can get to by killing off his 12 lieutenants’. That is the only thing linear about this game.
There are a variety of weapons which you collect from enemies and take to one of your scattered respawn spots to be added to your inventory. Despite having a dozen different guns in your weapon inventory you can only carry 2 at a time, not including grenades. Of course, once you find the massive machine gun and heat seeking rocket launcher you won’t find yourself using any other weapons throughout the game. Your character also has a handful of special attributes that you level up by doing things within those specific attributes boundaries. If I remember correctly the attributes are melee combat, explosives, driving, marksman, and endurance. So for example whenever you kill enemies using some kind of explosive means you get explosive points which go to leveling up your explosives.
There are 5 levels to each attribute. Level 5 explosives makes your explosions do more damage and in a larger radius. High driving makes handling vehicles easier and gives boosts to the 3 special vehicles you can get at the police HQ. High endurance allows you to jump somewhere around 30 ft and run faster. So forth and so on. The game offers rooftop races to help receive endurance points and street races to increase your driving skill. There is also hidden endurance tokens scattered throughout the 3 islands on all the buildings (similar to that of Spider-man 2’s skyscraper tokens or inFamous’ blast shards). I think I ended up finding like 197 out of the 200 endurance tokens. Even though Crackdown has online co-op, I did not know anybody else who had the game for me to play with. But I would assume it makes the experience that much better.
Overall it is one of the best sandbox games I have ever played and I give it 5 Boop BOOPS out of 5.
A Greystone Production
