If only you knew the power of the Dark Side - The Force Unleashed review

Lucasarts have certainly set themselves a high bar with The Force Unleashed.  Combining cutting-edge videogame tech with a heavily scripted, canon-approved script, the game is the highest profile Star Wars release in years, and is tied into a larger campaign of toys, novels and comics just as Lucasarts did with Shadows Of the Empire many years ago.  At the heart of this however, lies the game itself.  There've been too many Star Wars games that have been all hype and no substance.  Can The Force Unleashed rise above this impression?

It certainly makes a good first showing.  Visually, you've never seen the Star Wars universe like this before.  Everything is beautifully lit and immaculately textured, and the environments immediately feel right.  Old stuff is painstakingly recreated, new stuff is carefully designed and fits in well.  It's a good job that the game looks so beautiful too, because a major portion of the gameplay involves smashing up and tearing down this remarkable vision.  Much has been made of The Force Unleashed's revolutionary technology, in particular the Digital Molecular Matter tech which causes the environment to deform in realistic ways.  I couldn't begin to tell you how it works, all I know is that it does, and it looks astonishing.  Metal bends, glass shatters, wood splinters and all hell breaks loose as the environment is radically altered with extreme force.  Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the game's bravura prologue, in which you take control of none other than Darth Vader himself.  Tasked with clearing out a Wookiee village, and armed with your lightsaber and a full complement of turbo-charged force powers, incredibly fun havoc ensue.  The entire level is an onslaught of  satisfying destruction, throwing massive boulders through treehouses or blasting down enormous barricades.  The opening highlights everything that is great about Force Unleashed, the impressive visuals, the visceral gameplay, the outstanding environments and the overall 'Star-Warsiness' of the experience combining to deliver a showcase of gaming at its very best.  Sadly, it's sort of downhill from there.

This is what we like to see

The first problem occurs when the game proper begins and you take control of the main protagonist, Darth Vader's secret apprentice Starkiller.  Running into the first room, you get ready to let slip your astonishing force powers, only to discover that most of them have gone.  It's not so much the Force unleashed as the force mildly contained, and l

leads to a huge overreliance on  throwing boxes around, making the game feel like a lightly more polished version of Psi-Ops.  You can also attack with your lightsaber, but again, you've got practically no combos at this point, so it descends into mindless button-mashing.  The idea of a 'look what's possible' teaser is good in concept, but translates to a letdown in reality.  The idea of stripping you of your powers is to implement an RPG style 'level up and choose your talents' progression, which again is interesting in theory but redundant in reality, since the game itself will only dole out new powers at certain points and some upgrades are noticeably more useful than others.

Combined with the lack of power is the creeping feel of uninspired level design.  Though immaculately detailed, level design tends towards the repetitive, often falling into the dreaded 'series of rooms and corridors'. The large number of level set in starships/space stations/industrial facilities doesn't help either. Furthermore, realising that your powers make you nearly unstoppable in small scale skirmishes, the developers have chosen to instead throw dozens of enemies at you at once in huge battle chambers, often reducing the situation to a 'kill everything to get out' model.  Though this is rarely difficult (in fact the game generally is slightly on the easy side) it can be hugely frustrating, particularly when later enemies either resist your powers or can keep you a long way away with uncannily accurate projectiles.  Combat is particularly wearisome during boss battles, where the camera inexplicably assumes a locked perspective that is rarely ideal.  Nowhere are the failures in design highlighted batter than the infamous sequence where Starkiller pulls a Star Destroyer out of the sky.  What should have been the game's defining moment instead becomes an exercise in frustration as you're constantly interrupted from the spectacle by irksome enemies.

For a junkyard, the world of Raxus Prime is astonishingly atmospheric

Despite all the griping however, there is a very fine game within.  Although the environments can often be uninspired, they are never less than beautiful.  The junk planet of Raxus Prime is a superb example of how to do an apocalyptic wasteland right, its mustard sky and rusted landscape an oddly beautiful setting.  And once you crank your force powers up a few notches, the game regains some of its blood and thunder and becomes massive fun to play.  Throwing screaming stormtroopers into an abyss or blasting rancors with force lightning is a pleasure every time, and the terrific feedback that the game world gives never gets old.  There's a few big surprises as well, the first being how replayable the game is.  Your powers and abilities carry over to a new game, so you can monster the early levels with maxed out force powers, and while the game is totally linear, the unpredictable nature of the battles mean that every new fight is fresh.  Hidden holocrons unlock goodies such as new costumes and lightsabers, giving an item hunt aspect to old levels.

The other big surprise is the story, which is deep, interesting and surprisingly relevant to the rest of the Star Wars universe.  It's fair to say that what happens in the game adds a significant dimension to the events of the original trilogy.  Bar the predictable and predictably rubbish love story, the narrative is strong and the voice acting excellent.  There's old faces aplenty (including one gleefully out of place cameo) and a few great new characters.  Special mention goes to PROXY, the Apprentice's loyal droid sidekick who has been programmed to try and kill him at every available opportunity.

In summary then, it's a missed opportunity, a flawed gem.  The game reminds me a lot of Assassin's Creed - technically superb, and with moments of genius, but ultimately held back from greatness by failure on some of the most basic levels.  There's no excusing some of the poor design in Force Unleashed, nor the frustration and repetition involved therein.  Equally, there's no denying how fun it is at it's very best.  The deep and through integration of the Star Wars universe earns it an extra point from me, but at the end of the day this is an entertaining toy rather than the new dawn we were hoping for.

[7]

'A little bit of magic' - The themes and mysteries of Braid

Braid has provoked more talk and discussion from the community than any title in a long time, partially over its fascinating and deliberately ambiguous themes. In this post I'm going to poke into them a little. Obviously spoilers are rampant after this point, ye be fairly warned.

SPOILERS

Although none of the themes of Braid are entirely clear, the most obvious one to me seems to be a commentary on the linear nature of time, and how humans do not necessarily perceive it as such. This is rooted in the game's basic mechanics of course, exemplified in its time manipulation gameplay, but is also highly prevalent in the surrounding text. Many passages talk of how time appears different to Tim than to others, and the text that opens the first level (world 2) in particular ruminates on how a less strictly linear progression would allow learning from mistakes without punishment. Directly attached to this is the idea that time progresses differently according to perspective, a theme which underpins the game's unique conclusion of course, but is also very clearly exemplified in World 6, where the ring which Tim carries is both a gameplay device but also an item of great emotional significance in the plot. Ultimately, the entire game hinges upon the concept of time and how it shapes our perception of those around us.
A second theme that I personally see within the game is an understanding that appearances are often deceiving. The 'princess' Tim is searching for may not actually even be a physical person, but rather an emotion or ideal, and in any case, she is actually actively fleeing from him. Remembering that the events of the final level take place chronologically before anything else in the game, so the Princess has already fled, and the entirety of your quest is futile, though you obviously don't know it until the end. Perhaps the most telling moment occurs at the end of world 6, which chronologically is the last moment in the game, where the dinosaur that emerges confesses that he has never even met the princess, before he asks the killer question 'Are you even sure she exists?'. The correct answer is of course 'No', since the princess has long vanished from the game. Her absence can be seen in the progression through the levels which become increasingly dark and damaged as you play through, possibly in direct correlation to the increasing distance of the princess. Of course, you'd be totally aware of this deception if you had seen the game's chronology correctly, which leads back to the idea that time is perceived differently depending on person and viewpoint.

As to the more specific details of the plot, I'm pretty much as clueless as anybody else. It's possible the entire idea of the narrative is as a Macguffin to carry the themes, a theory seemingly supported by comments made by creator Jonathan Blow. I'm not convinced, and I think that although the plot by no means has a traditional coherence there is more to it than a series of random statements. Based on the close, near obsessive nature of their relationship as described in the texts, plus the creepy nature of the final level (man waits outside womans bedroom, then chases her as she tries to stop him), I'm going to suggest a possible Tim-as-obsessed-stalker scenario. It explains his undying infatuation with her, as well as hinting at the 'mistake' that he made that he's striving so hard to eliminate. What if his mistake was merely meeting her? It also explains why he believes they had such a deep and meaningful relationship while she runs immediately at the sight of him, and the way that the game is a delusional 'quest' for someone who is already long gone. Theres plenty of holes, but it carries a certain logic and certainly adds a dark undertone.

The other common theory is that the entire narrative is actually an allegory for a real life event, namely the creation of the atom bomb. There's certainly plenty of evidence for this idea, most prominently the flaming city that opens the game and ultimately closes it (a set of twin towers is clearly visible from the attic, suggesting it's New York) as well as the direct quotes pulled from the epilogue. This idea recasts the role of the Princess not as a person but rather as an idea, a concept that seems within reach, but always keeps escaping at the last moment. I like the proposal, and it's certainly a bravura idea, but it also seems a little loose and takes no account of the text given outside of the epilogue.

Both of these ideas fail to take into account huge chunks of the game, and no explanation I've yet seen can do so. For example, what is the meaning of the four paintings built from the jigsaw pieces, which seemingly are totally disconnected from the plot in any sense (clearly the person in them is different every time, and is not Tim). The flags at the end of each world are apparently naval signals, what do they say and how do they fit into the levels? What, if any, is the significance of the dinosaurs? Nobody knows, and this is part of what makes Braid so fascinating. Like Lost, it's inscrutability provokes debate, and allows each player to create his own personal context and motivation for the game. Until Jonathan Blow reveals the purpose, if ever, Braid remains an mystery wrapped inside an enigma, and that only enhances it's lustre.

EDIT: Apparently, finding all the hidden stars in the game unlocks an alternate ending, which, suffice to say, seems to corroborate the 'bomb' theory. It certainly fills a major piece of the puzzle in.

Time and Mystery - Braid review

Braid is probably one of the hardest games to pin down in a long, long time. In short, it's a 2D-side scrolling platformer, except that it isn't. It's actually a fiendishly intricate puzzle game, a series of self-contained challenges. A puzzle game that is, however, themed around a fairy tale search for a princess, in the best traditions of an epic quest. But that seemingly simple story is in fact an allegory for the fleetingness of time, the contradictory nature of love and the creation of the atomic bomb. Then again, everything I've said may just have been total bollocks.

All of those statements are open to debate to a certain degree, and this is the fascinating and yet frustrating thing about Braid. It is maddeningly ambiguous, from it's play style to it's story and it's themes.

Let's start simple then. What is undeniable is that Braid is a very pretty game. It's drawn from a traditional 2D perspective, but uses a thickly daubed lineart style, with the backgrounds being washed out watercolours. Rendered in HD it's utterly gorgeous, and is complemented perfectly by the music, a selection of classical string quartet pieces.
Things only start to get difficult when you try and describe the gameplay. At it's root it's pure Mario, move from left to right and jump on things to kill them. The only major difference here is that you have a 'rewind' button, allowing you to turn back time Prince of Persia style. That's where the similarities end however. The first major difference here is that your rewind power is infinite and unlimited. Death therefore becomes simply a minor inconvenience. This in turn leads to the major point of the game. 'Completing' the levels is not difficult, but the point of playing is to collect the jigsaw puzzle pieces that lay scattered around the environments, and these often lie in seemingly inaccessible locations. the only way to obtain them is to use your time-bending powers to manipulate the environment to your advantage.
This then, is where the puzzle aspect lies. The game introduces several ideas that alter the game's timeflow, but the most basic is the idea that objects outlined in green are unaffected by your rewinding power. So in a very basic example, you can use a key to open a green outlined door, then rewind so that the key is in your hand again, but the door remains open. From this basic concept the game spins some of the most astonishing puzzles ever imagined, with concepts so insane you'll have to wring your brain out to solve them. These are often accompanied by changes in the world in which you're in, for example the world in which time stands still when you do, advances when you move right and rewinds when you move left. It's important not to understate the ferocity and brilliance of the puzzles, they really are amazing and had they been incorporated into any other game they would have been the standout feature. But not here.

Braid has been much compared to Portal, and the comparison is extremely valid, not only because they are both extremely clever puzzle games that used a dimension (space and time) in a new way, but because both offered more than that - namely a tangible narrative that connected players to the experience beyond the technical. Braid's is told through a series of textual excerpts at the beginning of levels. These are long, and use clever and elaborate language, often asking interesting questions and raising valid ideas, but they are also clunky and come off as rather pretentious. Much more effective is the gradual tonal shift throughout the levels, as they gradually become darker and more gothic, and the subtle hints given through the narrative that all may not be as it seems. These ideas only really pull together in the final hour, leading to one of the best final levels ever seen in games, and that is not an exaggeration. The elaborate dialogue is junked in favour of a chapter told entirely through the gameplay, with a shocking twist leading to an impossibly tragic conclusion. It's a mark of Braid's mastery that it not only manages this bravura slice of innovation but also manages to evoke more powerful emotions from a 2D platformer than from almost every 'cinematic' game ever made.
What follows this incredible ending is a beautifully baffling conclusion that fails to provide any sort of closure or any answers at all, ultimately leaving you (literally) right back where you started. In many ways this seems to be the point. The game deliberately makes it's point vague and non-specific, and it's unclear whether the story is genuine, partly imagined or entirely allegorical. It's a story which leads and captivates through intangibles such as mood, curiosity and emotion. And despite it's great technical and aesthetic achievements, that is perhaps what is the most amazing thing about this wholly remarkable game.

9/10