Developed by: n-Space / LucasArts
Genre: Action
Number of Players: 1
Release Date:
US: September 16, 2008
Europe: September 19, 2008
Australia: September 17, 2008
MSRP: $34.99ESRB Content Descriptors: Fantasy ViolenceRated T for TeenSo if you were like me, you were excited for this game when you first saw the demo of the physics engine 2 years ago, but now that it's finally here, was it worth the wait? Honestly, yes and no.*Warning because I have to: This review may contain spoilers. Proceed at your own peril*So I managed to rent this game before it actually hit store shelves (sometimes it helps to work for the man), and I had every intention of buying it, but I sure am glad that I didn't. Mind you, it's not because the game is awful, quite the opposite. The game is just so amazingly short! I did absolutely everything there is in the game in under 3 hours. But we'll get to that in a second, because brevity aside, what TFU does offer is pretty awesome.By now, I'm sure most of us are familiar with the basic gist of the game, which is set a few months/years before A New Hope. You play the first level as the fully powered war machine that is Vader and cut a swath of destruction through a whole army of wookies, which is quite a treat. Vader, after defeating one of those pesky Jedi, finds said Jedi's son and decides to take him on as a secret apprentice. After sufficient training chasing after the Soul Edge (har har), you are set loose to destroy Vader's enemies and complete your mastery of the Force so that you can overthrow the Emperor. The story twists and turns and unfolds in a few surprising ways, but for the most part it's the same sort of Joseph Campbell heroic journey stuff we've come to expect from Lucas.The game itself is rather easy to pick up and play. You start your missions on your ship where you have a few points of interaction. You can exchange witty banter with your robot, select your next mission or replay an old one with your computer, fly to and start said mission with your pilot, and change your outfit and lightsaber. Movement uses the d-pad or the face buttons, and you can manually block with the shoulder buttons, but everything else is done with the touch screen, which displays buttons keyed to your currently available actions.
The missions take place on various worlds with an automatic camera that does it's best to keep you moving through what turn out to be very linear environments. There really is no chance for deviation, your path is almost always very clear and very much in front of you. You have an ample life bar, which refills when you kill stuff, a mediocre force power bar that recharges on its own, and a slew of baddies between you and your objective. For an action title that doesn't use buttons, they did a pretty good job creating a fun and intuitive system. Like I said, there are buttons on the touch screen that key to your various abilities, which in this case are Attack, jump, push, pull, throw saber and lightning. "But what about all those awesome tricks like dropping a TIE fighter on someone's head or splitting the ground asunder with your lightning charged saber?" you may ask. I'm getting to that.There is a minimal amount of character customization that goes on consisting of two things: applying points to various skills and unlocking the aforementioned combos. Combos you get automatically upon beating certain levels and allow you to do slick stuff like choke a whole room at once, wrap some poor trooper in a ball of lightning and bounce him off of the other troopers, and so on. The input method for these combos is actually quite creative. Say you want to do the lightning saber trick. You simply touch the attack button, and without lifting your stylus, you drag to the lightning button and *bamf*, there you go. Want to do a ground slam? Attack, Jump, attack. Simple, yes? (Note, those may not be the exact combos, but you get the idea.)
Whether or not you have appropriate occasion to use the neat tricks is another matter all together. The enemies in the game are VERY sparse, and when they come in groups it's usually either only 2, or a whole mess that are so spread out in the room that you might as well be fighting one at a time anyway (I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but not by much). So more often then not, if you want to do something flashy, you're pretty much stuck doing it to one bad guy. That, or they have a force bar of their own and are all but immune to anything but straight physical attacks.
The other means of customization, the points, has actually little impact on the game at all. When you kill bad guys, in addition to dropping health orbs (which heal you a ton making it next to impossible to die in the game on anything but a boss) they also drop force orbs, which, after collecting a certain amount, give you a force point which you can then allocate to combat skills like lightning (making it so you can shock more then one dude at a time) or passive skills, like how quickly your force bar recharges. If you've played any of the PC Star Wars FPSs, like Jedi Academy, then you already know what I'm talking about.Again though, after a little while you start to have a what's the point feeling, especially when you realize you aren't picking what improvements you want, you're picking what improvements you want FIRST, because unlike in Jedi Academy et al, you WILL max everything out. It is simply a matter of time and orbs. Even at that, however, the only powers that really have a noticeable impact on the game are the force regen rates and lightning. Everything else is either too subtle to make an overt difference, or just plain useless.The graphics are good, but not great. They decided to go with a 3d polygon offering (read: more pixelated, grainy look then the smooth edge cell shading stuff) that renders independent of itself. What that means is that stuff with blow up in front of you while stuff is happening behind you. The individual graphical elements are not rendered based on each other. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but it's a heck of a feat given the limitations of the DS hardware. The sound is crisp and clear (even if Vader does sound like a dying camel when you hit him), but again, nothing we haven't heard before. For the most part, the level design is pretty good. It definitely improves as you progress through the game. You start on pretty standard fare, but eventually you're running down the firing chamber of the death star laser while it goes off above you, which is pretty neat and where that independent rendering I mentioned really shines.The game itself is easy to pick up and play, there just isn't much of it to play. Without exaggeration, the entirety of this game can be completed in under three hours. It's a fun three hours, don't get me wrong, I just kept wanting more. They would dangle a nifty mechanic in front of you, such as a sort of follow the leader button game to defeat some of the bosses a la God Of War, but then you only get to see it twice. Or you would just get into the swing of a level and the next thing you know it would be over. There really isn't much hope for replayability either. It isn't like you can go back and play again and make different choices, because the few choices you actually can make impact gameplay very little. There is multiplayer (and a little more option for customization there, as the individual outfits determine the effectiveness of your skills) but not enough to keep you coming back, a sad truth compounded by the fact that it's only two player and you each need your own card.The long and short of it is that this is a great game that doesn't have nearly enough game to it. It almost feels like a demo, or a teaser for the larger console versions, a sort of "look how sweet this is, now go buy it on the Wii". The three hours I got out of the game were great, but I'll never get anymore then three hours out of it, and because of that, I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone actually buy the game, not because the game isn't great, but because you'll hate yourself for dropping 40 bucks on a game you could be half way through by the time you get it home from the store.The Numbers:Graphics 8/10 - The game does a great job stretching the limits of the DS hardware, it just does it in a way that isn't too terribly obvious and will more often then not be missed.Sound 8/10 - Llama Vader aside, the sound is crisp and clear, if a bit repetitive.Presentation 6/10 - The game is well done and fun, despite the story being somewhat predictable, and is an awesome, albeit far too short and unnecessarily limited, experience. There was just room for so much more. There could have been voice acting, some variety in the score, or a little more in the cutscenes. There is just so much untapped potential for this game.Gameplay 9/10 - n-Space, the developer, did an amazing job tailoring this title to the system. The controls are very intuitive and easy to handle. The camera angle could use some work, and the balance in the levels needs to be tweaked some, but beyond that it's a surprisingly solid experience.Replayability 2/10 - Outside of the lackluster multiplayer, there is no replayability to speak of, unless you want to play the exact same game over again.Final: 33/50 It's a great start, but they could have done so much more with it. This one is definitely a renter/borrower because while the game that is there is great, there just isn't nearly enough game to justify purchasing it.