Force Unleashed and Why Killing a Star Destroyer Failed
The scene was set up to be epic. A bronze sky painted with fading sunlight, eclipsing the horizon is a behemoth of smoldering steel being forcibly ripped from the skyline - a Star Destroyer, a symbol of Imperial authority, wrenched out of the sky and brought down by an indomitable will.
We first witnessed this scene in the debut trailer for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed back at E3 ‘07, and ever since then, we’ve been enthralled with the idea of the most powerful force wielder ever taking down the second largest standard ship in the imperial fleet.
Bring down a Star Destroyer is admittedly one of, if not the biggest, set piece in the entire game. It immediately established an enormous amount of hype for the game, and defined the game’s focus of immeasurably strong Force powers. Furthermore, we learned not long after the initial trailer, that this wasn’t just some cool pre-market hype video, but that players would actually get to pull down a Star Destroyer, in-game.
What should have followed is the one of the greatest instances in gaming history, an epic boss sequence to rival anything ever seen in a God of War or Legend of Zelda boss fight. Taking down a Star Destroyer with nothing more than the Force and sheer will power, while inherently intangible, should have been one of the most visceral and satisfying moments a gamer could experience while holding a controller.
Instead what we got was a poorly designed psuedo-boss fight with clunky controllers and horrible inconsistency that effectively succeeded in doing the impossible - taking the fun out of killing a Star Destroyer. For those who haven’t played the game, or have yet to reach the Star Destroyer sequence (don’t worry, no real plot related spoilers follow), allow me to break down the setup for you.
You start facing a swarm of TIE-fighters while on a narrow bridge, the Star Destroyer looming off in the distance, firing giant blaster bolts occasionally, but generally not a threat. You have to dispatch the TIE-fighters before you can take on the Star Destroyer, which proves to be all too easy. Quick lashes of Force Lightning or a Lightsaber throw will take them out fairly quickly. Once that’s out of the way, you proceed to grip the Star Destroyer like you would normally grip anything else. Once in your grip, you are to begin pulling down the massive starship by following a series of on-screen prompts that direct you to push the left and right thumbsticks in certain directions in order to align your target perfectly. This is where much of the epic fail takes place.
First of all, the on-screen prompts are almost always wrong at some point. The general idea, which is not communicated to you directly by the game, is to position the Star Destroyer so that it is level and facing you. The on-screen prompts may, or may not, be directing you to align it in the correct position, they tend to be a bitch like that. While they will direct you accurately, at times, you’ll find the only way to successfully complete the sequence is to at some point or another, completely disobey what the game is telling you to do. That doesn’t provide a problem once you know that, but the game never clearly communicates that it’s a dumbass that should be ignored.
Also, you’ll have problems aligning the Star Destroyer just right because the controls tend to be overly sensitive or hardly responsive at all depending on, you know, whether or not the game likes you. Once you do manage to align the Star Destroyer, however, you finally get the satisfaction of pulling down the sucker, hearing the steel frame shudder and bend under the weight of your immense power.
It’s amazing, for about two seconds. After that more TIE-fighters come in and kill you in seconds unless you release your grip and take cover. Again, the TIE-fighters are no problem. In fact, they’re so easy to defeat they feel like a nuisance as oppose to an actual challenge. If I’m going to be interrupted during what should be the coolest moment in the game, at least make the interruption challenging and fun, not repetitive and dull.
After you beat the TIE-fighters, you have to re-grip the Star Destroyer and align it back the way you had it. Oh yes, did I forget to mention? While you were kicking ass all over the TIE-fighters, the Star Destroyer realigned itself. Perfect. Essentially you repeat this whole process a number of times (personally it took me three, but I’ve heard as high as six for some people) before you finally bring down the Star Destroyer for good. By the time it’s all over you feel more relieved to be moving on (and back to the good gameplay) than satisfied at what you’ve just done.
To top it all off, you know how awesome it was to see the Apprentice in the trailer after he yanked down the Star Destroyer? No such thing here. After the awkward gameplay sequence is finally over we’re treated to a cheap ass cutscene with the Apprentice turning tail and running from the crashing Star Destroyer. Granted, that’s a hell of a lot more realistic, but if I wanted realism I wouldn’t be playing a game where people throw lightning from their hands pull objects out of the sky that are miles long. As long as we’re being ridiculous, we might as well be cool about it and have him stand there and ignite his Lightsaber in victory (or to execute survivors).
Now after having said all this, I should emphasize that I’ve really enjoyed playing Force Unleashed. It’s a damn fun game and as far as Star Wars games go, it’s actually one of the better ones. We don’t really do reviews on this site, so that’s not what this is intended to be. This is just an interesting talking point I thought I would share some thoughts on.
Amazingly enough, even after being disappointed by the whole Star Destroyer sequence, I was treated to what I thought the was the (second) best story sequence of the game up until that point. And just like, despite one poorly designed piece of gameplay, I was right back in it, loving the game.
Force Unleashed is a good game. It has few flaws and plenty of fun to be had, plus a tremendous story. But really, we wanted to pull down a Star Destroyer for well over a year now. And we got to do that. Unfortunately, I had more fun watching the trailer.
Think about it, seriously.
I was really loving this game until I got to the star destroyer boss. I have literally been trying to bring this thing down for the past two hours. Not since trying to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun for the NES have I been more frustrated with onscreen instructions. For whatever reason, the developers felt that bringing down a star destroyer should feel like building a card castle and not smashing stuff with sledge hammers.
Need to set the record straight. It turns out that the star destroyer was bugged so it wouldn’t transition to the pull down mode. once I rebooted my 360 and played the part again, I brought it down without a problem.
[...] I just finished the Force Unleashed for Xbox 360. Bottom line, a pretty good story that helps connect Episode 3 to Episode 4. The game play was about a 6/10. After all the delays, awesome trailers, and demos of the Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter engines I was really expecting more from the game play. I hoped for game play and controls as innovative as the Prince of Persia: Sand of Times on the original Xbox. I recommend borrowing a copy from someone and playing. It won’t take very long. I beat it on intermediate difficulty first time through (I died alot) playing only casually for a few days. My biggest issue with the game was that some of the “puzzles” you have to solve to move on in the game only have one solution and it is not obvious. In fact, when you use the force to crash a star destroyer the on-screen control guide will just mess you up. I finally figured out how to beat it using this post on InsideGamersLoop.com. [...]
Navigator is right.
This sequence totally reminds me of ‘Top Gun’ for the NES. ‘Up’ no ‘Down’ no ‘Right’ ‘Left Left Left!’
Of course failure in this game is simply ducking behind a pylon and idly taking out more fighters. Leaving you to do it way to many times.
This part of the game was terrible. You defeat a bunch of TIE’s (easy) then the old blind dude (who I wish had stayed dead, and this Starkiller fellow not turned into such a wussbag by this point) yells “PULL IT DOWN!” And so you do. Slowly. Really slowly. Then, more TIE’s show, you break your grip to defeat the TIE’s, but the Star Destroyer rights itself. Repeat. Many times. In fact if you don’t get it in a few tries, it becomes IMPOSSIBLE TO GET!!!! The little green light at the bottom stops appearing, therefore you cannot actually pull it downwards — it needs that to actually go down.
Why couldn’t they have just let you pull the stupid thing out of the sky without getting it in the right orientation? If I could pull a 1000 meter long object OUT OF THE FRIGGIN SKY … I do not think I would worry about what way it was facing.
A black eye on an otherwise great game. And at least the story is very, very awesome.
TFU reminds me all to much of Assassin’s Creed. Nice graphics — better, actually, than AC — great sound, lighting, texturing…but gameplay really made me yawn after a while. Been there, done that. I’m using pretty much the same tricks to defeat a new batch of enemies.
And, combsinthebutter, how did *you* figure it out if you read how someone else did? :)
I just found this article while googling this event because I’m stuck on it right now. I’ve got the game on pause and I’ve been trying to bring down the star destroyer for about 20 minutes - haven’t died yet. I’m not really keeping track of how many times I’ve had to re-align it before being interrupted by the next wave of TIE fighters, but it’s been a lot more than 6 - closer to 12, I’m sure. I never really get to the pulling down part before they’re on to me. So frustrating.
However, just read the first 2 comments on this post before submitting this comment and they’re very helpful, I guess I need to restart the mission and not be slow at killing the TIEs the first couple times.
I can’t finish this level!!! it’s unfair! my lightning doesn’t affect the TIEs! So i have to grip the frikking hyperdrive and lightning it to the TIEs! There should be a LIMITED NUMBER OF TIE SQUADRONS. My friend has TFU for the PS2 lucky boy, he only pulls the Star Destroyer In the cinematic. It would have been fun with Less or NO TIEs
This friggin part of the game is such an unbelievably colossal disappointment. Everything people said before is true, once you dispatch the very annoying tie fighters it is very hard to line this stupid star destroyer up following the on-screen commands, and why should you need to anyway, seriously? If you had enough power to pull something so gigantic and far away down to the earth, you would not need to line the friggin thing up, you would just pull the damn thing down period. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why you should have to line the damn star destroyer to anything, much less yourself. the only friggin reason I can think of why you need to is to sort of simulate the infamous trailer where we first got to see the apprentice. After about three times of hearing Kota yell “Pull it down!” his exclamation and the objective at hand lost any sense of urgency, it then becomes a rinse and repeat process which is tedious and poorly designed. Extremely friggin annoyed right now, this sequence of the game should have been epic and instead it was frustrating and tedious.
I get the impression this fight is easier on easier settings, like a fool I started on the hardest setting available. Many of the levels are frustrating, and at times I defeat the bosses by defeating poor ai, not through innovative use of skill or strategy. When you get to the Star Destroyer battle you don’t even have that.
I must have tried a dozen times before I resorted to the internet and found out that you can actually attack the tie fighters directly. On hard mode they kill you so fast (1-2 seconds) if you stand in open ground so I hadn’t even noticed you could attack them, I’d been beating them by lobbing that barrel thing at them. The Star Destroyer always reset back, and I rarely got to the point I was actually pulling it down, just realign, and then fight.
In the end I beat it thusly:
(1) stand behind the pylon thing so the tie fighters can’t shoot you.
(2) double jump and tag them with force lightning as they pass
(doing it this way you clear the tie fighters pretty quickly in fact)
(3) don’t run out from the pylon, just immediately grab at the star destroyer, that’ll save you precious time.
(4) stay on the star destroyer even when the tie fighters come out as long as you can, you can take about 3 hits without dying.
(5) force run out of the way and repeat above.
Things to know:
(1) using force lightning you get WAY more health back from the tie fighters, I think 2 kills fills you to full, tossing barrels you never get enough life back to get back to full from the entire wave
(2) after each time you pull the star destroyer it will reset it’s alignment, but NOT it’s height. So each time you pull it down you make a little progress.
After pulling it inches closer a couple times, it’ll stop resetting it’s alignment. After that the next pull should get it the rest of the way.
Best of luck!
4 hours and i still havent done it so fek it games going back balls to this!
I hope the developers of this game were fired. This scene was one of the worst things I have ever had the misfortune of playing. It left a dark blotch on an otherwise good game. Fuck you Lucasarts.
i got to this bit and the destroyer drifted so far out of alignment it might as well have been forced down backwards!