Is this game designed for freaking Rain Man or something?! Even on medium difficulty, it’s infuriatingly hard. I wanted to like this game, I really did, but I’ve had so many ‘hurl the controller at the wall’ moments I don’t know where to start. It’s old school platforming, but all the worst possible aspects.
For a kick-off, this elite apprentice is the biggest wuss this side of Tatooine. He’s spent most of my game getting knocked over by, well, just about anything. Then the enemies play sith whack-a-mole until you die with a pathetic whimper.
Second, whoever decided that quick time events were ever a good idea needs to be shot in the face. I wouldn’t mind if the controls corresponded to what they normally do, but it’s just random button instant failure horsecrap.
Thirdly, it would be easier to control if the main method of combat was to slam the controller into your genitals repeatedly. The ‘lock’ button is completely useless. Lock onto the enemy in front of you? Hey, look at this box! Oh, you’re dead.
Last but by no means least; checkpoints. My 360 has several gigabytes free, y’know, it’s not too much of a hastle to save where I like in the 21st century. There is a save button, but it’s mostly for show - you start back at the beginning of the area when you snuff it.
I had hoped it would get better, but having been knocked into a puddle by one of those walker things which was nearly dead and instantly dying (sith apprentices have a lethal allergy to any amount of water, like the Wicked Witch of the West), after killing a legion of crack stormtroopers, my controller-smashing fury knows no bounds.
It gets traded in for Fable 2 the second it comes out, if it hasn’t given me a rage-induced aneurysm by then.
I played the trial version, and I was having trouble locking onto targets, but I figured it was just because I was a beginner, and it would get easier as I went along. Now I’ve read a few reviews that say the targeting system is awful.
I haven’t played the full game yet, but I hear it’s buggy as hell.
It’s not so bad once you get used to the fact that the “targeting system” is more of a gentle guideline or indication of direction. I’ve mostly just waded in and gone close-up with all the soldiers, since throwing furniture and lightning bolts rather bore me. (While Force Push doesn’t . . . . Man, that can be fun. Not Mercenaries 2 level of destruction fun, but still fun. Skywalks, for instance, are hilarious.)
I wanted to get this game, 'til I heard that it has Quick Time Events. Nothing pulls me out of the game faster than being reminded that I’m using a controller to play the game and have to remember where the X button is. Or whatever.
I hated them in God of War, and was unable to finish God of War 2 because of the damn QTEs (I couldn’t finish the last fight- not because I couldn’t fight, but because I couldn’t press the buttons fast enough).
QTEs suck, and I won’t be getting any game that uses them.
A night’s rest has not tempered my hatred for this game and it’s nonsense. For God’s sake, don’t buy it. Especially if your name is Bruce Banner. All developers associated with it should be ashamed, as should their testers, who are apparently Vulcans for not pointing out how infuriating it is.
I don’t buy Star Wars games anymore. The ratio of fun star wars games to terrible ones is too low. There has been one star wars game in the last ten years that most people who played it would consider “fun”, Knights of the Old Republic. Two if you consider the sequel.
My wife wanted a Wii, and this is the first title I’ve been looking forward to for it.
I think the control schema does involve a certain amount of genital bludgeoning – I’ll get back to you on whether or not it’s any better.
What a buzzkill, though. Although I think the Wii controls are probably better than a gamepad for this type of game, I am resigned to missing out on some of the best (Euphoria-driven) features of the game… Looking forward to a watered-down version of a disappointing game?
Well, after reading some reviews, I’m almost glad there’s no PC-version – seems like I saved myself a couple of bucks and nerves.
Quick Time Events – Marvel: Ultimate Alliance had those. On the PC. There are still bite marks on my keyboard.
I mostly like the game, but the targeting system is annoying as fuck. My controller-throwing moment came last night, when you have to fight the Star Destroyer. Which isn’t so bad. It’s all the Tie Fighters that piss me off. You’ve got to use the force to grab them out of the sky, but the window in which you can target them is tiny. Okay, fair enough, they’re fucking spaceships, after all. Plus, they’re shooting at you, and if you get hit, you can’t use your force grab fast enough to hit the small window of opportunity. Alright, I can see that. It shouldn’t be easy to kill a Star Destroyer single handedly, right? Here’s where I got pissed. They keep sending this one chunk of floating debris flying through the screen. You try to grab a Tie Fighter, and just before you pull the trigger, the auto target jumps to the scrap and you force grab that, instead. And then, if you don’t throw it far enough away, it’ll explode and damage you when you release it. And the worst part is? There’s no reason for the debris to be there. You can’t use it to hit Tie Fighters or anything. They threw it in there purely as a distractor, to make it that much harder to kill the Ties. Except that it doesn’t make story-sense. You spend a lot of the game accidentally using the force on the wrong thing, which is, to a certain extent, unavoidable in these sorts of games, even if it doesn’t make sense that your badass Sith Master can’t keep his magic telepathy powers targeted well enough to tell the difference between a stormtrooper and a packing crate. But if the game makers can’t refine the system enough to avoid this, at the very least they should do as much as they can with game design to de-emphasize the problems it has. But here they’ve done exactly the opposite: they’ve used the flaws in their targeting system to deliberately make the game harder! I spent more than an hour on that fight last night before I gave up. I’m not sure when I’m going to go back to the game at this point.
Also, there’s a major glitch where the game stops counting objectives late in the game. Around level 7 or so, the Mission Objectives screen always says I have zero holocrons and zero Jedi points, and the secondary objective says “*Default Text.” And its like that from that point on. Sloppy as hell.
You misspelled “Lego Star Wars”, but your point is quite correct. I think the rule of thumb is that Star Wars games were good from the point when Lucas thought he couldn’t milk any more money out of the franchise to when the Phantom Menace was announced and after that things go downhill fast.
As for Laserdisk games… er… Interactive Movies… er… Quick Time Events (god, you’d think after that piece of shoddy design died a miserable death twice before they’d have given up on it), I’ll hold the developer down while you guys work him over.
If you care, post may contain spoilers
Actually, the debris was to give you an alternative to grabbing the TIEs. It acts as an engine, and if you line it up with a TIE and lightning it it will rocket out to a TIE in the distance instead of having to grab the fast moving TIE. I used it exclusively until I got predicting the fighter’s movements down at which point it became a really simple reflex game (dash, RT, hold and wait for collision or drop if fighters are going the other way, repeat).
Anyway, if you guys think you had it bad I STARTED, as in first playthrough, on Sith Lord. The second boss (Raxus Prime) can go fuck himself for all I care, god damn force push spam.
It’s not that the game is hard, it’s that it’s unfair sometimes, for a human who has the potential to be “the most powerful force user ever” he seems to be a textbook case of “underdog” against EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN THING THAT APPEARS. Including non-boss enemies like purge troopers. They seemed to forget that he really isn’t all that powerful in gameplay, because in the first room on the Death Star, 4 Evo Troopers, 3 Purge Troopers on the last wave, once I figured out how to get on the rafters I just went up there, offed the snipers and jetpacks, grabbed my holocrons, killed everything up to the AT-ST and repulsed the floor to get to the next area before that wave. No way I’m fighting that, ever again.
However I disagree about the quick time events, I thought they were done well in this game. I hate them when in the middle of what looks like a perfectly normal cinematic it says PUSH A OR DIE, but I thought it was a nice way to end boss fights cinematically while still allowing user input.
Most of the time they do correspond, there are a couple of odd ones though. Think of the AT-ST (for example), you use X to start your charge (with lightsaber), A to dodge his stomp, and then X to complete your move and slash it in half, a little more cinematic than what X normally does, but they obviously intended X to correspond with slash and A to do jump. The AT-CT, you used B to force push it in a neat little ball. And they’re not instant failure either, in fact I think you’re invincible during them. They, more often than not, give you a ridiculously long window to complete the button press and failing to do so only moves you back a couple steps in the chain, sometimes only the press you just did.
I agree for the most part, but I found it very useful for later bosses, especially (spoilers) Vader and the Emperor, which require you to circle strafe while dodging quickly moving projectiles. It’s also a lot easier to use once you go into options and switch it from hold to toggle.
I disagree with the “save everywhere, always” mentality. Though it makes sense for a lot of game styles, I think checkpoints can be used well, especially in platformers and “mass arena slaughters” like this game. However, it only works if they do it correctly, which they did not, some of the saves seemed arbitrary. On Raxus Prime, for instance, against the boss after the first Junk Titan it saved, it didn’t after the second one, why? No idea, but it should have. On the Death Star? Should have saved after each wave in the Hangar*, but it didn’t. Checkpoints can work fine, but only when your people put them in the right places, further more, if you complete an objective but didn’t make it to the next move the save feature on the menu, despite returning you to the last checkpoint should have left the objective (i.e. blowing up the wall, activating a tractor beam) completed so you didn’t have to mindlessly repeat 30 events even if you had to fight a certain volume of enemies again.
*Yes, I’m really bitter about this level. It’s worse than the instant-fail stealth missions in Goldeneye, to give you an idea of how many times I tried to beat those waves I actually completed the force points bonus objective on the Death Star before ever leaving the first room.
