StarWars: The Force Unleashed: Difficulty, Goals & Objectives

StarWars: The Force Unleashed (PS3 / Xbox 360)

Developer: LucasArts
Publisher:  LucasArts
Released:  2008



Difficulty
The game has four difficulty levels. Apprentice, Sith Warrior, Sith Lord and Sith Master (unlocked after completeing game in Sith Lord difficulty), each level significantly altering the difficulty of the game, with each level of difficulty the AI gets better blocking more of your attacks and being more aggressive, the amount of enemies does not seem to change but they have more health, take less damage and deal more damage with each difficulty level.

This is appropriate for the genre of game as in most games there are several difficulty levels and it gets harder in ways that you would expect as opposed to putting a time limit on levels for example. In Apprentice mode the game presents few difficult areas and allows you to play the game through with a minimal skill level, although just stepping up one difficulty level dramatically increased the difficulty.

Acheivements are given throught the game, for completeing each level and for completeing the game on each difficulty, extra achievements such as Defeat 100 enemies with Force Push, or Defeat 100 enemies with Saber Throw. These are easy to achieve but makes for repetative gameplay, constantly using the same moves can be boring.


Game Setting
Being set in space and able to use "the force" the game itself is not very realistic, although that is the point of it. some aspects of realism are kept such as being able to grab pretty much any object in the game to fling it towards your opponents, also if you break a window in a ship nearby enemies are sucked out in the vaccum, these are things that would happen. on the other hand being able to fall from any hieght and land safely on your feet or take several shots from starships and still surviving are unrealistic, but this makes for good gameplay.

Scale is used well within the game with certain enemies being the size you would expect them to be and environment items fitting in niceley with nothing out of place. The game consists only of pre-defined levels that you can explore to find hidden objects but you are constantly confined to the area relative to the story. natural boundaries such as walls, locked doors, mountains and piles of junk stop nyou from straying outside the level but in a natural way. Time is not changed atall in the game with everything running at real time, which suits this type of game.


Goal
the overall goal of the game is to level up your charecter and unlock weapons to become strong enough to defeat the emporer. In each level there is the primamry objective (to complete the level) secondary objective, forcepoints goal and jedi holocron goal. by completeing all of these you unlock more powerful weapons/customisations and level up. This keeps the player engaged and gives replay value to the game, going back to achieve secondary objectives/goals.