November 5, 2009 – In a posting made on Gamasutra the Dallas based developer Terminal Reality is advertising for a “Senior Xbox Live Programmer for an exciting AAA Natal title.”

Sections of the job description call for a programmer that is able to implement “XBOX specific functionality such as Player Lobbies, Matchmaking, and DLC,” and “a passion to create seriously high-quality action/adventure titles.”

While we don’t know what their current Natal project is the developer is most recently known for Ghostbusters which appeared on Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii. You can read IGN’s full review of the game right here.

World’s top publisher turns small profit on $703 million in sales; $4.05 billion 2009 outlook maintained despite concerns about holiday consumer spending.

Over the past two weeks, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Konami, Capcom, THQ, Ubisoft, Namco, and Square Enix all released their most recent earnings reports.

Today, it was Activision Blizzard’s turn.

Guitar Hero 5 brought in cash, in more way than one.

The world’s biggest-third party publisher reported $703 million in net revenue for the July-September quarter, up from $680 million during the same period the year prior. More importantly, the company posted a quarterly profit of $15 million, way up from the $108 million the company lost in Q3 2008.

The quarter also saw Activision Blizzard’s overall game software market share grow to 13.3 percent in the US. In Europe and the US combined, the company controls 12.3 percent of the software market, according to the NPD Group and Charttrack/Gfk.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Activision Blizzard’s famously outspoken CEO Bobby Kotick credited Guitar Hero 5 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 as the quarter’s biggest two debut games. Also helping fill company coffers were catalog sales of Guitar Hero and Call of Duty games and ongoing income from the massively multiplayer role-playing game World of Warcraft.

Kotick also tried to soothe the fears of analysts about slowing sales of rhythm games–such as Activision’s own forthcoming DJ Hero, which is reportedly seeing lower-than-expected preorders. He pointed out that when all SKUs were combined, Guitar Hero World Tour was the top-selling game in the US and Europe for the first nine months of 2009.

“Year to date through September 30, the Guitar Hero franchise was the number-one best-selling third-party franchise in North America and Europe,” Kotick said in a statement. “For the month of September, sales of music games in the U.S. increased 72 percent in dollars year over year, which demonstrates the sustained interest in this new and important game category.” September saw the release of both Guitar Hero 5 and rival MTV Games’ The Beatles: Rock Band, with the latter outselling the former but still managing to be unprofitable.

In the official Activision earnings release, Kotick was bullish on his company’s slate for the current quarter, which includes Band Hero, DJ Hero, Tony Hawk: Ride, and next week’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. (The latter title is the now most preordered game in Activision and GameStop history.) However, speaking to Reuters, the executive was more candid, saying he was “very concerned” about recession-hit consumers’ spending this holiday season.

Modern Warfare 2 boasts the most preorders in Activision’s history.

“The question is whether the consumer will materialize, and I think there’s huge risk that the consumer won’t materialize,” he told Reuters.

Kotick’s fears aside, Activision is sticking by its full calendar year earnings guidance of $4.05 billion in net revenues and $0.26 earnings per diluted share of $0.26. It did warn, however, that the figure was subject to certain risks, such as World of Warcraft’s ongoing struggle to switch localization partners in China. Earlier this week, operation of the MMORPG was suspended in the Asian nation following a dispute between two regulatory agencies of the Beijing government.

Finally, during a conference call with analysts after the report’s release, Activision executives confirmed it was planning to release new installments in the Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk, and Spider-Man franchises in 2010.

Let’s start with a quick primer. If you read our last preview, you’ll know that Bad Company 2′s multiplayer offers matches for up to 24 players, plenty of ground and air vehicles, and an added focus on customizing your weapons kit. There are four classes to choose from–medic, engineer, recon, and assault–but you can customize your loadout to such an extent that class limitations don’t play a huge role. Aside from your primary weapon and the specialized equipment for each class–the medic’s defibrillator paddles, the recon’s mortar strike device, and the engineer’s vehicle-repair tool–there’s a lot more flexibility in Bad Company 2. The expanded destruction engine also changes the landscape of battle (literally and figuratively) in the way you’ll see more chipping away of cover and entire buildings toppling down.

Arica Harbour is a map that takes place in a fictional South American locale, which focuses on a coastal town set between an ocean and tall mountains. Visually, it’s a very bright map situated under a pounding sun that reflects the white desert sand. But don’t take that to mean you’ll be waging your battles purely in bright, open spaces. Arica Harbour seems to offer lots of potential for various forms of combat, thanks to its mix of dense, urban structures and surrounding hills.

Because we played our matches in the Rush mode, the style of combat changed over time as new parts of the map became unlocked. Rush mode pits an attacking team against a defending team, limiting the former to a fixed number of respawns. The attackers must destroy a pair of crates four times to push their way down the map before achieving victory in the match. If they run out of respawns before taking care of that fourth pair of crates, then it’s victory for the defenders.

Each time the attacking team destroys a pair of crates, a new pair opens up a bit farther down the map, which players must make their way toward. The first section on Arica Harbour starts with the attacking team at the end of a long highway with overturned buses and destroyed cars on the sides of the road. The attackers have to push their way down to a small barracks at the end of the highway. There aren’t a whole lot of alternate routes to the crates besides going straight down the road, taking cover behind cars and hoping for the best.

Expanded weapons customization allows you to outfit your guns with various scopes and grenade launcher attachments.

 

 

 

The next section opened things up quite a bit, putting the next two crates in the middle of a large town and letting the attacking team go at it from multiple angles. We found the recon class (sniper) the most effective in this area because the tall buildings and surrounding hills offered a lot of hiding spots, while the ability to call in a mortar strike on the area immediately surrounding the crates usually meant a few easy kills against those defenders camping out a little too close to the target. On the flip side, getting in a tank was usually a recipe for disaster. The narrow city streets limit the paths you can take and means any engineer hanging out on the second or third floor of a building can just take his time to fire a rocket-propelled grenade or bazooka at you from up high.

 

In fact, it seems that jumping into a heavily armored vehicle is no longer the guaranteed kill streak it was in the first Bad Company–at least on this map. One of the ways that developer DICE seems to have balanced things out is by giving on-foot players the ability to use technology to fight the brute strength. One example of this can be seen with the inclusion of a new secondary weapon you can add to your arsenal from the kit customization screen. Rather than carry a pistol, you can elect to carry a tracer dart gun. This slick little device shoots a glowing red tracer onto the side of any vehicle, which acts as a magnet that will pull any explosive projectile within the general vicinity directly to that spot. Thus, your engineers don’t need anything close to precision targeting when firing a rocket at a vehicle from afar, helping to destroy those armored pests much more easily.

 

The third section that opens up in Arica Harbour moves back to a bit of a bottleneck scenario, with the action in the town funneling into a narrow railway bridge that crosses a river. The attacking team can take the direct route and risk charging over the road on the bridge, which turned into a hornet’s nest of bullets and grenades in our matches. Or the team can get stealthy and crawl down below, swim across the river, and sneak up behind the defending team. (The latter became our favorite approach in this section, though between the dumpsters under the bridge and the murky water, you could practically smell the filth on us after a while.) After this, the fight goes to the fourth and final section, which takes place in a wide-open shipping yard with a wrecked and flaming boat docked nearby that, sadly, can’t be used as a sniper hideout.

 

While the changing landscape forces you to take different approaches to each chapter in the match, you’ll also be earning unlockable rewards as you rack up the kills. These rewards are actually unlocked mid-match. At one point, while playing as the engineer and using an assault rifle, we managed to unlock a shotgun as a reward for reaching a new XP level. The next time we spawned, we swapped guns and jumped into a nasty firefight with the shotgun, which helped us mow down close enemies much more easily than before. In other words, it looks like those unlocks can affect the battle as quickly as the changing terrain.

 

 

 

 

 

Marvel reveals Sega titles will bookend a busy summer season for interactive adaptations of comic company’s films.

Thor will debut in May 2011, giving the golden-haired god of thunder his first starring game role. The film will be directed by Kenneth Brannagh (Hamlet, Frankenstein), with Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs, Nixon) as Odin and Chris Hemsworth (Captain Kirk’s father in this year’s Star Trek) in the title role.

Captain America will follow his fellow Avenger into theaters and onto game shelves in July 2011. A cast for the film–currently titled The First Avenger: Captain America–has not yet been announced. While Thor will be starring in his own game and movie for the first time, the star-spangled supersoldier has been there before, albeit not for decades. The much-reviled 1990 film Captain America was released direct-to-video in the United States, while the following year’s arcade game Captain America and the Avengers fared much better, spawning ports for the NES, Genesis, and GameBoy, among others.

The summer movie season of 2011 will be a busy one for Marvel comic book movies. In addition to Thor and The First Avenger: Captain America, Marvel has Spider-Man 4 set for launch May 6, 2011. Although a game based on the webbed wonder’s next outing hasn’t been officially announced, Activision has made games based on the previous three Spider-Man movies and has the rights to the crime-fighter’s gaming escapades sewn up until 2017.

Marvel also has an Avengers film scheduled for a summer 2012 release, although it too lacks an officially announced game tie-in. Sega is a likely candidate to make such a title, as the film would be the sixth Marvel Studios production, with the Sonic publisher having handled the gaming tie-ins for the first five (Iron Man and its sequel, The Incredible Hulk, and the Captain America and Thor projects).

The Xbox 360 is trying very hard to kick the PC from it’s throne as most pirated platform. The game was pirated and released on the Internet a couple of days back and many (MANY) players have already been playing Modern Warfare 2 almost two weeks before it’s official release. A quick search for Modern Warfare 2 on Youtube will give you tons of videos of gameplay, but watch it as some contain massive spoilers.

Now that all those players already got a head start on the rest of us, still waiting for the game to be released, Infintiy Ward will reset all leaderboards to make things fair again:

Source: @fourzerotwo »

@boyle111 It definitely looks like a full leaderboard / level reset is in order just before the release date to ensure no unfair advantages.

Source: @fourzerotwo »

@jeff1315 Why would you assume we wouldn’t address that at launch? Of course we’ll re-level the playing field at launch.

Planning to join the pirate fleet yourself? Please keep this in mind:

Source: @fourzerotwo »

@fourzerotwo Are you taking down names as you see people not authorized to play the game for future action? Piracy requires punishment.
@Sustainabillity theyre listed on the leaderboards. Logging online with a modded Xbox is like sewing a big red scarlet letter on yourself.

In certain multiplayer gametypes/playlists you will not be able to play Modern Warfare 2 while in a Party Chat on the Xbox 360. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare you could use the Party Chat walk-around/cheat to still give your team heads up when you were shot down (while spectating in 3rd person). Infinity Ward chose to not make this possible in Modern Warfare 2, so they’re forcing you to use the game chat channel in most multiplayer gametypes/playlists. This also means you will not be able to speak with a gamer buddy that is playing another game while you play some Modern Warfare 2…

By the looks of it, as shown in the image to the right, you will only be able to use party chat in the following playlists:

• Free-for-all
  
• 3rd Person Teams
  
• Mercenary Team Deathmatch

We’ve attached a video showing you exactly how this will work but chances are this video will be removed by Youtube soon. If so, please let us know

You play as Artyom, who is a young man born just before the apocalypse but has spent the majority of his life underground. His memories of the world aboveground are fragmented, and his parents are absent. Thus, he was left an orphan who has been raised by other survivors. His one dream is to see the outside world, but he’s still young and has never left the confines of his local Metro stop, Exhibition. You play Artyom as a 20-year-old man, who is entrusted to warn other colonies of a breed of mutated beasts called the Dark Ones that look to threaten this underground world. The physical structure of the Metro system is inspired. Each of the major subway stations has become its own little town, with the city of Polis at its centre. Each settlement also has its own social and political infrastructure–Exhibition is a peaceful democracy, but you’ll come across fascist dictatorships as you travel further afield. You’ll also get to see what it’s like aboveground–albeit only at night–thanks to the collapsed ozone layer.

The game opens with a glimpse into the future as you and another man approach the final destination in the game. You’re climbing up toward ground level when you’re attacked by a couple of mutants. They’re not difficult to kill, so you dispatch them and equip a gas mask to head outside to meet your allies. Vehicles approach, but you’re ambushed again. This time, it’s a stampede of mutants, so you have to take cover and shoot them down one by one. The horde knocks allies to the ground and overturns vehicles, and the sheer number of enemies makes your survival unsure. With your future uncertain, the game then sends you back eight days in the past to the beginning of the story as you explore Exhibition for the first time.

In Metro 2033, the Moscow underground network has become the last refuge for humanity.

The prologue may sound like a simple sequence, but it’s populated by lots of impressive details. Floors and ladders collapse as you’re climbing, so you have to go back to jump over large gaps or depend on your teammate to catch you. The lighting engine means that enemy shadows are cast across the wall before you see them attack you. Your map is a physical object–you pull it out and flick on your lighter to navigate. The gas mask also distorts your vision and has a dampening effect on the noise. There are lots of little touches such as these that look to add to the experience, and it’s impressive to see so many of them at this early stage.

The demo continued with a tour of Exhibition. Children ran around playing, people gathered around a fire to listen to someone play the guitar, and residents got up to their private business behind closed doors. It wasn’t long before we were out on an assignment–a character called Hunter instructed us to head to nearby Riga using the underground tunnel system. Along the way, we took a detour, which set up one of the game’s many set pieces. Our carriage was attacked by mutants, and it was up to us to save our comerades by fighting off enemies as we sped through the tunnel. It was impressive stuff–reminiscent of the tunnel sequences in the original Half-Life–and there were plenty of dynamic moments where the enemies made it onto our carriage to kill our friends. The final level we saw was a human battle against a group of neo-Nazis who’d deliberately flooded a station. 4A promises a completely different AI dynamic for every type of opponent, so it will be interesting to see how the different combat set-pieces will work in the finished game.

You’ll get to go aboveground, but not in daylight, and only wearing a gas mask.

The custom-built technology behind Metro looks like it can compete with the big-name engines out there. THQ says it’s going to be a poster child for Nvidia’s PhysX technology while also using high dynamic range rendering under DirectX 9/10, as well as DirectX 11 in the long term. Perhaps even more impressively, it’s genuinely difficult to see the difference between the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game, both of which were shown at the event. While the team claims the PC is the lead platform for the game, the Xbox 360 version looked identical–even when blown up onto a huge cinema screen.

If another postapocalyptic shooter sounds like familiar ground in the wake of such games as Fallout 3 and Stalker, then Metro 2033 looks like it will still be able to distinguish itself from the competition. The development team stresses that it’s predominantly a first-person shooter, and while there will be elements of character progression, the game is a long way from role-playing territory. We were left impressed by our first look, and with any luck, we’ll get to play it soon. Stay tuned for more on Metro 2033 as soon as we get it.

The Good

• Spectacular visual design  
• Unique, team-based combat  
• Fun skill chaining  
• Good quest variety.

The Bad

• Generic and forgettable plot  
• Disruptive party AI  
• Combat gets repetitive  
• Customization lacks depth  
• Linear with few opportunities for exploration.

Magna Carta 2 is an unapologetically cliched role-playing game that focuses on real-time, team-based combat, which the game translates into a single-player experience rather successfully. Its novel battle system, emphasizing speed and brutal skill chains, is initially fun, but it eventually struggles with hack-and-slash mechanics and aggravating AI, occasionally regressing into repetitive button mashing. Though the game looks superb and is mildly interesting at some points, its substandard plot and unsophisticated gameplay undermine a lot of the excitement.

Instantly switch between characters to perform skill chains for massive damage.

The storyline is underwhelming and dull, offsetting its dramatic tone against flat, archetypal characters and a confusing world history. A greedy politician has murdered the queen of Lanzheim and seized the throne, sparking civil war between the usurper and a shoddy resistance group. You control Juto, an amnesic country bumpkin who stumbles into Princess Zephie, the overburdened heiress and a major pawn for the resistance. You guide the duo and Zephie’s elite combat unit to retake the throne, unveiling Juto’s troublesome past along the way.

The real-time battle system is refreshingly fast-paced, incorporating active, turn-based elements that let you control every aspect of combat while keeping you on your toes. You fuel your abilities with kan–energy stored by constantly slashing opponents with standard attacks. Exerting yourself raises a stamina gauge, and once it’s full, you go into an overdrive state that briefly increases your attack power but can cause you to overheat, rendering you unable to attack or use items for a period of time. It takes some finesse to avoid overheating, which you can do by instantaneously switching between party members in the heat of battle; this grants you direct control over every ally’s stamina gauge and attacks at a moment’s notice, encouraging you to strategize on the fly. Each character possesses two distinct fighting styles and a healthy variety of skills to enliven combat, along with special talents that you activate via onscreen prompts. These abilities often boost your defenses and can help make the game’s challenging boss fights less daunting.

The battle system’s most enjoyable aspect is its high-speed chaining, which intensifies combat by forcing you to focus on proper timing and stamina management. Ideally, you’ll time your basic attacks to keep your party’s stamina gauges up. This lets you easily initiate a chain by performing a skill while in overdrive status, though you’ll overheat. Your goal is to quickly perform a second skill using another party member who is in overdrive; doing so before the previous member recovers from overheat completes the chain and resets both characters’ stamina gauges, freeing them from overheat status and dealing increased damage. If you slip up, however, you’ll have two useless characters briefly trapped in overheat. The process may sound complicated, but it’s relatively painless to learn, requiring some skill in balancing how long you stay in overdrive against the risks and rewards of chaining. The chaining system’s only disappointment is its failure to mature beyond the bare-bones basics, restricting you to repetitive, two-character chain spamming that often devolves into button mashing, which lowers the excitement.

Party AI is functional but frequently problematic. Characters get stuck on environmental obstructions like barricades, trees, or even small dips in the ground, which makes you feel like you’re controlling a party of nitwits. Sometimes your allies will stand on affected status areas that are harmful to them or stray too close to a boss, resulting in fevers, poisonings, bouts of vertigo or heavy beatings. Fighting in tight corridors is especially frustrating, because they’re usually littered with objects, and the camera zooms in too close, limiting your field of view and making it difficult to manage your party. The AI settings could also use some tweaking; even if your party members are set to attack whatever you target, they’ll often loaf around while you’re being pummeled or designate their own targets, which interrupts your strategizing. Ultimately, the only way to work around the AI is to assume direct control of offending teammates, which is an annoying distraction.

Stunning character models and flashy battle effects excite the senses.

A good variety of side quests and basic customization provide a little depth to relieve the sometimes finicky combat. These include missions to rescue civilians, hunt vicious monsters, and activate character-specific quests to acquire special gear, but a few frustrating yet thankfully sporadic quest bugs prevent you from receiving rewards. A basic crafting system lets you tweak stats by creating accessories from gems, or you can insert the gems into weaponry to directly enhance abilities. Unfortunately, you can’t combine gems to unlock new varieties or forge weapons and consumable items, so the system is limited.

Aesthetically, the game achieves a distinctive, surrealistic look. The expansive, richly detailed environments are well textured, and battle effects are impressive, with colorful lights and flamboyant sequences, though they periodically cause minor slowdown. Characters are creatively designed with exquisite outfits, and everything from facial expressions to fluid battle movements has been expertly modeled. The orchestral soundtrack offers appropriately sullen background music for the serene forests and desolate war zones, along with livelier scores for battles, but it’s hardly exceptional. Sound effects are usually grandiose and often gratifying to hear, such as the sound of steel weapons sliding against one another. Voicing is a little melodramatic but competent, so you’ll rarely feel the need to reach for the mute button.

The game has a respectable 40 hours of playtime if you complete most side quests, but its replayability is lowered by a noticeable lack of dungeons to explore and a high degree of linearity, restricting your adventuring until you’re more than halfway in. The battle system’s initial allure also wanes, making one play-through more than sufficient. Magna Carta 2 struggles with irritating AI and a generic plot, leaving its high-speed battle system and impressive visual style as highlights to an otherwise banal adventure. Some combat aspects are enjoyable, but the game’s shallowness and redundancy are uninspiring.

By Shiva Stella, GameSpotPosted Nov 2, 2009 6:39 pm PT

[UPDATE] Activision breaks silence following controversial leaked Call of Duty footage, emphasizes its plot significance, opt-out checkpoints; game’s ESRB summary MIA; new ESRB summary reveals circumstances.

SPOILER WARNING: The story below contains information that reveals major plot details about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game’s developer, Infinity Ward, is recommending a total media blackout for those who wish to play the game without any prior knowledge of its story.

Yesterday, footage purporting to be of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 began appearing across the Internet. Unlike prior gameplay trailers, it did not cast players as British and US Special Forces fighting terrorists. Instead, it put the gamers behind the iron sights of a terrorist’s assault rifle during an airport massacre similar to last year’s attacks in Mumbai, India.

Gamers won’t have to participate in Modern Warfare 2′s massacre.

Within hours, Activision’s UK offices confirmed the footage as real. However, reps were quick to emphasize that the sequence was both optional and prefaced by warnings that it would contain images that some might find offensive.

Now, with the Associated Press picking up the story–often the first step in a news item getting widespread mainstream press exposure–Activision’s US offices have broken their silence. “The leaked footage was taken from a copy of game that was obtained illegally and is not representative of the overall gameplay experience in Modern Warfare 2,” a spokesperson told GameSpot.

“Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 features a deep and gripping storyline in which players face off against a terrorist threat dedicated to bringing the world to the brink of collapse,” the spokesperson continued. “The game includes a plot involving a mission carried out by a Russian villain who wants to trigger a global war. In order to defeat him, the player infiltrates his inner circle. The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.”

The spokesperson concluded, “At the beginning of the game, players encounter a mandatory ‘checkpoint’ in which they are warned that an upcoming segment may contain disturbing elements, and they can choose not to engage in the gameplay that involves this scene.”

The scene’s carnage will be prefaced with warnings that its imagery may be “disturbing.”

Activision reps were quick to emphasize that, in the US and Canada, the game has been rated M for Mature by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. They also pointed out that said rating is “prominently displayed” on all packaging and in all advertising. However, the ESRB Web site currently has no detailed summary of the game other than the basic descriptors for “blood, drug reference, intense violence, [and] language.”

Detailed summaries became mandatory for all ESRB-rated games in November 2008 and are included for all new releases, such as Activision’s own DJ Hero and Guitar Hero 5. Modern Warfare 2′s DS spin-off, the T for Teen rated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Mobilized, also has a detailed summary.

[UPDATE] The ESRB’s Modern Warfare 2 summary is now live, and it is easy to see why Activision wanted to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. The description describes the exact circumstances of the massacre, and what role the player will be assuming. (WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW.)

The most intense depiction of violence occurs during a “No Russian” mission where players take on the role of an undercover Ranger: Several civilians are gunned down at an airport as players are given a choice to participate in the killings (e.g., players can shoot a wounded civilian that is crawling on the ground), or walk by and observe without opening fire. In either case, civilians scream and emit pools of blood as they are shot to death. Within the multiplayer portion of the game, players can unlock “emblems” to be used on their player name cards. Some of these emblems contain images that reference drugs (e.g., a cannabis leaf; a name card with a depiction of a joint). Dialogue in the game contains profanity in both English (e.g., “s***”) and Russian (e.g., “f***” and “motherf***er”).

by Chris Roper

November 2, 2009 – It took LucasArts longer than it expected to put the finishing touches on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but when it was finally released last year it went on to put up huge numbers for the company – record setting numbers in fact, and considering the success of previous Star Wars titles, that’s no small feat. Given that it might be a while before we see a direct sequel, assuming one is even in development (and you have to assume that it is), we’re now seeing the release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Ultimate Sith Edition.

Essentially, this is the collector’s edition that we didn’t see last year, coupled with all of the available downloadable content and a brand-new exclusive level. For the retail price you’ll get the original game, the Jedi Academy, Tatooine and Hoth levels, all of the downloadable skins, a collector’s card and a nice tin case to hold it all in.

In terms of the tangible stuff, the collector’s tin is really just the metal case that a lot of other special editions ship in, which, while cool and nice, isn’t anything new. The collector’s card is just a thick piece of paper with some artwork on it and is hardly worth collecting. In fact, there’s a paper pamphlet that shows what all of the cards look like, and that’s probably enough for most everyone out there.

Now, before I get into the actual details of what’s in store for you, let me point out that most of this content is also available for the original release of The Force Unleashed. The Jedi Academy level has been out for some time, as have been the downloadable skins. The new Tatooine level will be available as a download as well, leaving Hoth as the only exclusive gameplay element. So while this is also being targeted at existing fans of the game, its ideal customer is someone who didn’t pick up the game in the first place and wants everything in one shot.

The base Force Unleashed experience is the main star of the show, and nothing has changed. The code looks to be completely untouched, for better or for worse. If you haven’t played the game or want to know our thoughts on the original experience, be sure you check out our original Star Wars: The Force Unleashed review. In short, it’s still a fun, if somewhat flawed, experience that gives you a great set of Force powers to play with.

Obi-Wan is a pushover.

In terms of the additional content, what you’re getting here is an extension of the base game, something that simply adds more content to the experience but doesn’t actually change (or even fix) anything. What’s sort of nice is that each of the three additional levels are standalone options, so you don’t need to play through the game in order to get to them. The downside to this is that none of your powers or anything carry over, nor does anything that you earn carry back into the main game. However, that largely doesn’t matter as you start almost fully powered-up for each of these levels anyway.

I won’t spend too much time talking about the Jedi Academy level as it’s been available as DLC for some time, but it’s a pretty decent bonus level that has you wandering through the academy in order to get to a personal test of sorts. It doesn’t seem to fit into any specific part of the secret apprentice’s story and instead acts as a random side mission that he goes on for himself, which is nice as you don’t need to know what’s happened in the base game to appreciate it. There’s a small bit of simple puzzle solving towards the end that helps break up the pace a little bit, and while it won’t tax your noggin, it’s a nice change from all of the killing.