Summary [7.0 out of 10]

A follow up to a story that seemed pretty well cleared up at the end of the first installment, Force Unleashed II follows Starkiller as he awakes and breaks free from Darth Vader’s clutches and tries to reunite with his friends and continue the press of the Rebel Alliance against the Empire. Questions are raised (and not really answered) as to whether or not this is the original Starkiller who was thought to have died in the previous installment or just a clone like Vader says. The game plays pretty much exactly the same way the last one did but offers a much less substantial story and feels much smaller in scope. Nothing has been reinvented here but there are some nice tweaks and streamlines that make force powers feel a bit more badass.

Introduction

I never finished the first Force Unleashed but I really liked what I played of it. The gameplay was repetitive but I thought it was awesome to slaughter stormtroopers and jedi alike wholesale while slinging force powers out like they were nothing. I eventually got sidetracked but it was a good time. And so is the sequel but there isn’t enough new to really keep you interested and the story, which could pick up the slack here, fails to engage. So the whole experience feels a little cheap and rushed. That it is relatively short doesn’t help matters much. There are a lot of impressive things here too but the lackluster elements hold the whole thing back which is kind of a shame.

The Great

• Graphics: This game is great looking and constantly impressed me. With graphical quality starting to plateau this generation, Force Unleashed II shows us that there is still plenty of juice left for a gorgeous game. The environments are not as varied as the first game but they are several times prettier. Likewise the cut scenes are gorgeous with improved facial models and the animation is fluid and lifelike. It is fitting that a game dedicated to Force driven badassery would look so great.

• Force Powers: They added the Jedi Mind Trick which is awesome and allows you to pit your weak minded opponents against one another but the rest of the force powers are tweaked and amped up to perfection. The way the game is designed and balanced you are met with enemies that are weak to particular things so you have to use all of your force powers throughout the game instead of just spamming a favorite over and over again. Being able to mix powers with lightsaber attacks further makes you feel like an absolute bad ass of the highest order and using all of them is great fun.

• Controls: The controls are very responsive and the button mapping is pretty much perfect. There are no menus to cycle through to access which force power you want and everything is right there on the controller for you. It feels nice and intuitive too so very rarely do you fight with the controller. Poor lock on and targeting hampers this a little but in general you can do what you want when you want to do it.

The Good

• Starkiller is a Badass: As a character Starkiller owns in terms of action. There isn’t much actual development for him in the story but he is unrepentantly awesome. He is actually so awesome that it causes some story problems which I will address below. From beginning to end he completely owns and playing him is like playing Kratos if Kratos had the force. Now I just have to sit and think about how bad ass THAT would be…

• Cut scenes: As mentioned above the cut scenes are very pretty. More than that, though, they are generally exciting and fun to watch. There are some slower, more dialogue heavy scenes but a lot of them are showing Starkiller do even more bad assed things that you do during game play and that is saying something. These are just a lot of fun to watch and look great.

• Boss Fights: The boss fights are epic, multi-tiered affairs that often shift play styles a couple of times and offer unique challenges from beginning to end. The bosses are often very large and very formidable and you feel like you have really accomplished something when you finally bring them down. They are also pretty tough. Thankfully autosaves keep you from having to do everything all over again.

• Variety: The game play shifts a lot throughout the course of the game so you aren’t always just hacking and slashing with the occasional force power thrown out. Right from the start you have a free fall segment where you are diving out of a tower and have to avoid debris and tie fighters. There are a couple more of these segments with ramped up difficulty but you also have some unique platforming levels as well as some targeting segments and more unique force manipulation segments. These are well put together and entertaining and help break up the standard segments which can sometimes get repetitive.

The Bad

• Story: The story feels like a side story that could have been told in the opening crawl. Very little of substance actually happens with only two or three actual developments. And those developments don’t really go anywhere. The ending opens up room for a sequel but what it feels like is that this is just a stop-gap for whatever that is going to be. Compared to the first game, this one just feels hollow and insubstantial from a story point of view. Further, your character is going around crushing tie fighters like tin cans and moving Star Destroyers out of the way while his ship is crashing but yet he has a hard time taking on Vader when all Vader is doing is throwing glass containers at him? I think Starkiller may be the single most bad ass character in Star Wars in terms of what he can do. That he is just occupying a space between movies is kind of ridiculous and makes the story feel kind of stupid. This is a dude who could probably bend the Emperor into a pretzel from half a galaxy away but yet he is always getting the shit end of the stick. Kind of hard to swallow.

• Length: Just as the story makes this feel hollow and insubstantial, the length drives this home by providing an experience that can be run through in two longish sittings. When I got to the end I was kind of surprised because it took so little time and only barely more effort. It isn’t that the game play has you clamoring for more per se but from a full retail release that isn’t a Call of Duty game I expected more.

• Uneven Difficulty: The game goes from really easy to damn near impossible and then back again in the blink of an eye. The early levels are understandably pretty tame but by the end they are throwing just ridiculous numbers of powerful enemies at you in environments not really well designed for that sort of conflict. Sure, you get better and after repetition you will get through but there is a bit more frustration involved than is necessary and it may lose its audience near the end. It would be different, too, if the whole game were like this but the flow is very uneven and disruptive. It is hard to settle into having a good time in the later levels because you are never sure when the frustration levels are going to get jacked up to 11.

Conclusion [7.0 out of 10]

There is fun to be had in Force Unleashed II if you like this sort of game play and enjoy being a jedi badass. If you are looking for a long experience with a great story that really draws you into the universe then it is going to be a disappointment. I enjoyed it for what it was while I spent time with it but there needs to be some tweaking in future installments to be anything other than just OK.