"I've got a bad feeling about this"
Prior to the Spike Video Game Awards last year, it was confirmed one of the new reveals would be a game in the Star Wars universe. Fans, to put it mildly, went crazy as debates and theories about what it could possibly be ran rampant. Would Bioware finally make a long and emotionally involved third installment to Knights of the Old Republic to coincide with their MMO? Would....whoever decide to take up the responsibility of doing a Battlefront 3? Hell, would someone even attempt at making a new X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter? Instead, we get Force Unleashed 2. (crickets). A game with massive hype and hit just as much disappointments for its buggy gameplay, repetitive action and decent but rather thin combat. But Lucasarts has decided to bring out a sequel where they'll hopefully pull a Bioware or Naughty Dog and make their sequels even better than the original by fixing what didn't work previously and adding new things to make it a true successor. Instead we got a game that actually made me appreciate the original more because that one did something this one doesn't: this one just isn't fun to play.
Taking place after the good ending events of Force Unleashed, we find Darth Vader holding Starkiller in captivity as he's haunted by visions and memories of the previous Starkiller. This one, in fact, is a clone and is just being used by Vader against the war with the Rebellion. When Starkiller breaks free and escapes, his mind is set on one thing: Juno, the attractive Alliance pilot from the original. With the help of friend/mentor General Kota, Starkiller goes on a search to find her and to unravel the mystery of who he is: after all, it's apparently impossible to clone a Jedi.
The problem with this game primarily is the repetitive nature of it. There's a few sequences to break up the action such as freefall sections, one brief bit where you ride atop a big droid and one cool sequence where he enters Kamino throwing space debris away but it's still lightsaber fight one after the other and unlike the first game where you travelled to different planets, there's roughly 4 levels in this game: the rainy, ocean planet of Kamino, the floating city of Cato Neimoidia, a ship in space and the briefest of appearances of Dagobah. These levels just feel way too long and rather than have different environments to break up the visual monotony of being in the same environment, it's like they just made one level and made it super big and lengthy (that's what she said?)
As far as the gameplay is concerned, strangely enough, at times it feels worse than previously. Controls aren't as responsive and having enemies immune to your attacks feels really off and ridiculous. The game says "they block your lightsaber attacks, use the Force" or vice versa for certain enemies yet by the end of the game, they were blocking my saber attacks plus my Lightning that I just did the grapple maneuver for nearly everybody. Another issue last time was using the Force grab to launch things at enemies and that's still here too and it's still clunky. It's hard to tell sometimes how to actually use the thing and instead of firing it at an enemy, it just sort of falls to the ground like it ran out of gas or he throws it to some random wall out of your field of view, effectively wasting a missile/projectile. The platforming wasn't much of an issue this time around, the linearity of the levels makes it easier to tell where you're supposed to go and there's some cool setpieces but it's still not a gameplay that's been perfected yet.
The look of the game has definately been improved since last time as the environments look more destructible, the oft-touted physics engine is improved and the game can handle so many things at once. Oh, and hey, wanna know the craziest thing? The game never crashed on me. Not once. How's that for improved? Kamino still looks striking, the freefall sections (including the entry to Kamino near the end) have a great energy about them and the CGI and in-engine cutscenes look just as great and even Juno actually looks hot now as opposed to the weird frog lips from before. Voice acting is as strong as ever (though I still don't think Sam Witwer can yell dialogue and not have it sound grating) and John Williams-inspired score is just as rousing as ever. If anything, at least this game nails the presentation and feel of the movies.
Which is my biggest problem so far with this series of games: they could've been excellent movies. Unlike say Bioware and Obsidian's entries which were just too damn big to be made into movies, Force Unleashed 2 could easily be a great Star Wars movie but in game form, it's kind of tedious and repetitive to play, it's really short (forgot to check how long I took) and the challenges don't have the most welcome replay value. Honestly, unless you're a diehard Star Wars fan, skip it.
