The Forced Unleashed 2 is the sequel to the somewhat popular Forced
Unleashed. In this game you play a clone of the main character of the
first game and after escaping for Darth Vader you set out to find you
love interest for the first game.
Firstly let’s talk about the story and characters. The stories its
self is a little contrived but is sufficient to keep you wanting to know
what happens next. The endings (a good and bad) don’t make as much
sense in the story of Star Wars though. This means that if you have seen
the movies the ending will bug you. The characters are all very well
developed and work well together. The voice acting is a large part of
this and you really start to feel for the plight of your character.
The game is about 6-7 hours long and has a small character upgrade
system in that you put force points into making you attack stronger. The
game is artificially lengthened my some weird difficulty hikes that
appear out of nowhere. There are some challenge rooms that you unlock
but they are easy and you can finish them all in 30 min.
The game play is the biggest let down of this game. The action is VERY
button mashy and you will end up using the same for attacks over and
over again. The game adds one new force power to the ones from the last
game and an “overcharge” power which makes you invincible and makes your
powers much more powerful. The new power lets you trick enemies into
fighting on another and while fun, ends up being only used for a bit of
crowd control occasionally. The boss fights while epic go on for way to
long with bosses health bars being refilled several times during the
fight and one boss took me one and a half hours to beat. That’s a bit
under a quarter of the entire game. Also the physics in the game are a
little messed up with things not reacting how you would expect them to.
The graphics are good for the most part and there are some gorgeous
pre rendered movies. The only noticeable exception is explosions that
are look like flat sprites that just appear over the enemies. Another
complaint is the lack of variety in the environments and animations. You
only go to 3 different planets and one of them you are only there for a
few minutes. The animations are all very smooth and look good but there
are so few of them. After a few hours you will be sick of seeing the
same animations over and over and over again.
All in all this is a game that doesn’t really live up to it’s potential and suffers bad for being a sequel.
