This Week In Xbox Live Demos!

 Hello, and welcome to a brand new feature I made up because I don't have much to write about! In this feature, I will play through the demos that come out on Xbox Live every week and write about them! With words! I might even make unfair assumptions about the full game based on these demos! What fun! Yeah exclamation marks!

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

I remember the first Star Wars: The Force Unleashed pretty well because it was the first game I ever reviewed. That review isn't on this site, however, because I deleted it from the world about six months later. I remember liking it at the time, but looking back I'm starting to think that it wasn't particularly good. Also, since that review I have become a whole hell of a lot less enthusiastic about Star Wars. I'm not anti-Star Wars, I'm just anti-speaking about Star Wars. Which is what I'm doing right now! Whoops.

I do not know of a single person who is excited for this game. There's no one completely hating on it, because that would be unfair since it's not out yet, but I don't know anyone who is going to buy it. Or even rent it. It seems to have just slipped into a state of almost being out with almost no marketing push. This, combined with the fact that most of the team who worked on this game have been laid off, do not paint a great picture for this game. But I'm not going to judge this whole game based on Lucas Arts' business decisions. Instead, I'm going to judge this whole game based on it's demo!

Anyways, this demo would lead me to believe that this game is just the first one with more motion blur. Yeah, it looks nicer, but that's because the first one came out two years ago. It's just as clunky as the first one. You still move ridiculously slowly, unless you're using your crazy dash move that makes you look incredibly silly when you use it a couple times in a row. You hit things with your lightsaber, and then sometimes you use force lightning on dudes. That is, until you remember that you can just throw everyone off the edge of the pathway, which makes the whole things go a lot smoother. The targeting seems a bit better than the first game, but it's pretty easy to improve on utter shit.

As for what happens in the demo, you start talking to Vader. It turns out that you're a clone of the guy from the original game (Something Starkiller (Ha, get it? It's like the original name for Skywalker! That's pretty funny right?)) but you somehow kept all his emotions as well. You still have feelings for that girl who has no personality except that she is a girl, so you try to escape from Darth Vader. You jump out of a window and then escape by killing a bunch of storm troopers. Once you've escaped, you are put in control of your character with the camera pointing you directly towards an open window. But you're not supposed to go there, because you die! You stupid idiot! You have to walk to the left towards a closed door and then magically teleport to the other side of it. DUH.

Probably the worst part of this demo is the part where you are running down a corridor and it's getting crushed behind you by something (to be honest I don't remember what it was) and you have to do your clunky-looking dash over and over again to escape. On your way there are storm troopers hanging out in this corridor too, but if you try to attack them the corridor breaker will catch up with you and kill you. Which involves you getting too close to the destroyed bits of the corridor, stopping in place, and then doing a death animation a second later. Kinda clunky.

Then, you throw some tie fighters at a wall, and end up at a miniature boss fight with a robot thing. I say miniature because all you have to do is hit it a few times and then do a quick time event. Yeah, a quick time event. Apparently it's 2008 again. After that, you are pitted against a pair of AT-STs and given a new power. Some sort of "rage mode" where you supposedly become more powerful and wreck some shit. In most games, these are cool and let you kill a lot of enemies and feel like a badass (see: Shattered Dimensions) but in this game they kind of got it wrong. Your attack kind of makes you stop in place and all the moves you have in this mode feel even less effective than the regular ones. And then, the demo ends.

Final Conclusion: I am not impressed. It seems like they just made the exact same game again, and the original didn't really impress anyone back in the day either.