Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 Review

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is back and ready to take another stab at giving gamers the opportunity to kick galactic amounts of butt utilising the Force.

As a clone of Starkiller, you escape Darth Vader’s clutches after memories of a past life start rushing into your head, and so begins a trail of destruction that leads our dear force user into some serious trouble.

Click through for our full review.

The Force Unleashed 2 takes place a short while after the first game and kicks off with the player learning that Vader has been attempting to clone Starkiller, but has suffered failures over and over again due to memories returning to the clones.

Vader eventually gets one right and is in the hopes that he has finally succeeded, but his hopes are quickly shot down when the clone starts conjuring up old memories of Juno and refuses to attack bots that simulate her appearance. Upon seeing that he will be ended, our Starkiller makes a break for it.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 attempts to rectify many of the issues that were found with the first game. Major improvements have been made to the gameplay in terms of fun factor and variety, and you will undoubtedly have tons of fun when getting creative with Starkiller’s force powers. Some new additions have been made, such as some scenes where the character is falling, although the game was still a little too heavy in the quicktime-events department for my liking.

As per usual, you upgrade your character over the course of the game, building up your force powers until you are finally able to cause some huge amounts of damage effortlessly. Much of the tech from the first game returns as well, including the ability to bend and blast doors open using the force, as well as really great physics that are applied to all characters and materials, such as glass.

The visuals in Force Unleashed range from good to gorgeous depending on what levels you are on, and to make it even better, it is further reinforced by the powerful Star Wars score as well as maybe the best sound effects library available today.

A major issue with SW: TFU2 is that while I really enjoyed the force powers and the combat, the game really is just lacking in content. With a campaign that is only around 5 hours long on the normal difficulty at best, there is very little reasoning to spend full price money on it. Not only that, but in contrast to the first game, it feels as if though there is very little adventure and variety to the game overall. You fight almost the same enemies throughout the whole game, and with the exception of one or two scripted events, there isn’t too much going on there.

By the time I had reached the end of the game, it felt like I had only played a lavish extended preview of the what was to come. It felt like more needed to happen, like there were places to go, powers to use and outfits to wear. All of this could have been remedied with a fantastically woven story of deception, intrigue and love, but unfortunately there isn’t much of that either. The entire plot of the game can pretty much be summed up into: “Clone escapes, goes after girl”.

It’s really a shame, because I had so much fun with the game, I really did. The force powers were really fun to play with, some of the levels were gorgeous and the tech is impressive overall. So why then did Lucasarts decide to just cut the game short and leave out any major story progression as well?

It’s a shame that both the first and second Force Unleashed games seem like they need each other to be complete. While the first was adventurous and had a great story, it lacked gameplay depth. The new one has all the new gameplay flair, but lacks the story and scale of the first.

Conclusion:

It’s a heck of a lot of fun to play, especially for Star Wars fans. It’s just an incredible shame then, that the game ended feeling like it still needed a few more chapters and locations, not to mention plot points. This had potential to be a great Star Wars game, but thanks to a few very bad decisions, it will be quickly forgotten.

Scoring:

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Gameplay: 8.5

Using force powers and lightsabers to obliterate everything is fun. Controls work well but platforming can feel a little clunky.

Presentation: 8.9

The game really looks spectacular at times, especially when rain is involved.

Sound: 9.0

Two words: Star Wars

Value: 4.0

The campaign only last a few hours and there is no real reason to play it again or to play any of the challenges. No multiplayer either.

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Overall: 7.8 (not an average)

One of those cases where the individual scores don’t reflect the worth of the game. It looks good and its fun to play most of the time, but just lacks the depth and scale to justify a purchase, especially in this crazy season of game releases.

Last Updated: November 2, 2010