Game Review | November 18, 2010 8:05 pm

By Meta

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II is a third-person action game developed and published by LucasArts. It was released for the Xbox 360 on October 26, 2010.

Galen Marek, aka Starkiller, awakens in an isolation chamber on the planet Kamino. Darth Vader arrives to check on his progress and informs him that he is the most recent in a series of clones of the original Starkiller from the first game. The clone angle is necessary because this game assumes the light-side ending of the first game is 'canon', and this is just the beginning of an insipid story that comes dangerously close to breaking the official story of the first game as well as "facts" from the movies and Extended Universe novels.

If you haven't played the first game, the basic idea here is that you were a child on the planet Kashyyyk, found and trained by Darth Vader because of your incredible potential with the Force. As in the first game, you make your way from point A to point B, pausing for the occasional epic boss fight, wielding the Force with reckless abandon and at a magnitude that would make Yoda envious.

Very little has changed since Starkiller's first outing. You use two lightsabers now instead of one, but the acrobatic new combos are only different in a visual sense. There is one additional Force power you unlock, the Jedi Mind Trick, but otherwise you have all the same abilities you ended the first game with. You can earn points from killing enemies and destroying objects and use them to upgrade your powers, and at their highest level they are a bit more potent than before. Where you once could throw a Stormtroper several hundred yards with a powered-up Force Grip, you can now hurl up to 3 at a time in to low orbit.

In the first game, you could occasionally grip a passing TIE Fighter and fling it to its doom in the background, but you can now pull them from the air easily and toss them in to packs of enemies. The Mind Trick can be used to make enemies fight each other or take a suicidal leap, and your most powerful Force Repulsion can actually disintegrate the standard grunts you face.

As in the first game, you can change costumes and swap different crystals in to your lightsabers. This is a fairly pointless endeavor once your powers are upgraded though, because you won't need any extra Force points, and the most potent crystals like immolate and shock only work on the weakest enemies, and it's not like you need any extra help obliterating the standard Stormtroopers or rebel grunts. The costumes are purely cosmetic and I feel this was a wasted opportunity.

There are some pretty great locations and set pieces in your journey, including a brief stop at Dagobah, and this game is free of many of the technical glitches that plagued the first title. There are a couple moments where it seems like the story will take off but it doesn't. Yoda and Boba Fett make pointless fan-service cameos that never go anywhere, and the interactions with your old pal General Kota are brief and unsatisfying.

This game's gravest sin is that it is unforgivably short. On Normal difficulty, you will be lucky to eke out 5 hours from the main campaign and then maybe a couple more from some "challenges" outside the story. There are a couple of good, fun boss fights in the game, but the final confrontation is too boring and long for its own good. The game wants you to care when you reunite with old friends, but all you really get are a couple cutscenes and someone yelling in your ear during combat later in the game.

Visually, Force Unleashed 2 is an improvement over the original with brilliant colors, sharp texture work, and mostly impressive character models that look great as you murder them thanks to the Euphoria coding and Havok physics. Small effects like the rain on Kamino washing over smoothed surfaces look awesome, and the environments are nicely varied, even if there are only about 4 different ones and you go through them twice.

The audio is also a bit better, with the same good voice work and rousing symphonic score you expect from a Star Wars game. Starkiller himself is still kind of a douche, but Kota and the others are likable, believable characters. All the laser blasts, saber noises and computer sounds are spot-on and in high fidelity, with some impressive surround effects if you have the hardware.

The gameplay here is refined, polished and overall more exciting than the first game. There are some great one-off sections like the long falls on Kamino or later having to steer the burning wreck of a starship in to a city below, and there is nothing annoying like the Star Destroyer scene from the first game. There is a decent variety of enemies and overall they fit the tone of the game better and present some challenge while still reinforcing the fact that you are almost an omnipotent, Force-wielding demigod.

Overall, the Force Unleashed II gets a 6 from me. It is great fun, and technically sound; it is just way too damn short for a big budget retail game. LucasArts did a great job improving and refining what they were trying to do with the original Force Unleashed, there just isn't enough game here to recommend it as anything other than a rental.
And I DO recommend it as a rental, because it is a blast to play. I would just be VERY pissed if I had paid $60 for what's here.

Extras: No free gamerpics or avatar awards here. There are challenge missions that unlock as you play the campaign, and also some text entries in the "codecs" section that are great reads if you're a Star Wars fan. Especially cool are an entry where a veteran Clone Trooper (Cody) reflects on the miserable skills of the average Stormtrooper, and one where workers describe odd and violent mishaps near a suspected Sith training site.

Achievements: This game's Achievements are very easy. You can just play through the story for most of them, then do a few specific tasks for some more, and then finish most of the Challenges with gold medals to get the full 1000G. You can beat the game on any difficulty while leveling up your Force powers and then go back on the Unleashed difficulty with the same save file.

Reviewed: Force Unleashed II

Keywords: star wars, force unleashed 2, lucasarts; review