Chewing up the Star Wars canon like so much cheap soda, LucasArts churn out a tacked on sequel to the film saga’s missing link
Format: PS3 (version played), Xbox 360, Wii, PC, DS Dev: LucasArts Pub: LucasArts
Out: 29/10/10 Players: 1
Why can Lucas only work in trilogies? I mean we’re not looking at a trimmed down story on the scale of Halo 2’s annoyance, but Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II still manages to piss you off with its ridiculously cut-short single-player, in terms of plot development.
You’re back into the shoes of Starkiller – well, the clone of him. If you haven’t played the original game, this is the only backstory you will need, as you probably won’t care about the original Starkiller, and neither does FUII. You defect from the Dark Side and escape from the cloning facility, and the game is your adventures from there onwards.
This lack of plot cohesion comes from a sequel to a game that won awards for its storytelling. Everything just feels like an afterthought, from the Yoda cameo to Darth Vader’s key part to the story. He takes part in the first scene, with poor voice acting and bad dialogue, then disappears until the very end where he makes a second cameo. All of the above is the key selling point of the original Force Unleashed, but they’ve managed to annihilate what little story (which lasts 4-5 hours) there is.
So, maybe the efforts have been focused upon other areas? On the surface, things start to look good, as the visual style is a significant step over the previous iteration. Character modelling is fantastic, textures are vividly detailed and the action moves along at a good pace, and makes this lightsaber ballet plenty easier on the eyes. Add a soundtrack that is, in the case of the entire Star Wars universe, epic in every orchestral sense of the word. FUII is a presentational power house of prowess and style.
After a beautiful cutscene (including the classic scrolling text to fill you in on the story), you pick up the controller and begin to play. Actual control of Starkiller seems to have remained the same, only slightly streamlined and lacking any of the ability roadmap confusion of the original. Character upgrades have been simplified to certain powers and lightsaber tune-ups, which can be accessed at anytime.
This is a welcome change from the first, but the major issue still hasn’t been tackled: the repetition of the experience. Believe me when I say combat is fun, but only for the first hour or so. After you’ve tried all the gameplay options it has to offer – all the timed button-press QTEs and scenarios that require a culmination of both the Force and lightsaber attacks – you tire extremely quickly of the formula.
The promo trailers of you fighting Darth Vader really get you pumped for what should be one hell of a return to form for Star Wars in video game form. But it never happens. The story is ridiculously short and thin on the ground, the gameplay tires after the first two levels, and you’ll be left feeling lost with a generic third-person action game, when what you really wanted was something that at least resembled a Star Wars game. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I won’t be checking back in for the conclusion to this trilogy.
Jason England
Tags: action, activision, force unleashed, lucasarts, sci-fi, star wars
