Recently I started playing through 'The Force Unleashed 2' on XBOX 360.  I finished it in about three days of minimal play time, then played a few challenges then was left scratching my head thinking, '' Were on earth was the other £15 worth of game? '' I paid the princely sum of £20 for TFU2, but in honest I didn't feel like it warranted that price.  The reason?  A lack of content, there just isn't enough there... I bought Alan Wake before Christmas for £15 and that oozed content, took me ages to get through and I think it might be worth some DLC or another play-through.  So what is the difference?  

It's difficult to define content, I don't think multiple re-hashed copies of the same level with carbon copy enemies counts, there has to be enough variation to maintain interest.  This is where I think TFU2 falls foul, it keeps throwing the same enemies at you again and again, and a lot of the levels are more or less the same to play through but with different graphics.  The story isn't a bad one - but it's so short, it just doesn't make up for the other shortfalls.  In some respects Alan Wake had the same problems, I ended up finding the combat boring and samey, and some of the levels were a bit samey - but not 'too samey' the thing that held Wake together was the excellent story - the sense of who-dunnit or what the hell is it?  It even made up for the ropey lip-sync in places.

I think TFU2 suffers from 'lazy development' it's like in the nineties where a developer would be handed a licence and they'd just make a 1vs 1 beat em' up even though i didn't suit the licence or scrolling beat em' up or whatever... Take the fight at the end of TFU2, it drags on and on for ages, rinsing and repeating - and for what?  It's just a time-sink!  Like throwing hundreds of those irritating robots at you - which aren't a particular threat - but take ages to kill.  Then what do you get?  You unlock the challenges, which really, are quite boring and don't fit the story-line at all.  To me these felt like the developers had realised the game was a bit short and thin on the ground for content so tried to quickly throw something else on the disc to try to make it seem worth £39.99.

Is content about hours played to complete?  Partly I suppose - but again, if it's 80 hours of utter boredom, then it's not content - it's probably 'filler'.

I think a great deal of modern games suffer from this, tight development schedules and budgets, constant re-hashing of old ideas, even the best games seem to have a fair bit of 'filler' thrown in.  When playing the acclaimed 'Red Dead Redemption' recently I couldn't help but feel some of the stupid travel to x collect x missions were a bit 'filler'.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here - we didn't use to need content, we were quite happy with long games that recycled ideas over and over, and short games that were very hard... Doom, although it had some interesting level design was more filler than content in my opinion - yet it was still a great game.  Manic Miner was very short - only 20 screens... But so fiendishly difficult I still haven't gotten past something like screen 17 to this day!

Then again I think I paid £3 for Manic Miner on a cassette and maybe £20 for Doom... We're now expected to pay upwards of £39.99 for new releases - which is a lot of money for 3 hours play... That's why I think modern games developers need to work harder and do better.