Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 Review
Star Killer has returned for the next installment in the Lucas Arts Publish Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. Has this sequel push the franchise into a new galaxy or does it fall short and end up in a black hole for videogame also known as the clearance bin. First a side note, I did not play the first Force Unleashed, I wanted to but never got around to it. After playing this game through I will probably not want to go back.
The Force Unleashed 2 starts you out at the clone facility on Kamino. You play a clone of Star Killer. Darth Vader is holding you captive and wants to train you so that you do not have any of Star Killers weaknesses especially the one weakness for his love Juno. When Vader wants you to kill an android that is disguised to look like Juno, you loss it and you spend the game trying to find out if you truly are a clone and trying to find Juno. The game takes you certain Star Wars locals that some people will recognize like Dagobah and Cato Neimoidia. I would barely call Dagobah a level. All you do in the Dagobah level is land your ship, run through the swamp and meet up with Yoda, then from there you go into the cave of Evil for a cut scene and that is it.
The game play mostly consists of some plat forming and mostly killing Storm Troopers, AT-STs, and boss battles. There are also certain enemy types that can block your force powers or your saber attacks. Before I go too far I need to say something about the boss battles in this game. They are way too long; each boss can take up to 10 to 20 minutes of doing the same freaking thing over and over again. Why are they so long? If you haven't played the first game like I had you will soon learn how much fun it is to use your dual light sabers and your force powers.
Right out of the gate you get to use dual light sabers, this is your only melee weapons that you acquire but what else is cooler then dual light sabers. Combat with the light sabers is limited to one button presses mixed in with your force powers to increase the range and effectiveness of combos. You also find light saber crystals in each level that are like buffs for your character. There are a number of variations of crystals you can use. Force powers consist of lightning, force push, force grip, mind trick, and repulse. My favorite is force grip, it reminds me of a last generation game called Psi Ops that I loved and I wish they would make a sequel. Anyways you are able to pick up Storm Troopers and other objects in the environment and hurl them over at enemies or into other enemies. You end up throwing enemies off the edge of cliffs or you force push them to their death for most of the game. These powers defiantly make the game what it is and the developers know this but this leads to a problem.
All you do is go through the game kill a wave of enemies then move on and that’s it. You do this to a point that it gets nauseating. Sure it is fun to mess around with all the different force powers but it gets so repetitive after so long. When you are facing bigger enemies like AT-STs or other giant robots you get a quick time prompt and you go into a quick time event. The quick time events get to be the same for each enemy type, so you will be doing the same quick time event for each AT-ST that you come across and they just get boring to perform so I found myself skipping the event and just killing them. I got tired of watching and performing the same quick time event for each enemy type.
Item collection is a must have in this game due to the lack of replay ability. Thrown throughout each level are Jedi: Holocrons that do different things depending on their color. The holocrons are used to raise your health bar or your force bar. Some of them also contain new light saber crystals and force points. Force points are the games currency to level up your light sabers or any of your force powers. There are three levels of grade for each power and it seems like it would take another play through to be able to max out everything. I only maxed out the powers I used the most for obvious reasons.
With The Force Unleashed 2 expect to see a lot of the same environments, earlier I said you start out on Kamino well you return towards the end of the game and it still looks the same. You do visit a couple of different locations your second time around but for the most part it is the same rooms and hallways. That is not the only time this happens, it happens again when you a running through a rebel ship and as soon as you get to where you need to be you get to back track all the way through the same hallways you just went through. I can't believe this happens and in such a short game, you are only looking at a 5 hour game at most and it has you back tracking through it. The cut scenes’ and the in game graphics look amazing. The voice work along with the graphics really make the cut scenes something not to be skipped, they do look amazing. I just wish they put the same amount of polish with the rest of the game.
The game offers some great moments of "O that was cool" but that is not enough to set it apart from any other game. I think if Luca Arts would have kept the team for another 6 months before firing them they could have crafted any number of locations from the Star Wars universe. With the boss battles that take too long and the combat being to repetitive makes it a downer. If you love Star Wars then this game is worth playing through for some fiction or if you loved Psi Ops as much as I did then you should play this game, otherwise enter at your own risk and if you do play this game, what side are you going to choose The Light Side or The Dark Side?
