Review #735: Star Wars - The Force Unleashed II

 It's not about how long your Force is, but rather, how you use it.

 The Force unleashed was ambitious, I'll give it that. They aimed for an epic storyline that would unravel the origins of the Rebellion, as well give players access to the full power of the Force. I can't speak for the game then, but it hasn't aged very well, and the story was sort of a mess. Star Wars - The Force Unleashed II is a weird one, the ambition is barely there and it tried very little to stand out from the first game, and yet....

 The first game's story was very poorly told. Just the fact that Darth Vader would, apparently, go against orders to get himself an apprentice, only to use him to create an alliance to fish out the Empereror's enemies could've worked with a little more exposition, but the story moved very quickly and felt like it left a lot of stuff out. Well. the developers dropped all pretense of having an epic story, having you playing as Starkiller or a clone of him, the developers couldn't commit to either so they left it ambiguous, as he is trained by Vader, again, because reasons. But memories of his past lover haunt him, so he breaks free from Vader's leash and sets out to find Juno, meeting all sorts of characters from the previous game in the process. There's nothing tying this game to the original trilogy, so they weren't really aiming on expanding the Star Wars universe, as the plot is just an excuse to let you play as Starkiller again. Heck, the game is barely 4 hours long, and they tried to pad out the game with unlockable challenges.

 The story is as uninspired as it gets, but, thankfully, gameplay has been tweaked and polished, making for a much more fun game. The graphics are fantastic, making the first game look like a beta, the framerate is smoother and hitting stuff with your sabers, since Starkiller wields two of them now, feels much better. It's not just the audiovisual feedback that you get from landing hits, but you can actually dismember enemies now, which is amazing. QTEs return, and they are a bit more obnoxious than before since you have to pay attention to the borders of the screen instead of waiting for a prompt on the center of the screen. God of War did this too, but they'd add a black border alongside the button prompt so that there was no way you wouldn't see it.

 The game plays pretty much exactly the same, square are your attacks, triangle is force lightning, circle is force push, R2 to force grip stuff, yadda yadda, but the targetting system works much better in this game than in the previous one. Quite a few attack combos were added, relying on waiting a bit between square inputs, but, at least on the normal difficulty setting, it didn't feel like there were opportune moments to use them instead of the basic Square-triangle combos. Two new additions were made to Starkiller's arsenal: Jedi Mind Trick, which makes an enemy fight for you for a short while, and the mandatory super mode, Force Fury. I barely even used Force Fury, since it wasn't very useful during boss fights and I could manage just fine throughout most fights in the game.

 Just like in the previous game, there are quite a few outfits to unlock, although you don't get one per level you get a ton by finishing the game under different settings or completing challenges. There are a few more lightsaber colors, as well as shades of them, and you can have a different color con each blade, which is very, very cool.

 "The candle that burns twice as bright, burns twice as fast" they say, or something like that. Well, The Force Unleashed II is undeniably shorter, and way less ambitious than the first entry, yet, all the little tweaks to the engine makes for a game that is quite more fun to play.
 7.0 out of 10