izigame.me

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II successfully manages to put an end the Force Unleashed franchise - by being so underwhelming that another sequel is highly unlikely
Here we go again, is what I muttered to myself when I first started up The Force Unleashed II for the first time - and immediately had intro videos featuring artifacts and trouble setting my resolution. Honestly, after my more than bad experience with the predecessor, partially thanks to technical issues, I wasn’t really expecting anything different from the game.
Funnily enough though, for some reason, The Force Unleashed II manages to come with it's own share of different technical problems. No sound problems here – instead, in-game videos just won’t play (correctly) thanks to codec issues, which thankfully can be fixed. Crashes on dual screen setups? Nice. The HUD not scaling properly with high resolutions? Very nice. The game only running at 30 FPS, with issues/crashes happening on higher framerates? Hey, that’s something the previous game did as well! Guess The Force Unleashed II really is a sequel in its own right.
Anyway, once we got this technical trouble fixed (did you know that the PC version of the game forgot to add the wet cloth effects from the console version?), let’s move on to talk about the actual game, shall we?
The Force Unleashed II originally released in 2010, just two years after its predecessor. Making one of the two endings from the original the canon, we’re now playing as a clone of Starkiller, created by Darth Vader himself. Yes, they cloned a force user who was able to bring down an entire Stardestroyer with the force by himself. And yes, the clone also inherited all these force powers – including memories of the “original” Starkiller. It’s not hard to see why these games aren’t canon anymore.
Anyway, all our clone can think about is Juno, so he decides to escape the cloning facilities & Darth Vader in order to find her. If you’re expecting a galaxy-spanning journey with lots of epic moments and guest characters, think again. The game is only about four hours long and just got three different locales (+ 1 used for ~5 minutes of gameplay and one cutscene) to offer, one of which is just the inside of a starship – so expect lots of grey corridors. Now, considering how much the predecessor loved level recycling, you shouldn’t be surprised that we got the same thing happening in The Force Unleashed as well.
Another striking comparison is that the plot of The Force Unleashed II ultimately fails short of even being remotely interesting. The Starkiller clone wants Juno, Vader wants the Starkiller clone and the rebels vs imperials conflict is happening somewhere in the background – that’s it. It really feels like the story is more of an afterthought, even more so than in the predecessor. It’s an excuse to have Starkiller fighting lots of enemies again, nothing more.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the gameplay was actually good. You know what I’m going to say next but before, let me actually praise the game for once. The Force Unleashed II controls a lot better than its predecessor. This isn’t saying much with a bar as low as this, but I can definitely say that I was actually fighting the enemies instead of the controls for once. Well, with the exception of the force grip, that is. The Starkiller clone still refuses to throw stuff in the direction I want sometimes.
Now we’re moving on with the part you’re actually expecting: the gameplay’s not good either. You’re running through linear levels, killing hordes of enemies and “solving” extremely simple puzzles or platforming section. That’s fun for the first few minutes, when you’re force blasting stormtroopers off bridges and then gets stale really fast. Why’s that? For one, there’s little variety. Not only in the levels itself, as I mentioned before, but regarding enemy types as well, with only few variations offered. Another factor is difficulty: even on “normal”, the game is laughably easy to play through, that every combat encounter is merely a case of “how long until this is over” instead of “this is going to require more than pressing the same buttons over and over again”. You can unlock new force powers later on – but considering you don’t even need them to succeed, they’re not really exciting.
While we’re on the topic of “how long until this is over” – a lot of the game feels significantly longer than it should be. And that’s saying a lot for a 4h game. It really feels like this game was rushed and the developers realised the final product would be way too short. So instead, we ended up with a lot of unnecessary long battles which – again – are more of a playtime extender than fun or challenging combat encounters.
This especially shows during the three boss fights The Force Unleashed II offers. They’re not challenging at all – but extremely long to the point where it’s getting ridiculous. While the first boss fight got some attempt at an action-filled presentation going on at least, the final boss of the game is the least fun boss fight I had in a long time – if I didn’t play the predecessor of this game beforehand. It's really a simple matter of combining two attacks, lightning and lightsaber strikes, over and over again. That’s it. Then the boss repeats the same attack a dozen times, which gets boring really fast, only for this attack to do next to no damage. But as the health bar of the bosses is just way too damn large, this snoozefest goes on for so long that you’re wondering if you should’ve just watched an episode of The Mandalorian instead (to which the answer is yes).
So we got next to no story, little variety, gameplay that gets boring extremely fast and boss battles that are equally exciting as watching loading screens. What else do we got? Missing DLC! There’s a lot of Preorder and collector’s edition bonusses stored in the game files – but they were never made available on PC, just on Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3. This can be fixed but it’s still weird. Oh, there was also a “proper” DLC for this game, a character pack and an additional level which took place on Endor – both, you guessed it, never releasing on PC. That’s not too much of an issue, considering I wouldn’t recommend playing this game anyway, but for those who still want to check out the game regardless – keep in mind you’re not getting the full experience here.
Concluding, while The Force Unleashed II might be less infuriating than its predecessor thanks to better working (Xbox One gamepad) controls, it replaced those experience with extreme tedium and boringness. If it’s not even fun to force throw stormtroopers of a bridge, you really know something went wrong. And well, we never saw a new The Force Unleashed game or entry in the last decade – so this speaks for itself.
If you really really want to see how The Force Unleashed continues, by all means, play this game – it’s extremely short after all. But please, at least don’t pay full price for this. For everyone else, there are way better Star Wars games out there. How about Knights of the Old Republic, which is really great, or Star Wars: Fallen Order? The latter one DOES make it fun to throw stormtroopers off cliffs! How cool is that?