Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Review (shephjr15)
In concept, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 was a great idea. A successor to the combo-filled Force power-fantasy brought to you by the first Force Unleashed game. Unfortunately, the concept is where the good stops. From the moment the game begins, the power balance is totally broken, with the player having basically endgame stats and strength from the start.
This isn't surprising considering the levels are incredibly linear, with almost no collectibles and very short burst encounters, relying on incredibly long scripted boss fights to draw out the game-play. This leads to ultimately an incredibly boring experience that feels more like a post-game DLC coming off the original than a game of its own. And that's just the problems with the game on its own merit, speaking nothing of the version; so now onto that.
What you get here is an incredibly buggy and broken PC port of an already underwhelming game. The cinematic scenes are more likely to crash the application than tell you a story, and in-between we're met with screen tearing, horrible AI movement, and glitchy textures. A lot of people complain about the frame-rate, but honestly that's just to be expected of a game this old, so I wasn't all that bothered by it. What IS bothersome is the fact that the Keyboard/mouse control scheme is just awful. With the game being designed for a controller, you almost HAVE to have one to play it, since otherwise you'll be asked to make virtually impossible key or mouse movement combinations to do, well, anything.
Additionally, the port can't even handle having all the unlockables unlocked... if you want to use those codes to get your costumes and crystals like back in the old days? nah, that just crashes the game because it doesn't have the internal memory allocation to track that many customization options.
Ultimately, this product is dog-nuts. It's a bad port of a mediocre-at-best game, full of glitches, bugs, and terrible experiences. The only real selling point is nostalgia, and even that's totally thrashed by the legacy of untested cash-grabbing that's befallen the LucasArts product line. I'm glad I picked it up for basically nothing during a sale, because there's no way I'd be happy having bought this product at full-price.