Ideal Player Gamers who love action, over-the-top powers and a chance to throw down with Darth Vader. There's not a lot of meat here, but there's also very little fat. So if you're up for a single-day, Star Wars-themed experience, this is a solid rental. Only the sort of Star Wars fans who like the second batch of Star Wars movies would like this game.
Why You Should Care Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was a broken game with a few pleasant surprises when it hit two years ago. It delivered spectacular Force-driven special effects, a chance to explore places only glimpsed in the movies and a neat tie-in to the fiction we grew up with. It also was loaded with glitches, a bad targeting system and some tear-inducing level design. With Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II LucasArts promises to fix all of that.
The ending of the original Force Unleashed wrapped things up nicely, how did they manage to create a sequel? Clones of course! And following in the footsteps of all Lucas movies, clones can only make things worse. The game opens with you being told you are the latest attempt at cloning Starkiller, but then you manage to catch Darth Vader off guard and break free of his space citadel. You spend the rest of the game mowing down hapless Stormtroopers, mechs and Sith-in-training as you try to "find" yourself and Juno, the love interest from the first game.
Does the story at least go somewhere interesting, like the first one did? There are two of endings. Neither are satisfying. One derails the Star Wars fiction and the other essentially highlights how unnecessary the entire game's story is.
OK, so the story didn't make the game worth playing. What about the settings? The first game let me explore some amazing places from the movies. Yeah, that was pretty great. Unfortunately none of those astounding, delightful moments are found in this sequel. Where The Force Unleashed had you playing through places like a still-in-construction Death Star, the Wookiee-infested lands of Kashyyyk and Tie Fighter factories, The Force Unleashed II has just four locations: the drab world of Kamino, the floating city of Cato Neimoidia, Dagobah and spaceship The Salvation.
The original Force Unleashed took quite a hit for not having multiplayer or a lot of replayability. How did Force Unleashed II do? Unfortunately this sequel manages to offer even less reason to play through the game. There is still no cooperative play at all and the difficulty settings do little to make the game more challenging once you've played through it once. Even on the highest, Unleashed, setting I found the game to be an uninteresting reminder of level flaws my second time through. The game's challenges, which at least allow you to compare scores with friends, are a boring mishmash of button mashing, insipid level rehashes. At least the Wii version has multiplayer.
[Source: Kotaku]