Star Wars
The Force Unleashed II
The Captain’s Review
If there is one thing George Lucas knows how to do well, it’s how to bleed dry every single aspect of each of his highest grossing successes. He managed to corrupt Indiana Jones with the appalling crock of Goat discharge that was The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and more recently has been molesting the Star Wars franchise for every penny it can vomit out of its corroded bowels.
After the collective critical acclaim that LucasFilm received after the 1983 release of Return of the Jedi, it seemed Mr. Lucas would not be content unless he set about creating countless ridiculous animated spin off shows, of which all of them bar 1 are complete garbage (The one exception being the original Clone Wars micro series by Genndy Tartakovky which ran from 2003 – 2005 on Cartoon Network). But Star Wars loyalists kept on buying his junk and before long, around 15 years later the world is exposed to the prequel trilogy, a trilogy I firmly believe should not have seen the light of day.
Of course good old George, he didn’t stop cooking up the money with spin off shows, oh no; he decided to penetrate his lightsaber into every medium known to humanity and really milk the Star Wars franchise into oblivion. It wasn’t long after the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back that Lucas stuck his pie ridden fingers into the gaming realms with the 1982 release of The Empire Strikes Back...the game.
Screen of 1982 game The Empire Strikes Back
Now, I could do an entire review on how much Lucasarts suck at making games but fast forward about 30 years into this review where I am focusing on the 2010 release: The Force Unleashed II.
Back in 2008 the first Force Unleashed hit shop shelves and with previous games of the past haunting lucasarts like an angry horde of Nazgul, this game really had to bring something special to the table. Now contrary to how it may appear I am in fact a diehard Star Wars fanatic and unfortunately this disposition has forever bound me to being one of those that will buy anything that Lucas craps out of his sell out company. So...this meant on release day of the first Force Unleashed, I ran across several fields and maimed three travellers to get this game.
The reason this game appealed to me more than most Star Wars games from the past is because it bridged the relatively undocumented void between Episodes 3 and 4...What did actually happen in that period in between? It was going to cross new grounds and I wanted to be at the forefront of it.
Those travellers did not lose limbs in vain. I absolutely loved The Force Unleashed. I bought the PS3 version and so was astounded at how good the gameplay was. No Star Wars game prior to this on PlayStation had allowed use of a lightsaber as it was intended to be used or of course the use of force powers for that matter. But the best feature of the first game was the narrative. It indeed did fill in the gap between the movies Episodes 3 and 4, it was gripping, it made sense, the characters were compelling, there were a lot of revelations that fit into the canon, it was interesting and...It had an end! It had closure; the main character: StarKiller, helped establish the Rebel Alliance, sacrificed himself and died for his cause, and dealt The Empire a massive blow by starting a rebellion against them...THE END!! Episode 4 carries on nicely from the game, it picks up with the rebel’s struggle against The Empire, well done Lucas you made an excellent, fun and engrossing game which fits well into the canon and the Star Wars expanded universe, LEAVE IT THERE!
There was however one reason why Lucas could not leave his childhood raping dick out of this game...The Force Unleashed was a critical success.
Okay fine, you know what, I was looking forward to this game, the Lucas Empire gave me hope once again that they did have some of the magic they used to have, back when they first started Star Wars. As well, it was not altogether clear whether StarKiller died at the end of the first game, so they left room for him to return, and all the previews that I read gave it a positive thumbs up, stating that this sequel was going to develop the character as he works through his inner Sith demons. There was no way this could be a mistake.
I should have known better...
What hit shelves in October 2010 was a dull, dreary, monotonous, two dimensional piece of sewage that completely destroyed everything that the first game had set up. Of course my blind faith compelled me to get this game on release day once again.
After completing the main campaign in five hours (Yes FIVE hours, on the hardest difficulty setting... I’ll get to that later) the first thing that immediately struck me was the narrative. There wasn’t any. It is absolutely stone cold clear that this game was made to make money. The fundamental feature of the first game was missing. It did not have an original storyline, it felt rushed, repetitive and it was just an offensive descent into mediocrity.
The opening sequence basically sets the tone for the entire game. Re-used locations from the canon, such as the planet Kamino and its cloning facility at the beginning of the game, screamed repetition and lack of imagination.
According to the Star Wars universe, The Empire would have been in power now for around 15 or so years by the time of this game and have been at the forefront of new technological advances, yet they still use the outdated technology that created the original clone troopers at the beginning of the clone wars (Some 20 years prior to this game!). I just would have thought with all the power and wealth, The Empire would have built more advanced cloning facilities on other less turbulent planets by now. It seems the developers of this game lacked originality and creativity with their locations for this game, which to me indicates incredibly sloppy workmanship. Lacklustre animation and even Vader looking on down the hole which StarKiller blew through the wall during his escape in the opening cinematic, I couldn’t help but think I’ve seen this all before.
Story
My first real issue however with the narrative was that it was a clone story.
Personally I hate clone stories and if any writer is going to do one such story then they really need to pull something new out of the hat. This game doesn’t. This game uses a clone story because the developers wanted to resurrect a storyline that has already finished!
The player finds out at the beginning of the game, that Darth Vader has been trying to genetically clone his former apprentice in an attempt to create the ultimate killing machine, to slaughter the newly founded Rebel Alliance. BUT shock horror, the latest incarnation of StarKiller recalls fragments of memories from his original template and lashes out at Vader, escapes the cloning facility at which he’s being held, and then spends the rest of the game on a hell bent rampage trying to find his love interest from the first game; Juno Eclipse, while mulling over the question is he just a clone or is he in fact the real deal? The answer is never revealed in this game!
That’s it?
Those were the “inner Sith demons” these previews were talking about? “Am I a real fucking boy???” It just doesn’t cut it in a world where people thrive on originality, it’s all been done before; The Island, Alien Resurrection, The 6th Day, Artificial Intelligence, Godsend, oh yeah and Attack of the Clones!
My second issue with the narrative was that it’s a love story. This Dark Jedi/Sith warrior was willing to die at the hands of The Emperor at the end of the previous game to initiate a war, to fight back against The Empire and oppression, forsaking LOVE! Proving that he is not a Sith lord but in fact a true Jedi knight. Yet now in this sequel he is resurrected or reborn or found (Who knows??) and all he despairs about is Juno Eclipse!?
He spends a fair amount of time in the game on a tremendous killing spree, ignoring the rebellion and just fuelling his own quest. That to me is not a good enough storyline for a Star Wars game. It chronicles the events of one man who is never seen or heard of in any of the films ever again. The first game’s plot fit, because of the Rebel Alliance’s emblem, the audience who played the game can relate it back to it being StarKiller’s family crest and they then have insight to the birth of the rebellion, but this sequel is just pointless. It does not move the canon or universe on in any way...AT ALL!
What’s worse is that supporting characters, new and old, let him carry out these intentions. General Rahm Kota from the first game, tries to guilt trip StarKiller into doing the right thing after they escape from Cato Neimoidia...but fails...mainly because he didn’t really try at all.
StarKiller then goes to Dagobah and stumbles across Yoda in quite possibly the most useless level I have ever seen in a video game. The Dagobah level, consists of you the player, nudging the analogue stick forward and holding it for a few seconds for Starkiller to move forward a few paces...unhindered. End of level.
SK enters the cave that Yoda is guarding to face his future (Hmm there’s that Déjà Vu feeling again...). After witnessing future visions of Juno getting shot SK leaves with the intention of annihilating anyone who gets in his way...AND YODA LETS HIM! He even says “What you have seen, follow you must”.
Have I completely lost my mind? The ultimate Jedi Master Yoda must know SK is about to launch an all out OFFENSIVE (Everything a Jedi is against!) to save the one he loves (Dark side qualities right there) but instead of decapitating the demented Pinocchio he lets him go on his Merry Fucking way! The developers of this game have just evoked YODA to smear his green, wrinkly faeces all over millennia old Jedi tradition and ALL six Star Wars films.
Eventually StarKiller does find Juno eclipse on...KAMINO!!! And after killing his way through much of The Empire’s stormtrooper stock he eventually reaches a final confrontation with THE Dark lord himself Darth Vader.
WTF!!?!?
Words can’t ever convey what a disappointing, anti climactic, painfully boring, and waste of time boss battle this turned out to be. If you were expecting a massive clash of the titans here then you were sorely mistaken.
Vader...Supposedly the most powerful Sith lord the galaxy has ever seen (He even has a whole prophecy dedicated to him) just stands on a platform and lets his former protégé beat the burnt, crispy shit out of him. He doesn’t even defend himself...What?? Was this a new technique he’d been mastering? Let his opponent wail on him and eventually he’ll lose patience and commit suicide!? He would periodically jump away onto another platform and release StarKiller clones to attack you but even they could be beaten with a force blast off the platform.
It just did not make sense.
You finally do beat him after non sensically whacking him in the jewels for about 10 minutes and that’s it, the end of the game....WHAAAAAATT!
I guess Vader took something away from that battle as we hear in the chronologically later film; Return of the Jedi...”You are unwise to lower your defences”...Well, he should damn well know!
Of course the Lucas machine strikes again and leaves the game with Vader getting captured by the Alliance, StarKiller still not finding out whether he is a clone or not, and right at the end just as they all set off into the sunset, none other than Boba Fett detaches Slave 1 from a floating piece of garbage...I mean, Star Destroyer wreckage and blasts off after them. Cliff-hanger...FUUUUUUU...
Characters
One of the things that really caught my attention from the first game was that the characters were not just two Dimensional lumps of polygons. They had depth, they had personality. StarKiller adapted his demeanour depending on the company he was with, each character had more than one side to them and the voice actors really emphasised that as they did a fantastic job conveying the appropriate emotions through the character. Something the GTA series has not been able to master yet.
Now it was a pleasant surprise to see that the same level of quality returned with the voice acting for the second game. The brooding tone of StarKiller’s voice conveyed the torment that he was going through, General Kota still had the determined, wise old Jedi articulation, Darth Vader carried through his malice and even the cameo appearance of Princess Leia’s character conveyed hope, and struggle in her voice. Where this game was let down in terms of character portrayal was with the facial animations. None of characters it seems ever grasped the ability to move their facial muscles. They all carry throughout the game this perpetual intense expression even when happy...It’s like they’re all in a permanent state of anger and disappointment. It seems all the attention to detail was seriously lost in this game which was made the previous game great.
The animations of movement were however very good I have to admit. Some of the best I have seen in a video game. Starkiller’s personality, mentality and psychology was better conveyed in his combat. The pure aggression that he has shows the player that he is battling between using Jedi focus and Sith skill. Fluid body movement animations, action animations, and in game animations make up for the more than unsatisfactory facial animations.
In these animations you can get a feel for the character’s emotions in the cut scenes through their posture, body language and stance.
At the end of the day however you really want to be getting the emotion being conveyed to you through the face since in the human condition that is what the brain distinguishes the most, another score for the Lucasarts Dev team.
Controls
Another positive for this game is the control system. It is as intuitive as it could be if I am being totally honest. Not much has changed from the first game. All the buttons feel as though they should do the natural action. If I want to force push a bunch of enemies I instinctively go for the circle button as if I was retracting my right arm back to push outward, however if I want to block and enemy barrage of fire then my finger squeezes the left trigger button and if I was bringing up my arm to block a punch or a kick in real life.
The controls are fast and responsive, there is no lag between the action and execution and the control system really does utilise the entire game pad in an innate, legitimate, fluid manner.
Gameplay
This was the big focus of the sequel. To address the many gameplay issues that were raised in the first instalment. The main one (for some reason I will never know) was to address the use of the force grip power. After reading many reviews and forums posts, it seemed players just did not agree with how well the force grip abilities were implemented. So after two years of development, the programming team for Lucasarts have fixed the problem!...By doing absolutely nothing :D
“Force gripping enemies is now so much more improved”. No it wasn’t. I went into this game and did exactly what I did in the first game, there was NO difference. There were some players who state that the force grip power was ‘sticky’ when taking down the star destroyer in the previous game, but I genuinely had no trouble with that part.
All and all this in itself was not a bad matter. I quite like how it works, its intuitive, it’s natural; you pick an enemy up with a squeeze of the R2 trigger and then throw them across a continent with a flick of the analogue stick. But it’s the fact that one of this game’s major selling points was that it vastly improved the mechanics of the force grip powers that really gets on my wick, I have only two words for you Lucasarts; FALSE ADVERTISING!
Also I was disappointed to see that the developers still kept the ridiculous QuickTime events, which jut into the action of a boss battle so unnaturally, just so the player can finish the opponent off. I personally HATED this system as it completely took away from intense battle and effort that you (the player) are putting in to defeat your enemy.
You could be pulling off moves that would make the Shanghai Acrobat troupe piss themse..PRESS X NOW!
Did you notice how jarring that sentence cut off was? That is how I view these QuickTime events. They are not fluid or natural, they are essentially cut scenes...where there shouldn’t be any cut scenes.
Did you notice how jarring that sentence cut off was? That is how I view these QuickTime events. They are not fluid or natural, they are essentially cut scenes...where there shouldn’t be any cut scenes.
You have to press the buttons it tells you to, at the right time, in sequence, to defeat the boss. That’s right you defeat them with a preset move! And even if you hit the wrong button you can try again...and again...AND AGAIN without repercussions! This game treats you like a baby giving you no sense of achievement or reward!
However my largest gripe with the gameplay, by a mile, was the difficulty setting (Told you I’d get back to this). This game was FAAAR too easy!! I played this on the hardest difficulty setting and completed it in five hours. That is not a hard level play through time. I cannot stress this enough, the only way to have really fulfilled this game and get the full £40 out of it was to play it on hard....and even then this game was by no means tough.
Modern Warfare 1...To this day, I swear, the Russians in that game had X-Ray vision and could see me through the core of the Earth – completion time = 9 hours...That was Hard! Dead Space 1...I couldn’t walk down two steps of The Ishimura without perishing, because I’d have a crew Necromorph fall through the ceiling, on top of Isaac and collectively go on to gang bang every orifice of his deep space suit until he blew up – completion time = 12 hours...That was HARD! Splinter Cell Double Agent – If I put 1 toe in front of a security camera, the whole Middle Eastern army would take Mr. Fisher down Bin Laden style – Completion time = 10 hours...THAT WAS HARD!
Taking on the might of The Imperial forces with the power of a God takes away all challenge away from the game, and therein lays the problem.
Unlike the first game where StarKiller starts out relatively weak, he starts off this instalment of the series already imbued with the power of the incredible hulk and the rage of Freddy Krueger. This game gives the illusion that it is super hard by throwing vast legions of storm troopers and Imperial guards at you at every moment of the game, which I’ll admit when first seeing them is supremely intimidating. However this game is called The Force Unleashed, and you soon remember that Starkiller can seemingly engulf an entire planet in Force lightning from the tips of his fingers, and make an entire cadre of even royal Imperial guards shit their guts out.
The combat in this game was excellent and far surpassed the first game. Actions were fluid, the incorporation of an additional lightsaber was brilliantly executed, and the combinations of moves SK could pull off were varied and impressive. But the fact was that you just start out already incredibly powerful. Levelling up didn’t seem very fruitful in this game as all that was afforded was the ability maybe hit more enemies with force lightning for example, nothing you couldn’t already do by using a combination of force push, jump and a volley of lightsaber attacks. If anything else a combination of moves looks so much better on screen as opposed to just one.
However the Dev team didn’t stop there. They found a way to make SK even more almighty. As being the most powerful Dark Jedi in the universe wasn’t enough, this game was made all the more easy by StarKiller’s “rage mode”, a new feature brought into TFU2 to perhaps add some innovation, I guess.
Basically throughout the game you will attack and be attacked. With each assault a meter will fill up in the corner of the screen telling you how much “rage” you have. This meter fills up each time an assault against an enemy is underway. Once the meter reaches max you can activate SK’s rage mode, which is basically the same as Dante’s Devil Trigger Mode from Devil May Cry. He becomes so powerful to the point where his ship wouldn’t need a hyperdrive anymore, all StarKiller would need to do would be to fart out of his ship’s exhaust and his Sith fumes would propel him across the expanse of around 4000 galaxies in about 2 seconds!
This is where The Force Unleashed II becomes ridiculous as StarKiller literally becomes INVINCIBLE! The developers of this game seriously put in a legitimate God mode into this game, and although there is only a finite amount of time you stay in Rage mode it is still a good minute at least! That’s more than enough time to take on the entire AT-ST production factory, especially for an amped up Sith lord on steroids! Every force power in SK’s arsenal gets jumped up by about a billion and it just makes the game a complete doddle.
A close second grumble comes in the form of repetition. After getting through about half way in the game I was astounded to find out that I had to go back through each and every level. I kid you not readers, this game actually forces you to back track through all previous locations. Same environments, same enemies, SAME GAME! I swear the only thing that this game tests is your patience!
This in my opinion was the largest nail in the coffin for this game. The development team were so half arsed with their creation. They spent so much time focused on the revised combat system, and dual lightsaber action that I guess they couldn’t be bothered to look at all the other aspects that make a game....A GAME!
Which brings me back to very sloppy, lazy workmanship really, and for a company like Lucasarts, developing a sequel to (let’s face it) the PlayStation’s flagship Star Wars game series I really did expect a whole lot more from this game.
Overall
A few reasons have cropped up as to why this game sucked so hard. One was that the writer and director of the first instalment left three months prior to the release of the sequel. Another of course was going to be the fact that because the Lucasarts team had the task of re-launching a storyline that had already run its course, they would use that “burden” as a scapegoat.
My counter for both of these arguments would be, why did you commission this game for production in the first place? If the lead cheese from the previous game, the writer; the guy that made TFU1 amazing, left the project should have been stopped right there and then! Instead it’s like the dev team left the rest of the storytelling and writing to...George Lucas.
Secondly if there was such a huge mammoth assignment of reviving a series then why would they not consider leaving it well alone? They could have released a separate game instead about a badass Sith/Jedi that tore up the galaxy until he was defeated, because let’s face it ladies and gents, this game is a pure hack and slash title for the sake of being a hack and slash title. Lucasarts couldn’t risk releasing a new title entirely because they were cowards. Instead they took a leaf out of Konami’s book, followed what they did with Silent Hill 4 and cheapened, plus ruined a game that was quite possibly (In my opinion anyway) one of the best Star Wars games ever made, purely because they knew if they attached the words “Force Unleashed” onto it then every Star Wars fan and their Mother would rush out to get this game.
Folks, if you want to play a game where you are a badass, psychopathic motherfucker to let off some steam and also contribute to an actual storyline then I suggest buying the far superior Devil May Cry 4 as an alternative to this repulsive skid mark.
Otherwise gamers and Star wars fans especially, if you want to save disappointment, AVOID THIS GAME!
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