Lightsabre duels with dual lightsabres
Force Unleashed II starts off promisingly enough. But, of course, Star Wars games always do. The explosion of the LSO's brass section and the trapezoidal prologue rolling off into the field of stars maintains its magical ability to blow away cynicism and replace it with childlike wonderment.
A slice of the action
This impetus is sustained through Force Unleashed II's opening hour. Despite glaring paradoxes in continuity – the severity of which depends upon your choice at the end of the original – the narrative initially engrosses through impressive cut-scenes. Graphics and physics are palpably improved over the original. And the new dismemberment system, twin lightsabres and refinement to Force Power controls make opening encounters feel fresh and entertaining.
But it's not long before you begin to feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if a couple of hundred developers' imaginations suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. All too quickly, Force Unleashed II reveals itself as genre by numbers, with combat proving particularly shallow compared with the best brawlers, such as God of War and Castlevania: Lord of Shadows.
Where those games struck a fine balance between player abilities and enemy attack patterns, Force Unleashed II debases its combat. Stereotyping enemies with one-dimensional attack patterns and vulnerabilities, combat feels patently formulaic as you weaken enemy type 4 with Force Power B, before killing them with attack pattern X.
Roundhouse flick
Combat is easy enough wielding lightsabres alone, but Force Powers are all too powerfully reductive. With the vast majority of levels based around vertiginous walkways, the predominant Stormtrooper classes can simply be picked up and tossed over the side with Force Grip. And heavier, resistant enemies need only a few blasts of Force Lightning before taking them down with a couple of button presses in woefully perfunctory QTEs.
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COMMENTS
remake tie fighter for fucks sake
started playing tie fighter again on the pc. the grpahics are really dated , but by christ is the gameplay fantastic. even 15 years later it still feels like actually being a tiefighter pilot, and the sense of satisfaction from killing the rebel scum is still there. i can only dream of the way it would look if it was remade. id even take a graphic overhall, and release as a psn/xbl title.
that or remake almost any of the dark forces series.
Actually...
.... I quite liked Return of the Jedi... Just saying like :)
PC games vs Console
another fact is that us pc gamers have had amazing titles in the past that were designed by gamers, but now they are all being dumb downed for the kids console market and they have to meet their shareholders expectations so titles are rushed, thus depth & story suffers, its a sad decade for gamers as corporations now churn out their cruddy titles by the bucket load.
Aww.
I spent so much time looking forward to this...but once again game developers/producers have succumbed to the ever-extending trend towards 'the sequel should be, like, more of the same, but, like, y'know, more ACCESSIBLE'.
Unfortunately 'accessible' is just a code-word for shorter, prettier, dumber, less story and repetitive MMO-tedium gameplay.
I was bitterly disappointed with the game, expecting that by the end of my first session I'd be finishing Chapter 1 or 2 of an awesome story, and that what I had played was just the warmup and practice for an in-depth action mystery....then the game ended.
5 hours.....5 MEASELY tedious hours fighting the same sets of enemies in different configurations and numbers. Where was the VARIETY...where was ANYTHING? The characters are just weak, Starkiller just spends all his time sounding p*ssed off and Koda is just a windy tossbag with an attitude problem.
Weirdly enough, I think I'd like to see the return of X-Wing and Tie Fighter, but with proper missions and some real story.
Monkeys and typewriters
Oh, how I hate those predicable games.
