2/5 ★ – FarnySeals's review of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II.

Due to having this on PS3 after giving away my Xbox 360 as a kid, I ended up playing this way more than the first game, but I remember having a hunger to replay the first game that this one just didn’t satisfy. But that being said, I remember enjoying the power fantasy that this game gives you with the fully levelled up purple lightning and the bigger effects and spectacles. The game has smooth and satisfying animations, great graphics for the time, a decent basis for gameplay, generally smoother and less janky, and weirdly good writing compared to the first game. Unfortunately, for everything that it does better than the first game, it does something else way worse. The level design is genuinely copy and pasted over and over again, you fight in nothing but corridors or square shaped rooms, the enemies are mostly incredibly easy to beat and are also copy and pasted over and over again, there’s very little enemy variety, there are only 3 locations you go to and because the platforms are repeated you don’t get to see much of them, and the levels themselves are painfully dragged out and repetitive. Also, boss fights are a cheap imitation of God of War 3’s spectacle fights and also take so long that there’s just no impact to them, which is the case for every boss (there’s only 3) here. There are no combos at all, no heavy attack or anything, just mash square constantly until the enemy dies, and they try to mix it up by having to use specific attacks but it just feels like DmC: Devil May Cry. It honestly feels like the developers accidentally published the game half way through development, because even if this just had better level design I’d probably prefer it over the original, but as janky and awkward as the original is, at least it had a range of boss fights and locations, the levels were good lengths, there were different level layouts, tasks and arenas, and there was actually some challenge to the game. I also need to mention that this game is a 5 hour tutorial. I’ve never felt so talked down to by a game before. The final boss fight has fucking tutorial pop ups alongside literally every single other part of the game. Not once does this game let you figure out what to do, there’s even a button to show you where to as if this isn’t the most linear game ever made, it’s just one long hallway. Add this game’s gameplay and animations to the original with some added combos and you have yourself a 4/5 Star Wars hack n’ slash game. Needless to say, replaying this games has not been good for my nostalgia. Hopefully, the first game gets a remake one day, but considering how long the KOTOR remake has been in the works, that probably won’t ever happen. I think I just need to play the Wii port on the Nintendo Switch.