2.5/5 ★ – Manic_Zucc's review of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II.

By all accounts Force Unleashed 2 isn’t a bad game, but man I wanted to like it more than I did. What’s particularly frustrating is that the two major complaints I had with the first game are more or less fixed. The combat is significantly smoother and the enemy variety actually incentivizes you to use a variety of force abilities and not solely rely on lightning for everything. On top of this the visuals have also had a pretty significant upgrade, the environments are all beautifully rendered and the handful of pre-rendered cutscenes look great. Sadly while this sequel improves on the shortcomings of its predecessor, it more or less misses the mark on everything that the first game did right. The fun and over the top story from the first game was an easy highlight, but here I can’t even sugar coat it the story is straight up bad. The stakes are not particularly high and there are never any pivots in the story, Starkiller just spends the whole game trying to find Juno. The characters aren’t nearly as endearing here with Starkiller going from a conflicted villain to an obsessive complainer, Kota just barks orders the whole game, Proxy is brought back to life for some reason only to do nothing, and Juno is downgraded to token damsel in distress. On top of this the game lacks any variety in its locations. The first game may have reused a few locations but its pacing was strong, never dwelling in one place for too long. Force Unleashed 2 has a minuscule 3 locations and they all drag on for way too long. These locations all look great but you’ll be tired of looking at them by the end. While I’m digging into the game a bit, it’s only because I feel like it could have been so much better. It feels as though this game was rushed out in response to the first game selling way more than they expected. Lucas Arts made some amazing Star Wars games back in the day and it’s sad that this ended up being their last one. Despite some elements not being the best I’m still a fan of this series and would love if by some miracle the series got to continue in some form. Time will tell. (This isn’t affecting the score but there’s a Battle of Endor DLC that lets you punt Ewoks which I think is hilarious)