Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 is immediately engaging. It's strikingly beautiful, with fantastic vistas and superb character animations. Sadly though, its pretty face can only carry it so far when the rest of the game is comparatively weak. Repetitious combat and level designs, a shoe-horned in story, and a lack of depth to the experience overall keep this from being anything more than an adventure for the most hardcore of fans.
The levels themselves are beautiful and immediately capture the same sense of grandeur and scale that Star Wars has done so well with the environments in the films, but the stages quickly feel redundant. Each level feels like it's been artificially extended, with repeated buildings and environmental portions that make it feel like a copy/paste job. I understand and appreciate the need for a world to feel coherent, to have environments feel uniform in theme and look, but TFU2 takes it past this point and right into generic territory after just a few moments in any stage. It's a shame, too, because the artists responsible for the worlds are obviously passionate about capturing the look and feel of the Star Wars universe.
The Force Unleashed's combat is fun at the start, but begins to feel very uninspired as the hours go by. I mean, look, the inclusion of dismemberment is awesome, and the first few times you blast some Stormtroopers off a ledge with Force push, or send a trooper to his doom by convincing him to kill himself with Jedi Mind Trick are exactly what I'm looking for in this sort of game. It's just that there isn't enough outside of the combat to break up the pacing. Starkiller is always just mashing into wave after wave of soldiers, and it gets surprisingly mundane kicking so much ass all the time.
Variety is something LucasArts attempted to address in combat, and the developers accomplish this to an extent, but it doesn't go deep enough. The first Force Unleashed had a ton of enemies who were varied in appearance, but not in how they fought, and LucasArts sought to address this by having fewer, more differentiated enemy types.
Unfortunately, though, this too is underdeveloped, with combat mostly boiling down to realizing "enemy X can be killed only with lightsabers, while enemy Y can only be killed with the Force." They combine these enemies in ways that occasionally present a challenge, but eventually they repeat this formula over and over again that it becomes more tedious than new and exciting.
Not that any moment in The Force Unleashed 2 lasts all that long, as it's surprisingly short. I'm not one to complain about length normally, as I think games can be short if the experience is tight and consistently inventive, but despite taking less than six hours to complete on Normal, TFU2 manages to be demonstrably repetitive. The world's that Starkiller visits in the game are beautiful, and make me want to know more about the cultures they represent, so it's a shame I don't get anything more than a cursory look at them.
This is awesome looking, but a little too good for killing groups of enemies.
Other problems arise from TFU2's brevity as well, namely it doesn't feel all that rewarding or make your character progression feel as worthwhile. Your character starts out with a lot of the powers he had to earn in the first game. The end result is that Starkiller is a bit too much of a badass too quickly, and that leveling up your force powers – done by spending experience points you earn via combat – doesn't feel anywhere near as important or as game changing as it did in the last game.
Starkiller can take on anything and everything with ease on the Normal difficultly, with most enemies serving little purpose other than to go sprawling from endless waves of Force push. I understand the need to empower the player, and yes, I certainly felt empowered, but the lack of skill made me less like a Jedi Master and more like wandering, overpowered monster.
