POSTED 7/1/11


STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED II

LucasArts
PS3 (also on Xbox 360, Wii, PC, DS)

Is that it? Seriously?! Man, we don’t know what the peeps behind this were using, but it sure as fuck wasn’t the Force.

Five hours from go to whoa – and we were leisurely about it. Deduct around an hour for cutscenes we dutifully sat through and that’s stuff all buck-bang. Ripping off the Warsies (well, Star Trek fans are ‘Trekkies’, so we’ve improvised) much Mr Lucas? Yeah, like that’s new...

Ahem. Brevity aside, there’re things to like in Star Wars: The FU2 (a somewhat appropriate abbreviation). Visually it’s as close as any Star Wars game has come to movieness. Audio’s top notch (when half of it doesn’t glitch out then disappear) and control ‘quirks’ from the first incarnation have been tweaked.

How about the story? W...e...l...l... No spoilers for those unfamiliar with that first FU, so we’ll just say that you again hop into the space boots of Starkiller, Darth Vader’s hush-hush apprentice, but he’s a clone. Or is he?! (Insert dramatic sting here). He’s now doing a dual lightsaber dance, as well as harnessing all manner of quite ace Force-controlled weapons such as lightning, pushes and mind tricks. It’s all very melee and, straight-up, you can essentially spam your way through the entire thing, but that defies the point – and the playfulness of flicking the Stig’s spacey cousins off ledges with the merest inkling of a “die mo-fo!’ thought.

Bummer-wise, levels are alarmingly repetitive, and whilst one gargantuan boss battle is fun scale-wise, it suffers as others do of more repetition, frustration, obfuscation and really bloody lame quick time event endings. If we do all that work, we really wanna punish that fucker in his final death throes, yeah?

Star Wars: The FU2 could have been Chewbacca. Instead it’s Jar Jar Binks.

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