You can watch this game and know just how much of a badass this Jedi really is. The overall animations, the visual spectacle of the bulkhead-crushing Force powers, and the new dismemberment effects make combat a real treat for the eyes. The gameplay is almost good enough to make you forgive the inconsistent story. Okay, maybe Darth Vader is the exception, but even here, he’s supposed to be the central villain and he’s completely absent for most of the game. In fact, the game uses three of the series’ most iconic characters, but they never get enough room to be the characters we know from the movie. But none of it really engages the player enough to actually care about the outcome. Yes, you’re on the run from Vader yes, you’re questioning your very identity yes, you’re chasing Boba Fett to rescue your girlfriend.
Starkiller’s story in the first game was quite good but here it just feels like it’s recycling plot points with no real motivation for connecting them together. Sadly, the story doesn’t do much with the raw material. You’ll just be confused that in a game where you’re running across the entire galaxy, you only seem to go three places – and one of them is just for a quick cutscene. The levels themselves are undeniably repetitive, but they’re still incredibly well designed from an artistic standpoint. There’s even a stint on a certain swampy planet where you visit a certain syntactically-challenged puppet. There’s a sprawling iron-grey starship, filled with cramped hallways and massive hangars and some spectacularly large windows through which you can see a massive space battle between two fleets. There’s a golden-tinged elevated city, which is just perfect for flinging Stormtroopers off of ledges. The game also understands that locations are a huge part of the Star Wars magic. LucasArts is so consistently good at this, it almost doesn’t seem worth mentioning, but our natural reaction to this world is so strong that simply having the starfighter engines glow just the right shade of pink is enough to have us fully invested in the world. Whether it’s the warm glow of a lightsaber, the squeal of blaster fire, or the intense moral struggle, everything looks and sounds just like you’d expect a Star Wars game should. From the sights to the sounds, every element in this game is a pitch-perfect recreation of what we’ve seen in the films. LucasArts games, not surprisingly, always feel completely consistent with the Star Wars experience. If Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II has one thing going for it, it’s the overall authenticity of the whole experience.
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