The Force Unleashed II

It's pretty easy to make a cool looking cinema. I'm going to need to see some in-game footage before I'm impressed.

Hey look, it's cloned supersoldiers. Never thought I'd see that in a star wars thing.

There's some added moves it seems, but it looks pretty much the same with some better graphics.

that cinematic was better then all 3 prequels.

Didn't take long for someone to pull "X was better than all 3 prequels" out of their ass in this thread.

Looks pretty fun. The first one was fun but not really memorable but this one looks really cool. I'll keep my eye on this.

Well there would have to be added moves, he uses dual lightsabers now after all, and they wanted to add different force abilities. Anyways, I just hope it delivers on DMM, unlike the first game which was just a huge tease.

Apparently there will be a couple times during each stage when he can pull off massive Force attacks. Hopefully the stuff he can pull is a little closer to what is in the cut scenes. And doesn't involved thumbing joysticks in unituitive and annoying ways.

*Angry cynical rant about game sequels and George Lucas' testicles.*

Will buy game regardless.

Didn't he die in the first one?

Ether way I loved the first game so I'm gonna purchase this one as well.

Well, yeah. But, you know. Clones.

The story carried the flaws of the game for me. If this is just the Apprentice mowing down Stormtroopers for 6 hours out of revenge, they can keep this one.

Well hey someone had to say it..and well, my ass has been pretty tight lately, had to loosen that bad boy up!



I agree, it fits in pretty well with the over all series, and at the time I thought, "Well hell! that's a good ending. Guess we wont be seeing another one in the series!" WRONG I've also enjoyed the add ons that have you in the expanded universe hunting down Obi-Wan and Luke.

Maybe he's spending the game going after that blonde woman? Casue maybe Vader went all King Koopa.

I'm also damn curious about that Star Wars game coming out for Microsoft's Kinect.

Fun video (I watched it since I'm over at my mom's house at this minute) but the first game was one of the worst purchases I've yet made for my xbox. I've not played it since I beat it. I hope that :

1) The sequel lets you break more of the materials that were the most fun to break in the first one, but mysteriously barely showed up at all

-Wood
-Glass

2) I hope that you fight people in the sequel, and not weird mushroom people or robots all the time. I feel like LUCAS ARTS forced you to fight robots to tone down the perceived level of violence

3) Fix the controls so I can aim at something and hit it

4) More gameplay, fewer quicktime events

That's what I was getting out, just wrong choice of words. I know all of us would lose their shit if this was a trailer for an up coming film (live action of course)

Game play looks damn good. Freaking storm troopers can't aim worth a damn.

http://kotaku.com/5562575/force-unle...s-not-improved

Didn't you only really fight one main robot enemy? not counting that damn Jedi with those spider legs. He was a bitch!

But I agree on the aiming system.

Well, yes, but there were also a bunch of mushroom people and I was annoyed that you almost never fought real stormtroopers. I wanted to feel over powered, but instead I felt overwhelmed by cyborg troopers with mech walking frames and weapons that could stop my lightsaber (not to mention anti-force forcefields). Basically I want to lay waste to my enemies in fun and creative ways. I don't find much enjoyable in the challenge of defeating overpowered NPCs.

PS The game also needed some JK2 style dismemberment. The lightsaber as cosmic baseball bat idea was lame IMHO

But just in that first level. And the wood destruction only was in the pre-game mini level. It was the material that I took the greatest pleasure in destroying!

Boba Fett suits up- http://chud.com/articles/articles/24...HED/Page1.html

I'm pretty sure the dismemberments are going to be canned animations, like unmodded versions of Jedi Outcast. Expect to be swinging a glowing baseball bat 90% of the time. Can't you also knock armor off of stormtroopers with the Force? If so, some erotic fanfiction writer from the 501st's dream just came true.

Sigh...all the effort being put into this game.
Think about how much easier it would be just to upgrade 'X-Wing' or 'TIE-Fighter', LucasArts...
...we've been waiting SO DAMN LONG...

This might pique some of your interests.



Yes, that's Guybrush Threepwood as a Jedi. And yes, it's confirmed to be in the game.

That's just.....weird.

"Look behind you, a three headed bantha".
This is gonna be so cool. Wasting storm troopers as Guybrush Threepwood.

Has anyone checked out the demo today?

Honestly after playing through it I was pretty underwhelmed. The first Force Unleashed was a game I wanted to like a lot more than I did but once the initial novelty of playing with the amped-up force powers wore off the actualy gameplay just felt too sloppy to be very fun. Playing through this demo I didn't feel like there were many improvements and it just felt like more of the same.

I played the demo for the first Force Unleashed and kind of enjoyed it. I never played the full game. I played the demo for Force Unleashed 2 last night and kind of enjoyed it. I doubt I'll ever play the full game.

Finished this game this afternoon on the ol' PC.

Quick thoughts below...

GOOD:
Graphics are beautiful, all the levels look like nice renditions from the movies
Great merge of PT and OT style...
Controls are MUCH better (on the PC) than in the TF1-USE release
Game only crashed once on me
Barely any lags, only a few clunky moments moving from game-play to rendered cinematics, as you would expect
Nice mini-games to break up the Stormtrooper Slaughter™ (crashing a Starship into Kamino was pretty sweet...)

"MEH"
Story felt like it only got started, then it finished. Really abruptly with a pretty massive cliffhanger and, in terms of cannon... I'm really not sure where they go from here...
Whole game was basically 'Starkillers Story' and none of the fun Proxy/Kota/Juno banter that made the first so special.
Fun, but tedious boss battles (outside of the first boss, which is kinda fun... but a battle of attrition and boredom)

BAD:
Vader is punked, again... just like in TFU1 (lightside ending). The guy is treated so poorly in games.
There's pretty much NO 'bad guy' the entire game, there's a HINT of one in the Cato Neimodia (sp?) mission, but he's almost an afterthough and you don't even get the joy of actually killing him (that's left to a rendered cut-scene)
If you dislike games on rails, then you'll HATE this. Where Assassins Creed has displayed how WELL open-world games can function, I would think LucasArts would seize this kinda stuff for their Force Unleashed series. Alas, you're on rails ALL the time and the game is very restrictive, even repeating WHOLE LEVELS when you return to the same area in the story.
Darkside ending was lame. Don't even bother finishing the game Darkside. Waste of time.


REALLY PISS POOR
Yoda. Utterly irrelevant, other than rending-time and animators having a play in that Dagobah sandbox, he's surplus to the story and character development. Can't believe THIS passed through R&D without expanding, even a LITTLE on why the hell Yoda was needed to be a part of this story.
Boba Fett. There, and gone again... should've been made FAR more use of. Nice ESB-style gag at the end however, which, given they basically HAVE to make a sequel now... will hopefully be put to good use in TFUIII - but for this game, waste of time


Final thoughts...

Honestly, it's a rental... not a purchase. Other than some really nice graphics and kinda cool CG on display, there's nothing worth purchasing for either the PS3 or XBOX. PC is another matter, as the TFU-USE port was abhorrent and this feels MUCH better (fuck, you can use your MOUSE on the title screen without a hack!) and although there's some nice PT-style vibes to the game, some of the story choices are irrelevant and the punking of Vader for the SECOND time just pissed me off.

It's another case of great IDEAS poor execution when it comes to StarWars. I like the IDEA of Starkiller, I like Proxy, Juno and Kota... they're cool characters, but there was just nothing for me to get invested in, especially as Juno is the Macguffin (which reduces her role drastically), Kota is annoying as 'tell you where to go' guy the whole time (even though the game NEVER gives you options to go anywhere else!) and other than using Starkillers CG-cypher to slay stormtroopers and annoying sith-clones, the story just doesn't do anything...

So yeah, buy it... if you're a HARD CORE StarWars fan... if you're not, rent it... or read the comic book. The ending, although intriguing... suffers from the entire game being a bit of a tireless bore story-wise and when it gets going... Credits.

Yeah, I was really looking forward to this seeing as how I really liked the 1st one. I even went so far as to reserve the Collector's Edition to get those extra skins and challenges. I mean, who wouldn't want to complete nifty extra challenge maps dressed up as a Ralph McQuarrie concept character?

Then the weekend before release there's so much bad word of mouth that I ended up cancelling my pre-order.

Like dude, if is really that bad and that short there's no way I'm spending $60 on it, let alone $80.

I spread that love instead to Comic Jumper, Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption, and the difference to my Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood reserve. Now that game looks like its gonna be worth it.

First off, if anyone wants to purchase this game, go staple your hand to a table, it will feel about as good as this.

This game had about as much substance as the Hoth and Tat exp levels.

There are ONLY 4 environments in the game. One of which being the degobah level, which lasts 15 seconds, has 5 holocrons and it's over. Like someone else said, the levels are repeated, you go back to the same areas you did in other parts of the game. And it isn't a good thing when this game is as linear as it is. (At one point, you walk into a huge open courtyard, only to have just enough forcefields go down to point you in the right direction.)

My 10 year old son played it on the easiest difficulty, in a hour.. It is frightengly short.

Unfortunately, we bought the collectors edition hoping for some fun stuff. But the starkiller outfit is the only thing worth noting. (btw, all the other "exclusive" costume unlocks, can be entered with a cheat code, such as "HAAZEN" to unlock the sith acolyte. WITHOUT disabling achievements.)
The 2gb pen drive that comes with the collectors edition is loaded with a bunch of nothing. A cheap flash page that leads to some concept art, and a script for the game.

You want easy achievements? This game has em, It seemed like I was getting them about every 15 seconds on medium difficulty.

I was hoping this game would get me a bit ramped up for the star wars universe again, but it made me a sad sad man.

It started so promising, it is a beautiful game, but if they had spent half as much time putting substance as they did throwing in "wow!" moments in the first 10 minutes of the game, it would have been better. If you read the notes on the collectors edition artwork, you will realize this game was nothing but a portfolio filler for the lead concept artist.

My last gripe, but a big one, is the lack of earning anything. You start the game with all your force powers except for one. The force repulse (the one in the video where he disintegrates all the stormtroopers.). The game basically gives you points where at certain times you can upgrade your force powers to make them a bit stronger. BUT, it is impossible to upgrade them all since the game is so short. You basically need to stick to one force power and upgrade it to level 3 if you want it max. The apprentice is so unbelievebly strong in the beginning, you could almost go without upgrading any of the powers. (Seriously, On medium, I felt like I was on auto pilot.)

If you are itching for a new game and have the money, go buy the Borderlands game of the year edition. Just came out, it's borderlands with ALL 4 of the expansions for $60.

/wall of text end

Yeah, when I started playing this I was pretty hopeful. They seemed to have ironed out all the annoying combat/force power handling bugs from the first game. The graphics looked great. Heck, they even added in storm trooper dismemberment. But once you pass the Stadium level it all sorta goes down hill. The combat and such and such feels great but the games far too short with very little variety in enemies and environments, which ironically the first game did really well.

It seems the lead developer left Lucasarts a few months before release. That should have rang alarm bells. Worth a rental if you are an action junkie, because quite frankly I think the combat/force mechanics are great. It's just those mechanics are in pretty average game.

Did any one else think the voice acting started off really good and then progressed into Starkiller shrieking like wuss every two minutes?

He was very Skywalker-lite whinger near the end, although I LOVED the on-rails bit at the end as you walked towards the main clone-area to fight vader. Why they couldn't have had more cool story moments like that in each level, I don't know. The voiceovers, the eeiry music... Vader's 'breathing' in the background. It was really cool and had some great flashbacks to past-game moments and TFU1... but again, everything up til then (after the Arena Battle) seemed a rushed afterthought and the boss battle with Vader was boring, long and over-the-top stupid.


^ THIS.

It could just be me, I kinda think I'm not the only person who's thought this, but expanding on what you've said above; I just don't really give a shit about force powers.

StarWars, for me... is all about the lightsaber and the characters. I understand some people like the force lightening playground... but honestly how many times did you use even 20% of the hundreds of "Force Combos" they built into either TFU1 or 2?

I can count on one hand the times I bothered with the combos, after a while.... I either just force-gripped and threw stormtroopers off the bridge or cut them down with my baseball ba... er... I mean lightsaber. I thought the coolest thing in the game was the fact you actually could CUT LIMBS off... I mean, why couldn't they expand on THIS (finally) rather than throwing in a bunch of (basically the same) force/lightsaber combos?

If I was LucasArts and developing TFUIII, I would do the following:

• Take the game off rails. Expand it (Assassins Creed Style) to an open-world gameplay, with lots of mini-games inside the main story, rather than in a seperate selection screen* and MOST importantly, give us a variety of settings. The beauty of the OT is that each location in the films is VASTLY different from the last. I'm sick of Coruscant-esque settings and "insert jungle" setting. Raxus prime was magnificent, why we didn't return there is beyond me and Raxus Prime in an OPEN WORLD scenario... that'd be amazing.

• Planet to Ship in-level transitions. One of the best bits of Battlefront II was how you could move planet to ship seemlessly within the game, and BFIII looked to be expanding that further with the leaked footage. This again, should really be a no-brainer for a game like Force Unleashed and would give you MULTIPLE environments within the one level, rather than just going to 'another bit of x planet that looks exactly the same as the bit you just came from'

• Get rid of the Boss Battle Quicktime events. I dunno what the developers fascination with these are, granted I've never played God of War, but they're just tedious, clunky and you never ACTUALLY get to watch/enjoy them because you're constantly trying to keep up mashing the right buttons. If you HAVE to have some kind of cinematic-finisher then, again, go in the direction UbiSoft have by making it a one-button-key that you hit, and you get the reward. Also, make a VARIETY of them... If you're going to have boss-battles and re-use the same boss, don't be lazy with your cinematic finishes.

• Ditch the Force Power 'overload' gimmicks Introduce it as a plot-point or something and FORCE (pun intended) us to do something different during different levels. Put more effort into the lightsaber, give us the option of Single or Duel wielding and MOST importantly... don't make every level reliant on using shitty force-power combos. Make us use our brains to solve problems as well and (as I said above) if you 'reduce' our ability to use certain powers, it makes it more interesting and the other abilities we earn more relevant.

• Story. Spend time on it. Give me a villain (not Vader) and make him RELEVANT. Tarkin would be a no-brainer for me for the 3rd installment and if you're GOING to use existing 'hero' characters from the movies, don't make them punks. They're going to NEED to tie-up Starkillers arc and he's going to have to actually A) Die 2. NOT be a Clone otherwise that fucks eeeeverything up and III. The 'End' of TFU should tie directly into the opening crawl of IV

Sorry for ranting, but I had to write these down...

I would love TFU to be an open-world style gameplay and I would give my left-nut to see what Ubisoft would do with the StarWars franchise. I can't understand why either hasn't approached the other to do a game as they, for me, seem to be a perfect fit. Either way, I'd love to see TFU have a variety of environments, a return to Raxus Prime and even Tatooine.... but they really have to take the game off rails and make it more an exploration of environment, even if that means we only get 4 different settings and a similar-length gameplay. If people actually got to EXPLORE the environments and the in-game minigames were a part of the overall story, I think they'd be much more happier with a 5 hour gameplay time. As it stands, the 'Challenge' mode stuff is actually pretty cool.




* I cannot understand why the Dagobah challenge mode stuff wasn't included in the fucking Dagobah level? It's all cool 'jedi challenge' stuff and with a bit of faux-yoda voiceover and a rendered cutscene, you could easily give them story-relevance and rewards for the player. They're actually very cool 'training' style mini-games, especially the time trails and stuff. I don't know why they wern't a part of the main story and would greatly imrpove both gameplay time and the relevance of Yoda in the fucking game!

Jesus. I had this game pretty much pinned down as a must buy. Guess I'll wait for it to be cheaper around January.

I echo a lot of the criticisms but I could have handled a lot of them because I did enjoy the game play but the biggest flaw to me was the fact that I paid 60 bucks for such a short game. It was ridiculous. I beat it on medium in like 4 total hours. That felt like such a rip off. Ive been looking forward to this game for a long time and to have it end so soon really felt like the developers taking advantage of a built in fanbase. I would gladly have waited a longer time for an extended game.

I'll also say that I do wish they would do a Star Wars game like this with an open environment. Imagine a Star Wars game with a Red Dead Redemption like free roam.

While I agree that a sandbox/free roaming Star Wars game would be great, the main issue is from my understanding Star Wars has some "rules" that always need be followed (or Lucas isn't likely to approve your game). One of those is "travel to multiple worlds." So basically any attempt at "sandboxing" Star Wars would probably result in a half-dozen or so "little" sandboxes instead of say, one large continuous world ala Red Dead Redemption, and that could hurt the presentation more than helping it.

I mean, I suppose they could come out with a 6-disc uber-collection with a full-fledged "world" on each but I can't imagine Lucasarts ever devoting the time, effort, and resources to develop something on that scale (They outsourced TOR to Bioware, after all), at least not on this generation of systems. Would be totally awesome if they did though.

Amusingly enough one of the early pitches for what eventually became TFU was "Star Wars: Smuggler" which was jokingly referred to as "Grand Theft Starship." Lucas nixed it because he didn't feel there was a strong enough focus on a clear story (I think this stuff is on some of the making-of docs for TFU, and is definitely in the "Art of TFU" book). Seems like Lucas himself is not a fan of free-roam, since it encourages players to ignore the narrative. Which is sad, because the concepts behind the game sounded awesome: Gather a crew, customize your ship(s), etc... etc...

It just saddens me that a company that should have the resources, talent and passion to make some really high-quality stuff rarely manages to crank out much beyond "somewhat above average" with lots of "shovelware" in-between.

To those of you willing to buy the game and talk about it in this thread, thanks for saving me $60. Maybe I'll rent this someday, and knock it out in a weekend.