Be warned: Light spoilers for both Force Unleashed games follow.
You're dropped in to a space ship. Your objective is to find and kill General Rahm Kota, leader of defected Storm Troopers who resisted Order 66. Vader has sent you on this mission to test your abilities as a Jedi. You are Starkiller. You are the most powerful Force-wielder in the known galaxy.
In front of you, there are tight, silver corridors, crawling with maintenance droids and lined with windows. The cold, empty darkness of space peers at you through them, black except for the white freckles of stars, lightyears away.
What would the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy do? Probably throw a cleaning droid in to space, just to see what would happen.
Using the Force, you pick up a droid, watching it spin uselessly mid-air. It struggles against the invisible power around it, fighting to get back on its maintenance track. It resembles R2-D2, though you don't know its specific model number. Up and down, left to right, closer and further away. Yup, the Force works. All systems go. We are ready for launch, captain. Bombs away.
The droid whips out the window, clumsily smashing off of the ledge, the nostalgic "WAAAH" of the droid ringing out into the vast emptiness. The vacuum of space begins to violently pull the rest of the corridor out with it; other droids, boxes and power cells, shards of broken glass all go hurling out of the window beyond your control. Just as you begin to think that you might be next, a hefty metal barrier slides in place, accompanied by the reassuring sound of re-pressurization.
Everything's safe. The droids are gone. Now you have an innate understanding of how your Force powers interact with the world around you.
In the next hallway, there's a door. It looks the same as the thick, protective sheet that slid over the broken window. If it can resist the crushing power of depressurization, how do you get through it?
You annihilate it with your powers, of course.
With the press of a button, you unleash a wave of unparalleled power that blows the door open, seemingly effortlessly. What was once a formidable barrier is now a crumpled piece of metal, hanging on by barely a thread.
You are Starkiller. You are the most powerful Force-wielder in the known galaxy.
On the other side of the door is a wide-open hangar, filled with Troopers who are terrified of your very presence. They take poorly-aimed shots at you, running to and fro, taking cover and grouping up, trying to kill you as hard as they try to avoid you. But you know what to do. You know that you can pick things up and hurl them with your mind; you know that you can use the Force to literally blow people away. Within minutes, the hangar is empty of (living) Troopers, and you stand unscathed. You've thrown them in to the void of space, thrown them against walls and each other, dragged them across the floor and instilled fear in to their hearts before bringing their lives to and end.
You are Starkiller. You are the most powerful Force-wielder in the known galaxy.
The opening moments of the story proper in The Force Unleashed are brilliant. As soon as you're put in action, the game allows you to connect the dots with your imagination and experiment within your environment, free from harm and enemies. Even though you're only allowed a few minutes in this corridor playground, it shows you enough of what you can do to ignite your imagination for the rest of the game, and what that will bring in terms of abilities. It's the bait to hook the player, and it's one of the most effective hooks in any game.
While the rest of the game, at least on the initial playthrough, never lives up to the potential in the player's mind, it's clear that the concept of The Force Unleashed is rock-solid, if not technically sound. The Force, in the movies, is always preached as a passive, coercive ability that is rarely used in direct, destructive means. The Force Unleashed, however, puts the Force powers at the forefront, as a Force wrecking-ball.
"He's taking it to the limit [. . .] he's unstoppable," said Sam Witwer, voice-actor and motion-capture actor for Starkiller. This encapsulates how the player should feel while playing as Starkiller: an unstoppable force. An embodiment of power. From the moment you first hurl a droid out of a window, the player feels in control.
Fast-forward two years, to the release of The Force Unleashed 2. What was a flawed-but-promising game is finally receiving its sequel, a game that will be action-packed, filled to the brim with emotion, and obviously awesome force powers. If The Force Unleashed 2 is everything the first one was, but with less glitches, it would be an amazing experience.
Open to a room. Vader is talking to you, a clone of Starkiller, forcing you to cut down holograms of the Troopers you killed at the beginning of the first game. . . and your love interest. The game tells you how to play. Press X to lightsaber, press Y to lightning, Press B to Force Push, Right Trigger to grab, so on and so forth. Gone is the opportunity to fool around with your abilities free of harm. Either cut down the enemies with the proper button inputs, or be killed.
As soon as the tutorial is over, Vader decides you must be killed and a new clone awakened, but you leap out of the window before that happens. Cue an 'action' sequence of dodging airborne debris while you fly through the air. Follow that up with some bland platforming, and then running away from a ship that's going to kill you, and then you leave the level.
Each level of The Force Unleashed 2 is a repeat of the previous, just with a new location. Enter area; fight Storm Troopers; ramp up to Force-resistant enemies; fight AT-STs; fight big boss; cue cutscene. Gone are the playgrounds of the previous game, allowing you to chain together combos and attacks to create a machine of destruction. Each enemy, except the regular Storm Trooper, has one attack that makes them vulnerable to all other attacks. The game boils down to doing an attack to make an enemy vulnerable, and then throwing them off of a ledge/into a fire pit/at a fan blade/into the sky. Larger enemies all have projectile attacks that you can grab mid-air, and they never attempt to close the distance, so any larger enemy is taken out just by throwing their own attacks at them. Any real trouble that you may be in is averted by a 'Rage' meter; press the GET ANGRY button, and then every single one of your attacks becomes instantly lethal, lasting for the better part of a minute.
To illustrate the lack of creativity on this game's part, here's a video of the Dagobah level.
Unfortunately, the video starts with the previous level's boss battle, which was an exercise in tedium and entirely lacking in challenge; a lazy chase of the big-budget action moment that ended falling flat on its face. After that, there's a cutscene in which Rahm Kota says something about Dagobah, for some reason, and for some reason also, Starkiller goes to Dagobah (for some reason). Once you land there, you get to walk in a straight line, picking up collectibles which just litter the ground. You know, Dagobah. It's where I keep all of my lightsaber crystals. For storage purposes.
Eventually, you encounter Yoda, who just spouts some cryptic bullshit, and then for some reason you see the future, and then the story continues. And that's Dagobah. Just senseless fan-wankery that serves absolutely no purpose. It's a stroll through a tightly guided, poorly-realized location that fans like, but one that entirely misses the point of the location. You're guided there with the vague mission of 'finding yourself,' and all you do is walk for three minutes towards a cutscene that lets you glimpse an attack on your love interest. By the time you get to your love interest, the attack has already happened, making the whole trip a pointless endeavor. You don't learn anything about Starkiller. No mysteries are revealed. You're not given a new objective. You just visit, and then leave. Luke Skywalker went to Dagobah and became a Jedi; full of determination and drive, eager to put an end to the tyrannical reign of the Empire. Starkiller goes to Dagobah, gropes himself, and then is late for an appointment.
Everything about The Force Unleashed 2 feels unfinished. It's a collection of thoughts and ideas for a sequel that never form any sort of cohesion. What if you didn't know whether or not you were a clone? What if you went to Dagobah? What if you could use the Jedi mind trick? What if the story were more personal? It's almost like playing a stream of consciousness, but you can throw Storm Troopers around. Nothing about it feels tight, or refined. It certainly doesn't feel like two years worth of development time. It's a glossier, shinier version of the first game, but without any heart or passion.
You were Starkiller. You were the most powerful Force-wielder in the known galaxy.
