Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 review: Not the sequel you’re looking for

ByScuttlebug

Oct 26, 2010

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 is a desperate cash grab. For whatever minor improvements were made to the combat for this sequel — and, boy, are they pretty basic — the story is an insult to the original’s award-winning narrative. While the first Force Unleashed tied up a compelling piece of Star Wars cannon in a nice bow, the sequel has no aspiration to be a major part of lore or to be nearly as epic. It simply cobbles together glorified fan fiction for what amounts to an unexceptional subplot as it abruptly ends in the second act screaming, “SEQUEL GOES HERE!”

The story begins with a revived Starkiller, locked up in a cloning facility on rainy Kamino, being told by Darth Vader that he’s just the latest iterative test tube creation in some cloning plot … or is he? No, really, or is he? We never find out. That’s not so much a spoiler as it is the type of writing one should be prepared for. However, that’s not the main plot. At its core, the story is about the shackles of love, as our sad clone (… or is he?) desperately tries to reconnect with his love interest from the first game, Cpt. Juno Eclipse.

You could make an argument that with his overabundance of power, Starkiller’s character in the original Force Unleashed was a “Mary Sue,” but the first story was handled with such respect and (at the time) finality, it wasn’t a real problem. For the sequel, let that Mary Sue criticism fly proud: Our hero tosses TIE fighters like crumpled paper, survives an impossible fall in the wake of a starship’s detonation and is basically the most ridiculously powerful user of The Force the galaxy has ever known. If Darth Vader had one of the highest concentrations of midichlorians ever seen, Starkiller is a midichlorian.

Gallery: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2