Game EXP: STAR WARS™: The Force Unleashed™ II (PC)

My plan for this May the 4th was to start and finish a STAR WARS game that I had never played before and to have a review up in time for today.  My first attempt was with STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast™ but I was getting motion sick since the first part of the game was in first-person so I uninstalled the game and decided to give STAR WARS™: The Force Unleashed™ II (hereto after referred to as TFU2 so that I don't have to deal with adding the legal ™ after every mention of the full title of the game), which I have had on Steam since I picked up the Humble Star Wars Bundle 5+ years ago.  So this is a story about the tumultuous relationship I developed with TFU2, the steps I went through to get parts of the game to operate properly, and how I tried multiple avenues to fix the game so that I could finish this short campaign.

Still Imposing as Ever.

I started the game like any other I have on Steam and figured that because I played the first game with the Xbox 360 controller, it would make sense to return to that way of playing.  So the game loaded fine and started without any significant issues.  I was greeted with a cutscene Darth Vader arriving on Kamino to check on the status of the new version of his cloned apprentice Starkiller (Galen Marek from the first STAR WARS™: The Force Unleashed™).  You run through a quick tutorial stage before Starkiller going apeshit and breaking out of what essentially is his holding cell. . .I honestly do not remember even though it was only fewer than 5 hours of gameplay, something to do with not wanting to do Darth Vader's bidding and coming to terms with the fact that you are being told that you are in fact a clone on life's fast track.  Upon escaping, TFU2 is back to its old ways of running through stages, killing Stormtrooper after Stormtrooper, absorbing their life force in the form of glowing green orbs and replenishing your force powers by way of glowing blueish/whiteish orbs; you know, like in the God of War series.

And you know, one of the things that I feel still absolutely works in this game despite being a little more than somewhat broken (at least on my computer, which I already recognize is a couple of years past its prime), is that I still feel like an absolute badass who kind of knows what they are doing.  When everything clicks, the fighting in this game is still a lot of fun.  Mowing down whole platoons of Stormtroopers with dual-wielded lightsabers, throwing Stormtroopers off the side of already precarious walkways to the rolling ocean below, and zapping Jumptroopers then hearing them scream as their packs overload and they go flying off like a smoking lightning-induced grenade is what the dark side of the force is all about.  And I feel like this is where TFU2 excels and feels the best, but the one downside is that throughout my time playing, it did the fighting Stromtrooper after identical Stormtrooper did get a little weary.  The only real challenge that I came across was when you start going up against Sith Acolytes, especially when they are combined with AT-STs and their other variants, otherwise, you are just wailing away on plastic-encased meatpuppets who act as a mere inconvenience who give you live and experience points as you fight your way through the various stages.

And as fun as the game was, it certainly did not start off that way.  After the first stage was complete, Starkiller ends up stealing Darth Vader's Tie Fighter.  What happened to me was that Starkiller ran up to the Tie Fighter, then it cut to him being on a new planet with a completely different ecosystem and color palette, although surrounded by the same type of Stormtroopers as at Kamino.  What I realized halfway through this series of five stages on Cato Neimoidia, was that there was supposed to be a cinematic showing the events between levels.  After searching several discussion boards and forum posts, I found out that it is an issue with the PC port of the game and how videos are accessed and run by the game.  Apparently, the issue is that the game uses Windows Media Player to actually play the cutscenes rather than the game playing them in-engine and if Windows Media Player is not set to be the default player for WMV files, then the game just skips over them and throws you right into the next level.  What I ended up doing was following Shotgun Teddy's advice below, which did work for me, although I did not have to reinstall the game. 

Only Imperial Troopers on Neimoidia, No Fighting Neimoidians.

Another issue I had with the game, was the story, and by way of the story, the way the stages played themselves out.  The entire story in TFU2 is oddly simple in that it could have been a DLC pack for the first game.  In a nutshell, Starkiller is awoken on Kamino, escapes from Darth Vader, flies to Cato Neimoidia (the homeworld of the Neimoidians, a la the Trade Federation) to rescue Rham Kota, flies to Dagobah to find himself, flies to a group of the Rebellion Fleet to save Juno Eclipse (love interest from the first game), flies back to Kamino to rescue Juno and confronts Darth Vader, roll credits.  What is not so in a nutshell, is that each area is made up of about three-to-four individual sections culminating in a boss fight, and in the case of Cato Neimoidia, a stupidly long boss fight that went on longer than it really needed to be.  But that is essentially the entire game right there.  Starkiller escapes Darth Vader, rescues friend #1, goes to save friend #2, confronts Darth Vader then rescues friend #2.  Or at least I think he rescues friend #2 (being Juno Eclipse) but I would not actually know because my game crashed six times in the transition between levels four and five, which I will cover later.  

This is just ridiculous.  Seven Saber Guards (two off-screen), two Riot
Troopers, one Stormtrooper, and two Scout Troopers  (both off-screen
& only one currently aiming).

Something that I felt made this story feel short, was the significant lack of enemy diversity.  in.  In TFU2, you had four types of Stormtroopers (Standard, Scout, Riot, and Jump), a Sith Acolyte/Saber Guard (being force wielding enemies who also attack with lightsabers), and War Droids; not including the AT-STs, AT-MPs, and the Terror group of Droids, Troopers (not related to Stormtroopers) and the Biodroid boss.  In the first Force Unleashed, there were different types of Stormtroopers as in TFU2, but because you went to other planets, you also went up against different types of Felucians, Jawas, Rebel Militia, Rodians, and Wookies.as well as reusing the Carbonite War Droid, which first showed up on Kamino, then again on Cato Neimoidia, then a flame variant showed up on the Rebel ship Salvation.  To me, it made sense to have a large-ass droid capable of using the carbonite freezing process offensively especially on Kamino, but having that technology spread galaxy-wide and at the ready did not seem to make a lot of sense to me.  The Incinerator War Droids made more sense as it could have been a repurposed CWD, or it could have worked the other way around, but having the CWD so widespread made it feel like the art and/or development team was moving too quickly to design/develop more varied assets.

I think the only times I ever used the Mind Trick skill was on accident.

Something else that I was not fond of was the force powers and how they were introduced to the game.  When you start out, you relearn your powers in the first couple of levels, but as you kill people (and destroy objects) you gain experience points you can use to upgrade your skills.  And the skill tree was not so much of a tree as it was a line.  Gone are the options to learn more complex combo moves (more intricate button mashing) or force talents (amount of health gained from enemies, amount of power required to charge moves, etc), and instead you now only have one group of force powers to upgrade.  Yes, you can change the kyber crystals in your lightsabers to give similar bonuses that would have been in force talents, and you do pick up holocrons scattered/hidden throughout each stage so I guess that was to replace the buying force talents.  Maybe?  But the hidden holocrons would only increase your max health, max force power, or give you more experience points.

The last section in the game I could play before the game would
consistently crash.  Terror Droids?  More like Annoying Droids.

As I mentioned three paragraphs ago, following the cinematic that closes out the third level, being the sixth stage aboard the Salvation level, my game would crash.  The first two times I did not do anything differently and just repeated the same motions just to test it out.  And both times the game crashed.  Then I let my computer sit for a while and tried the game again, and two more times it crashed.  The fifth time, I had read someone suggesting going into the game properties and running the game in Windows 7 compatibility mode, which made the cinematic run a little bit smoother, but it still crashed.  The sixth and final time, I went back into the computer default settings and changed them so maybe the game would skip over the cinematic entirely (having already watched it five times already and not being able to skip it because the game never registered that I had gotten that far), but the game went to the loading screen anyway and then proceeded to crash.

I really wanted to like The Force Unleashed II as I did enjoy most of the first game (despite all of the negative things I had to say about it).  I keep coming back to the feeling that this was supposed to be a DLC for the first game that was decided that would be its own stand-alone game at some point, but I cannot find any information to that effect.  I just feel like there was not enough story content for it to be interesting, and I realize that I was not able to finish the game, but it is the humble opinion of this person that after finishing 14 out of 18 stages, if the primary story is not interesting, then there might be something up with the story.  I also felt that voice actor for Starkiller Sam Witwer was grossly underutilized.  He talked a bit during the opening Kamino stage, not a whole lot during the entirety of the Cato Neimoidia stage until he was in the process of rescuing Rahm Kotam, which I understand because there was no one for Starkiller to talk to for nearly a third of the game. 

I do wish that I had been able to complete the game because I was maybe an hour away from finishing the game and I am sad that the only reason I could not finish it was because of an undiagnosed issue either with my computer or the game itself.  So that makes me a little sad, but at least I have the final episode of The Clone Wars, so surely that will uplift my spirits.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental


P.S.

I wanted to share a couple more screenshots from the game that did not fit within the article.

This is the Carbonite War Droid.  What got really old with them was that fighting them, the tactic was the same.  If there were other enemies around, just run around so their frost cannon was out of range and kill the rest of the smaller enemies.  Then focus on the CWD (or the Incinerator variant), force pull the shield out of its hands, then either blast it with force lightning or throw your lightsabers at it until you see the A above it, then you run up and kill it with a QTE (Quicktime event).  While not overly difficult to kill, they got annoying pretty quickly.

This was from the final boss fight in the Cato Neimoidia when Starkiller was rescuing Rahm Kota, that I was alluding to back in paragraph five.  This boss battle consisted of five different sections, with the last one actually being cut from the Wii port of the game.  At the start, I was afraid that it was going to turn into a Shadow of the Colossus type battle, but instead, it was a half-circle arc of the arena that you used.  And it went on way too long.