Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Preview

Pro tip: When you’re aiming to start up a new gaming franchise, it’s never that smart an idea to kill off your leading man. The Force Unleashed was a massive success for LucasArts and Activision alike, notching up over 6 million sales worldwide and collecting a shiny award from the Writers Guild of America, as well as holding the record for being the fastest-selling Star Wars game of all time. A sequel was always inevitable, as sure as a Wookie leaves little brown Jawas in the woods; what was less obvious was how the developers would solve their biggest problem – the untimely death of antihero Galen Marek, otherwise known as Starkiller. His explosive demise certainly made for an exciting end to the first game, but it didn’t exactly leave the door open for a second appearance.

To sneak around this rather awkward situation, LucasArts have opened the Big Book of Emergency Clichés and turned to the page marked “cloning”. In storytelling terms this is only one step on the scale from “then he woke up and it was all a dream”, but what the hell, any port in a storm. The developer actually claims that it planned to take this route all along, and has further hinted that there may be some ambiguity about whether the new Starkiller actually is a clone or not. Regardless of whether this is true, the important thing is that the man himself is back – and this time he’ll either be even more unleashed… or even less leashed, depending on your grammatical preference.

LucasArts’ presentation at Activision’s pre-E3 showcase was surprisingly revelatory in terms of the game’s narrative, giving a rough overview of what felt like the first third of the plot. I’m not going to relay all the details – that would spoil a lot of the fun, after all – but the initial setup is that Starkiller 2 wakes up in Darth Vader’s custody on the planet of Kamino, the drizzly planet from Attack of the Clones. After making a dramatic escape he then heads out to find Juno Eclipse – a woman who sounds like an overpriced cocktail, but who is in fact a pilot, and also his major love interest. Starkiller’s journey will reunite him with several other friends from the first game, and naturally enough it’ll feature well-known locations from the Star Wars canon. LucasArts also says that this sequel will be much darker and more personal than its predecessor, describing the story as the Empire Strikes Back for the Force Unleashed franchise.

Plot gubbins aside, the first thing to say Unleashed 2 is that it looks lovely. Activision’s demo found Starkiller battling his way through oodles of Stormtroopers on Kamino, a location that showed off drizzling rain and reflective, water-slick walkways. Like the first game, there are three separate physics engines fuelling the action simultaneously: Havok facilitates stuff being flung around, Euphoria helps bodies to crumple and fall in just the right way, and finally Digital Molecular Matter lets the game simulate the qualities of different materials, like glass and steel. Put it all together and you get a carnival of force-enabled mayhem, with Starkiller zapping his foes and flinging them around like helpless rag-dolls.

This bedlam is undoubtedly a good sign, since the prevailing feeling was that Unleashed 1 took a bit too long to build up to speed. There was that amazing first level where you played as Darth Vader, then suddenly all the fun toys were taken away from you. This time around you should be a force-wielding badass from the start, and naturally there will be new miseries to inflict upon your pathetic enemies. Starkiller can now hover above the ground, perhaps frying a few bad-guys with lightning while he’s up there. He can also use Obi-Wan’s classic Jedi Mind Trick, an attack that will affect the various enemy types in different ways; in the case of stormtroopers, the armour-clad idiots will turn suicidal and blindly stumble off the nearest ledge. Accompanying these powers is a new combat style, one that finds Starkiller holding his lightsabers backwards in the manner of a samurai; he can also use two sabers at once – an ability that always proves popular with the Star Wars fanbase.

For the opposition LucasArts has opted to dial things down a bit, limiting the overall number of enemy types and placing greater emphasis on tactical play. For example, the Carbonite Heavy is a large two-legged droid equipped with a shield and a freezing spray; to beat it you’ll need to avoid its icy bursts, and then find a way to neutralise its defences – perhaps by pulling away the shield and then throwing it back at it. By the later stages of the game you’ll be facing several of these specialist enemy types at once, forcing you to adapt and change tactics on the fly.

To accompany this changeable combat, LucasArts is promising a more considered approach to pacing – which in simple terms means that there’ll be some puzzle-y bits to break up the constant slaughter. More promisingly, there will also be what the developer is calling “Run For Your Life Moments”; in the example given, Starkiller had to flee down a corridor as a large ship attempted to blast him via a sort of sci-fi drive-by, utterly obliterating everything behind him. The whole section was quite reminiscent of the run-away-from-the-jeep bit in Uncharted 2, and once again the physics effects looked great, with hapless Stormtroopers getting nailed by flying crates and the like.

I know I’ve been a bit scathing about the premise for Force Unleashed 2, but the truth is that my first glimpse has left me really quite impressed. The whole clone angle may sound a bit cheap, but I suspect that the developers will find a way to make it fairly credible, or at least as swallow-able as the whole “secret apprentice” line of the first outing. Things are already looking promising in terms of the core action, and LucasArts says that it’s fixed all the areas that drew criticism last time around. It’s been a while since we’ve had an absolutely top-drawer Star Wars title, so let’s hope that this sequel is more than just a well-made clone.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 will be released on October 26 for PS3 and Xbox 360.