Wait – WHAT?!? OK, now I am willing to suspend disbelief enough to accept that Vader wants to get a decent return on his Force training investment and therefore tries to reuse his old apprentice, which is also quite efficient usage of all of those Kaminoan cloning chambers. Starting out, you discover that Darth Vader has created a series of clones of his original apprentice Starkiller, and trains each one to be his NEW secret apprentice, but ends up killing them one after another as they show the same single-minded need to rebel and seek out Juno Eclipse, Starkiller’s pilot and doomed love interest from the first game. OK, let me return to the tutorial of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. But since this is LucasArts, whose in-house development team hasn’t had an original idea since Grim Fandango (1998 if you were wondering), what do you think we got? So what would fans want in a sequel? More depth to the story, a reasonable light saber combat engine, some choices to add replayability, and perhaps even some multiplayer would have been nice. It was an average game but not one I regret paying for or playing on multiple platforms (I played on PSP and PC, my kids also have the Wii version). You see, there was basically no replayability in the single player game, no choices, and no multiplayer. And to an extent it was true: we got past the sub-par light saber combat, the silly combo moves and quicktime events, because the story worked well enough and it was basically a fairly short game that was a bunch of fun to play through once.
It seemed that the design mantra was ‘given them unbalanced powers, destructible areas, arena style levels, and a light saber and they’ll be happy’. The gameplay was also ‘pretty good’, and was ultimately centered on one thing: everyone things it is cool to abuse enemies with over-the-top Force powers accompanied by awesome physics effects. Not great and definitely not as good as many reviews stated, as there were too many holes like the ones above, but still serviceable as a video game plot.
Putting aside that everything we learned in all six movies tells us that Palpatine could read Vader well enough that keeping this apprentice secret is unlikely, and also that we saw Vader, Palpatine and Luke Skywalker all sensing Force presence over great distances in the original trilogy … well, putting all of that aside the original story was pretty good. The original Force Unleashed game told the story of a boy named Starkiller who is discovered as Darth Vader is killing off Jedi in the wake of Episode III, and whom he raises as his own ‘secret apprentice’.
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