Just finished this game, all I can really say in short is 'Meh'

Surprisingly a very disappointing and unimaginative sequel. The narrative wasn't really all that, which is a surprise after the award winning plot of the first, the gameplay hadn't improved all that much technically, and the action was an increasingly stale case of standard infantry type units followed by and semi-boss type unit that requires a button mashing finishing move sequence to kill and then rinse and repeat (and it is exactly the same finishing move sequence every time ). I mean in some of the earlier levels just an hour or so in I was already thinking "If I have to go up against another one of those bleedin' Carbonite spraying battle bots... Oh, surprise, surprise, here's another one." Or another AT-ST Walker, or the little baby missile platform version. It takes a seriously unimaginative game to practically give you all the different enemy units you're going to have to fight against in the first level. I remember thinking at the time. "Well it is only the beginning of the game, I bet there will be more interesting and a higher variety of enemy units to combat later." There isn't.

To be fair there are some genuinely thrilling sequences in the game, the free fall action can be pretty cool (especially the one after the Barog sequence) and intense, and obviously mashing people and scenery up with your amped up Force powers never gets old, but the game itself gets old really quickly, and then when it's over it is like..."What? Is that it?" I didn't even play it that intensely but still got through it in a weekend, and that was with the irritatingly grating grind of some levels that just mashed you up countless times until you finally figured out what tiny element you were missing in your gameplay style to get through the sequence.

The story and lore accuracy also seemed to go out the window, where as the story in the first one amped up your powers but still managed to weave the tale of Starkiller pretty successfully in with universally accepted Star Wars lore. In this episode they seem to be playing fast and free with lore throwing a lot of crazy spanners into the Star Wars lore pot, weird little touches which are totally unnecessary but would make anyone who knows their lore go "Huh?" The fledgling Rebel fleet for instance has no X-Wings yet, instead having Y-Wings, Headhunters and some additional fighter I didn't recognise, all good so far, but then they have an A-Wing parked in a hanger when they wouldn't have been invented yet. The Rebel flagship is a Nebulon-B Frigate (as seen in the Rebel fleet at the end of The Empire Strikes Back) but it is completely the wrong scale coming across more the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer. These details aren't too big a deal to a casual fan, but to anyone who knows their Star Wars to any reasonable level of detail, these errors will grate. And then there is the plot's need to throw as many second movie of either trilogy nods in there, but then do nothing with them. So for instance the promotional material bigs up the fact that Boba Fett and Yoda feature in the game, yet neither one has more than one or two scenes and you never actually come up against either in the game as such, they just feature in cutscenes (though I believe the Wii version's multiplayer mode allows you to battle against or as these characters).

So in short, with my rant over I guess you can tell that I found this game to be a touch disappointing. Never have I picked up a game with such potential (the original TFU was by no means perfect, but you'd think with the sequel that they would build on what was good and improve everything that wasn't so good in the first game. Y'know, learn from experience?), only to find it to be a ropey total vacuum of originality of gameplay which makes no effort to build on what has gone before but just rests on it's laurels and puts out more of the same but without any of the spark that made the first game so enjoyable despite it's shortcomings.

So once again with feeling "Meh."