Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Collector's Edition -Xbox 360

I've seen a lot of people whine about not only the game, but the collector's edition as well. Here are my thoughts:The USB flash drive containing the extra content is weird - the darth vader helmet is very hard to remove without fear of breaking the hard drive. Also, I have not been able to use the pre-loaded content on the drive yet, but I will try today.The steelbook is indeed a little flimsy and is hardly metal - it's made of really lame aluminum or something. It may dent easily, but I am not a child and I treat my growing collection of games with the utmost care. This is a moot point to mention. Don't blame the packaging because you couldn't avoid dropping your game case/throwing it.The "sleeve" with the artwork on it - the one that reportedly rubs off with wear and tear, only opens at one end. So, unlike Halo 3 Collectors Edition, it's kind of annoying to get this game out of the sleeve. The packaging itself is also annoying - they gave it a wide case, the size of two games, just to put a cardboard insert in which contains the flash drive. They could have just made a slightly bigger steelbook and put the flash drive in it. Now I am forced to keep the useless cardboard insert around because I am the type who likes to display my games in their original packaging.The game itself:So far I am only on the second chapter. Until now the game has been just as fun as TFU if not more. Starkiller's clone seems fond of high speed travel through the air - within the first two chapters he plunges through the air in a free fall at least 5 times. The user interface/HUD has been completely reorganized and works MUCH faster than the original user interface in TFU. The menus are much smoother and there are far less loading times.Graphically this game is prettier than TFU as well. At first your Starkiller doesn't look as much like Sam Witmer as he did in the first game, but in the cutscenes it looks like they practically filmed actual live sequences of Sam Witmer. The renders and the graphics overall have been much improved - Caito Neimoidia is simply beautiful.Onscreen quicktime events/button prompts have been slightly improved. The buttons you need to press are now displayed at the appropriate edge of the screen, rather than all of them in the middle (but I liked that system better in the first game). It is also more clear now when you need to repeatedly press something, or hold.Force powers are both better and more annoying in this game. You can do mind trick now, which is good. It's much easier to force-slay everyone. However, using force grip to grab a lot of the boxes on the ground is next to impossible, as the force targeting system is very subtle and not as responsive as the original game.They have also expanded on the experience/upgrades/holocrons, giving you health and force bar upgrades.The difficulty of this game also seems to be equal to the difficulty jump between Ninja Gaiden 1 and Ninja Gaiden 2 (the new ones). There were points during TFU 1 where I felt like I was playing Ninja Gaiden again, except that in Ninja Gaiden you can counter and block - but your ninja powers are nothing compared to your force powers. Overall, TFU 2 feels like Ninja Gaiden 2 but with Star Wars, and it's not a bad thing at all.I can not attest to story, yet - it was said there is very little story in this game and it is essentially just a beat-em-up where you are encouraged to destroy everything. So far I follow the story and there has been plenty of it. I think the people who complained about this aren't familiar with storytelling. The first entry, be it a movie or whatever. always has to tell more story - the second movie is where you get to open up and do things.I absolutely recommend this game and TFU to anyone who hasn't played it - you have to play it first.

I enjoyed the first game and I enjoyed this one too. The mechanics are more or less the same as they were in the first game, with a few minor differences: there seem to be more saber combo variations and it seems to take less time to do fully charged force attacks. The bigger differences are the story (obviously), some new enemies (spider bots & the "Terror" enemy variants), and Force Fury.Regarding claims that Force Fury makes the game too easy: on the harder difficulties, a well-timed Fury can be the difference between life and death, but even if you do use it strategically, you're likely to die at least a few times. On lower difficulties, the game is very easy for the duration of your Fury, but if you're looking for a challenge, then you shouldn't be playing on a low difficulty setting (if you still think Fury makes the game too easy, just don't use it). I hoarded my Fury on my first play-through, but used it as often as I could on subsequent plays (it's a blast when messing around).Regarding omplaints that the game is short: this may be a Star Wars game, but it's still a hack 'n' slash/action game and games of this genre are always somewhat short(Dante's Inferno is a great game with high reviews, but it took me about the same amount of time to beat on my first play-through). Those who've said the game only takes 4 hours either exaggerated or rushed through it (in which case, you can't really complain about the shortness); my first play-through was about 9 hours on medium difficulty and that was without hunting down all the holocrons (I think I found all but 5 without really looking for them).I really only had 2 problems with this game: the first is that some of the challenges are just dull (ie, the ones where you just dash to the finish) and the tank-breaking challenge (#9, I think) has a forced camera angle that's kind of awkward (which was annoying); the second was a bug in the DLC that caused the fight to get stuck & not proceed to the final stage - the boss just kept jumping around, taking damage, & not attacking me (but the DLC is only $1 and I was able to fix this by using costume select to revert to the beginning of the 2nd stage of the fight).The Collector's Edition is currently only $10 more than the standard, which I think is worth it. For me the flash drive is more of a novelty (I've already got 8GB & 16GB drives), but I do use it occasionally. Buying a 2GB Star Wars drive directly from Mimobot would cost you at least $39. If you don't want the drive, you could sell it (the Starkiller drives generally go for $20 on ebay, meaning you'd wind up having the metal case & DLC for $10 less than the standard edition).