The Force Unleashed 2 and Medal of Honor

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2

At last, the Star Wars brawler you’ve been looking for…

Star Wars games haven’t all been belters (hello, Yoda Stories), but 2008’s Force Unleashed was a success, racking up 7 million sales and introducing the generation that thought Star Wars had got stale to the joys of crushing a Star Destroyer with your bare thumbs.

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But it wasn’t without its faults: the hand-to-hand lightsaber combat felt like you were batting away stormtroopers with a Kwik Cricket bat, and the much-trumpeted Force grip mechanic was as intuitive as picking up a bowl of jelly with a surfboard.

So it was a sceptical FHM that scuffed our heels into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, waiting for another chance to electrocute whole armies of Empire droids. Especially considering at the end of the first game, the lead character, um, died.

Cue a neat bit of sci-fi plothole surgery, and the newly cloned and impossibly named Starkiller is back, now blessed with not one but two lightsabers as well as force powers that make Darth Vader look like an asthmatic vicar.

Your lightning attack, for example, is now cranked up so high you feel like a walking, talking Tesla coil and your grip power is so strong you can pluck TIE fighters out of the sky. Smug Jedi Mind Tricks let you force weaker enemies into fighting by your side, or if you’re feeling evil, have them leap off a bridge.

But things really go off the chain in ‘Force Fury’ mode. Allowing you a moment of invulnerable insanity, your lightsabers float out of your hands and into enemies’ skulls, Force lightning jets out of you like a flailing fire hose, and everyone gets very, very deaded.

After ironing out the kinks in the original’s cape, we finally have a decent, playable, exciting Star Wars -based brawler. Lightsabers actually slice limbs off instead of tapping them to sleep, Force powers genuinely make you feel like a miniature Death Star, and the Force grip almost, sort of, actually works . Fans of the film franchise will love the storyline (Yoda and Boba Fett say hi) and hardcore gamers will relish the new combo system and updated force powers. It’s a triumph.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 is out on PC, PS3, X360 and Wii on October 29

Medal of Honor

The dastardly Taliban, eh? Thanks to EA, they’re in the game…

“You only get one chance to reboot a franchise,” certifies Greg Goodrich, executive producer of the most deliberately controversial game since, well, last year’s Modern Warfare 2 airport scene made the evening news. On the screen, FHM watches as Goodrich delicately points the Hydra rockets attached to an Apache helicopter towards the Afghan countryside.

Radio contact crackles, the visuals flick to thermo imaging, rockets fire and a man with a turban is propelled 15 feet in the air before crumpling, limp and broken, on a rock.

But that’s not controversial. Electronic Arts’ decision to haul Medal of Honor from World War II to Afghanistan is, in some ways, an obvious one. But it’s the move to let you play as the Taliban in multiplayer that’s really pissed some people off, with defence secretary Liam Fox bellyaching disgust that “any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game” – a soundbite as conniving as EA’s Taliban-fragging strategy in the first place. So, the more straightforward issue: is it any good?

It really should be. In EA Los Angeles’ campaign mode, you take charge of several different ‘tier 1’ characters (Jack Bauers in combat trousers), with missions split between stealthy ‘scalpel’ mode and the big-gunning ‘sledgehammer’. Meanwhile, the multiplayer’s been put together by DICE, the EA-owned studio that forged the clever maps and no-frills gameplay of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It’s a marriage of convenience and ambition, rubber-stamped with that other MoH hallmark; authenticity. And that doesn’t just mean blood. It’s out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

From the November 2010 issue of FHM India.