More than anything else, Vader Immortal: Episode II is a lesson in the dangers of episodic content.
Being one of the relatively few Star Wars fans who can afford to play the Vader Immortal saga has been a bit of a roller coaster: if you look back to my review of Episode I when it first came out, my mind was blown. Two months later, when discussing the experience on Book Wars Pod (shameless plug), I had a lot of nagging issues with the story and the gameplay. With all that said, Wednesday’s surprise release of Episode II made me really excited to recapture the feelings of awe I had when going through the introductory chapter for the first time.
But honestly? I’m underwhelmed. Episode II doesn’t manage to recapture the magic of wielding a lightsaber for the first time, but it does put all of the problems from its predecessor directly in the spotlight.
Since you’ve already mastered use of a lightsaber, the new chapter begins with you learning to use the Force, using your hands to (wait for it) lift rocks and throw them across the room. But where lightsaber tracking was crisp and realistic, Force control feels, well, clunky – and not in a “I’m just learning to stretch out with my feelings” kind of way. I spent the entire experience dropping rocks and enemies at my feet rather than throwing them, because the Oculus Quest wasn’t picking up my throwing motions quickly enough to respond. It doesn’t feel like the technology is there yet for a realistic Force-wielding experience. That’s understandable, as the Force isn’t a real thing and I’m not a real Space Wizard, but it quickly takes you out of the experience and feeling of being the Dark Lord’s apprentice.
Speaking of feeling immersed in the Star Wars galaxy, Episode II feels needlessly on-the-rails for your character. Where Episode I allowed you to interact with seemingly meaningless objects on your ship and feel like you were actually wandering around, the new release offers you more actual freedom of movement within Lady Corvax’s temple without actually letting you touch anything. Early on, you and Vader walk through the Lady’s library – a vast and beautiful setting, with hundreds of books… that you can’t pick up or examine in any way. For an experience whose whole point is interactivity and immersion, it felt like a basic misstep and set the tone for an experience that felt more like a demo than a finished product.
Speaking of Lady Corvax (and without any spoilers), my feelings that the story of Vader Immortal was a bit basic and derivative were completely validated here. It’s strange to me that Lucasfilm and ILMxLAB spend so much time hyping up award-winning screenwriter David S. Goyer’s contributions when the actual plot feels so out of step with what we’ve come to expect from Star Wars. Part of this is likely the length of the game – at around 40 minutes (shorter than the first chapter, at least for me), there simply isn’t time to develop an emotional connection to any aspect of the plot, and I (the user, not the character) was drawn out of the experience thinking about what a bad idea all of this was, and how I would never actually do any of this. Again, some of those feelings are just going to happen in a video game-like setting, but the tutorial sequence of learning how to use the Force from Vader, in particular, just didn’t pass the smell test for me. The voice acting is another big miss, in my opinion – I love Maya Rudolph but it feels more and more like she was just a “get” for the sake of having her name on the experience, as her performance, in both writing and delivery, feels contradictory to the seriousness of the plot.
One HUGE area of improvement over the inaugural chapter, though, is in the game’s accessibility to disabled fans. Episode II gives users the option of playing sitting down, skipping climbing portions, enabling motion-smoothing in the shakier scenes, and turning on visual combat cues for hearing-impaired players. As accessibility was a huge concern of mine in Episode I (and one I discussed further for SWRepMatters), I was thrilled to see these options and hope that we continue to see more of the same in future VR Star Wars experiences.
(Author’s note: I am an able-bodied adult man, and not the best person to be reviewing these settings, but the prohibitive cost of an Oculus Quest/Rift means that many disabled gamers just haven’t had a chance to play the game yet. I’ve been looking for reviews of these features from the disabled community and, as I find them, will tweet them out and edit this post to link them here.)
Overall, is Vader Immortal: Episode II worth the $10 cost for those who played the original and already have an Oculus system? Yes – it’s Star Wars, and it’s still fun. But as an immersive VR experience meant to make the user feel one with the Force, it fell short for me: the concept was sound, but the execution, both technologically and creatively, didn’t live up to the hype. If this had launched three months ago with Episode I, I likely would have enjoyed it more – still riding on the immersive highs of the first chapter, some of these complaints would have been relegated to the back of my mind. But months later, this doesn’t feel like a sequel – it feels like I’m replaying the same game with worse controls, less excitement, and more awareness of the fact that I’m a dude standing in my living room with a headset on.
