Written by: Rik
Date posted: April 11, 2026

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had some good moments, but didn’t exactly make a compelling case for itself as the opening chapter of a grander tale. This sequel is a slightly strange beast, with certain story events in the first game necessitating somewhat of a cop-out in the introduction and setup here, about which I won’t say too much more for fear of spoiling both games. Needless to say, you’re back with your friend Starkiller for another round of galaxy-trotting adventures, hacking through endless waves of foes with your lightsaber, and using the Force to toss around bits of scenery that seemingly lack any weight or heft.

An opening escape features one of several visually exciting set-pieces with limited interactivity, as you move your angry avatar from side to side to dodge various obstacles. There’s no denying they make for a powerful spectacle, particularly for someone sufficiently stuck in the past to remain impressed by Xbox 360-era graphical tricks, and they are a step above the pure quick-time events utilised in other games (and at other points here), but there’s also an element of Rebel Assault about these bits, which is hardly a ringing endorsement.

The main action remains largely unchanged from the first game: Starkiller is strong in the Force, and despite continuing to carry his dual lightsabers at a slightly risky and ostentatious angle, most foes – especially the bog-standard Stormtrooper – are little more than a momentary distraction. At the standard difficulty levels, at least, your main issue is deciding whether to slice them up with your lightsaber, lightning bolt them to death, or grip them and throw them off a nearby ledge.

Pretty quickly, though, the game introduces enemies with particular strengths and weaknesses, with some resistant to saber attacks, and others to Force powers. It’s a way of breaking things up, in a way, although it feels like a slightly mechanical way to go about it, as the game throws a combination of these two enemy groups your way and your default process of tossing multiple baddies to their deaths is replaced by a slightly more nuanced evaluation of which button to repeatedly press depending on who you’re facing off against.

Stormtroopers with jetpacks, or wielding sniper rifles, are slightly more tricky to overcome, although they have their own weak spots to be exploited. Periodically these puny foes are supported by larger enemies, such as the War Droids that defend themselves with a large shield and hit you with a cannon that either sprays flames or freezing carbonite (like wot Han Solo got himself stuck in at the end of Empire Strikes Back). AT-STs are also a semi-regular foe, and you need to be au-fait with blocking their missile attacks with the Force to survive, deflecting them back from whence they came if at all possible, before a prompt informs you that a quick-time event can be triggered, wherein you hit a few buttons in the right order while you observe Starkiller smash the absolute hell out of your robotic nemesis.

Levels are broken up by boss fights, usually against some kind of mega-monster rather than an individual lightsaber-wielding enemy as in the first game. While none of these come close to being as memorable as the much-derided ‘rip the Star Destroyer down from the sky’ encounter, this sequence has evidently informed the sequel’s multiple face-offs against massively overpowered beings and/or machines. Even allowing for the odds being skewed heavily in favour of the hero, battles often verge on the farcical, without any sticking in the memory in quite the same way as the starship-moving set piece of the first game.

After a while, the gameplay reveals itself as rather repetitive and linear, falling into a pattern of moving through fairly bland corridors before entering a larger space and being overloaded by enemies of different kinds. Almost everything that you’ll see in the game is introduced in the opening few levels, so there are no new surprises or nuances to learn later on; instead, you’ll sigh as yet another War Droid clomps through a door, accompanied by several drones of different varieties.

Puzzles and other subtleties are limited to a repeated requirement to use the Force to manoeuvre batteries into door panels in order to open them, and the dotting of power-ups in slightly odd places, inviting you to consider whether a specific combination of difficult moves and jumps could get you there and if that effort would be worth it. As before, combinations of various lightsaber crystals benefit you in different ways, and you can choose to beef up various Force powers as you progress. New powers include Mind Trick, which I mistakenly thought was featured in the first game (turns out it was Jedi Knight II that I was thinking of) and Force Rage, which is a kind of turbo-nutter-ninja mode best employed when you’re completely overwhelmed and can’t be bothered approaching things too tactically.

Story-wise, while the first game shoehorned quite a lot of quite important-sounding plot in between the events of the films, this one seems to exist in a strange vacuum of its own, which takes away the feeling that familiar characters are being used to tell a rather unlikely story, but also gives the whole thing a vibe of being almost completely inconsequential. Darth Vader, so central last time around, appears at the start and the very end here, as a fairly anticlimactic final boss whose main power is to stand around and get battered before flying off to a faraway platform to chuck a few things at you.

Otherwise, you’re mainly dealing with characters introduced in the first game, to whom you’re unlikely to have retained much attachment. (Cards on the table: I genuinely thought two of Starkiller’s main allies here had died in the first game and was very surprised to see them again). Allegedly a Force Unleashed III was under consideration, but it’s hard to see what that would have involved, plot-wise, and how it might have convinced its potential audience to return.

The Force Unleashed II is a much shorter game than its predecessor – less than half the length – which has its pros and cons. The first game could be a bit of a slog, but had gameplay elements that suggested subtleties beyond the wit of a standard player using the default difficulty settings, and aimed to tell a story that mattered in the grander scheme of all things Star Wars. Progress here is much smoother, but with an abandonment of those greater ambitions.

Personally, had this game offered up another 20 hours or so of the same thing, I’d have been slightly hesitant to give it a go. The shorter length made it rather more palatable, with moments of excitement occurring more frequently. That said, it’s hard to make a case that it’s a superior game; instead, it feels like everything has been watered down with a slight shrug, making things easier to digest for the casual gamer but disappointing any hardcore fans of the original.

As a side-note, the DLC made available on consoles is not part of this PC port. The add-on missions were a highlight of the first game, and though without having played it I can’t say the same for the extra campaign here, it’s a shame not to be given the opportunity to do so, particularly as it brings the story back towards the events of the original film trilogy.

Like the first game, The Force Unleashed II isn’t without some epic moments, but fails to leave much of a lasting memory. The breezier pace may come as a relief to those who found the first game somewhat over-lengthy, but it feels rather slight and insubstantial as a result. For a few hours of mindless Star Wars-themed blasting, it’ll certainly do the job, but you won’t be missing out on much if you give it a swerve.