On August 21, a demo of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was released on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network. As an eager fan, who even watched the new Star Wars movie The Clone Wars, I simply couldn't resist to give the Star Wars videogame saga yet another try.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed woke a new hope, but also summoned a familiar but dark fear inside of me. Would The Force Unleashed finally be the long-awaited AAA-title that LucasArts fans have been praying for days and nights? Or would it rather put George's game studios once again to a miserable shame? While the demo will certainly not give a full answer to this, it will at least allow us a glimpse at what can be expected from the full version.

Full of anticipation and good will, I downloaded the 900 MB demo, loaded it up, and played through it a few times. One thing that I was instantly pleased with was the new LucasArts logo intro. Simply awesome--well done guys! That really left me there sitting overly impressed, and enthusiastically pleased towards the rest of the demo.

Loading up the game reveals another astonishing LucasArts logo teaser--how nice!

The Force Grip tutorial lasts about 60 seconds and teaches you about as much as the demo level does within 5 secs.

But things went bad too quickly. As I loaded up the Force Grip tutorial, one of the two levels you can play in the demo, I felt that a timeshift back to the past must have taken place. Wasn't there all this fuss about how The Force Unleashed forges technological advancements (Euphoria engine & Co) into one whole unique game? If that was the case, then it was surely invisible to my humble eyes as the game demo does certainly not look nor play like that. Among the whole demo, Vader was the only 3D model I came by which was worth looking at. And the physics are also not something entirely new: Psi-Ops already featured similar gameplay mechanisms (only called telekinesis instead of Force Grip) in 2004 which worked much better in fights against multiple enemies compared to LucasArts' game here.

Darth Vader with nice shaders highlighting his highly polished pitch-black armor of darkness. But what is this first true test that he is talking about? Bearing to play through the whole demo maybe, something that only a real Sith can possibly do?

LucasArts has promised that you will get to "kick ass with the Force." While they certainly didn't lie about that, it's also not quite the whole truth. If kicking ass with the Force is supposed to feel like tipping over a Lego figure, then they certainly were right. The infamous lightsaber, a Jedi's or Sith's most powerful weapon that is capable of slicing limbs left and right, is not fatal at all. You rather need to combo your way through the mass of enemies. While that feels at least a bit fluent, using Force Grip does certainly not. While moving objects with the mere power of the Force, you are immovable, and thus susceptible to attacks. This is especially annoying if you fight against multiple enemies. Even though you can toss one object or enemy at a time, or move it into any direction, even up- and downwards, it takes far too long to really make use of Force Grip. And it also doesn't feel right if you toss a whole TIE fighter upon your enemies and this whole thing, made of massive durasteel, vanishes into a short, unspectacular explosion! The Apprentice, the protagonist you control in the demo, can neither move while blocking with his lightsaber, nor execute any dodge maneuvers. Playing him just feels neither fluent nor impressive. Playing the demo feels like a bad videogame adaption of a Hollywood movie. I wished me ten years back--to Jedi Knight I--where the world and LucasArts were still all right.

Impaling with a lightsaber was the only force-worthy special move to keep on playing the demo. Unfortunately, you can only make use of it if you force-grip your enemy, one by one.

Shenmue was possibly the only game where Quick Time Events (QTE) really made sense. While a cinematic sequence is rendered on screen, in order to advance and be successful, you had to press certain key combinations at the right time. Now, eight years after Yu Suzuki's masterpiece, LucasArts must have thought it a most brilliant idea to include QTEs in their game as well. But Quick Time Events simply make little sense in an action sandbox game like The Force Unleashed.

A blast from the past: Quick Time Events in a Star Wars game?! Uughh, please don't ...

THE GOOD

1. Comes with a really nice, impressive, and overly joyful LucasArts logo trailer.

1. Plays like just another sub-solid videogame adaption of a Hollywood movie: inconsistent graphics, sluggish animations, dumb level structures, and sloppy controls. The only difference is that it really shouldn't be like this with a LucasArts game.
2. "Kicking ass with the Force" feels like tipping over a Lego figure.

THE FINAL WORDS

I don't know how LucasArts manages it every time to really ruin a game concept that could have worked in the end. It really can't be the mere fact that creative people that made LucasArts' adventures famous left the company eons ago.

Because, so far, the concept sounds appealing: People do want to play the baddie, the Sith, and they do want to strike enemies down with evil, devastating Force powers and an all-powerful, limb-slicing lightsaber. But not this way! The demo of The Force Unleashed still feels like just another solid SW Lego game. You don't feel truly powerful, and Force Grip is more hindrance than help. Add a dumb, straight-forward level structure to that and you can see that it can't possibly work out too well in the end for the gameplay.

The problem is that The Force Unleashed has gone terribly wrong at its core. The release date drawing closer and closer, makes it utmost unlikely that the final product will yield radical changes towards the gameplay concepts that TFU is suffering from. Whether the story in The Force Unleashed can sort things out, I doubt it. The Apprentice feels like a nobody in a Star Wars universe full of good names and characters. As well, I think it was a huge mistake by LucasArts to reveal so much of the corner plot points in their promotional videos.

Whether any great LucasArts game will ever see the light is still written in the stars. The demo, however, has already prophesied that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed isn't what gamers and Star Wars fans alike have been waiting for. But then again, it's only a demo, isn't it?