There are few things as depressing as watching Star Wars stumbling forward, each new cash-in another low for the series, every new installment a shadow of what has gone before. It’s got so bad in recent years that you almost pine for the days of Jar Jar Binks. Almost.

But here’s The Force Unleashed, the first Star Wars game for years that isn’t a movie tie-in, or a sequel to an ageing series. You can’t knock the ambition behind it: LucasArts has invested in some of the greatest technology of this generation. NaturalMotion’s Euphoria, Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter and the Havok physics middleware are combined with the company’s own proprietary Ronin engine – all in the service of spectacular twisting of metal, salad-tossing of stormtroopers, and the odd environmental puzzle. LucasArts and Industrial Light And Magic are handling the cinematic side, George Lucas himself has added his touch to the script, and when you press start for the first time the John Williams score booms out of your speakers. Surely, you think, this time they’ve got it right.



Wrong. But The Force Unleashed is by no means a bad game – it’s simply one that constantly makes you think of what a brilliant experience it could have been. The opening – in which you march Darth Vader through ranks of wookies, using Force-powered pushing and pulling to collapse the wooden architecture of Kashykk upon its residents, before the section ends with grandly staged cinematic flair – sets the scene in more ways than one. Because, weirdly, it’s not very much fun.

Everything crumbles and bends like it should, wookies are sent flying with a wave of your hand and fall after a single Lightsaber swing, while old deathmask has all the swagger you’d expect from a genocidal Force-pusher. Then it all happens again with the next four or five enemies, then again and again. If you take a player to the extremes of in-game power, giving them the equivalent of a god mode against standard enemies, how can that be turned into something more engaging than a temporary plaything? Even in this first section, it’s clear what The Force Unleashed’s biggest problem will be: coming up with a challenge that isn’t either going through the motions or simply unfair.