All those Xbox 360 owners who were left unsatisfied by Lucasarts recent big screen Star Wars endeavour will be glad to know that the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed hit Xbox Live yesterday–and I’m glad to tell you that there are no cross-dressing Huts in sight.

While the demo is unbearably short (I’m not sure who decided 20 minutes would be long enough), it goes a nice cross-section of what the game entails. You play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, who is sent on his first real mission: kill a Jedi Master who is currently on a Star Ship. Since Vader doesn’t want the emporror knowing of your existence, you must kill everyone on board, including Imperial soldiers.

You only get a limited variety of moves in the demo, but what skills you do have give will give you a good idea of the kind of carnage you can create. Along with scorching dudes with your lightsabre, you also have Force Push, Force Lightning, and Force Pull at your disposal

The last of those abilities is both the most fun and the most frustrating. On the one hand, you can move just about anything in the environment around, and there’s nothing quite like pulling a Tie Fighter off its perch and flinging it as a single, sad Storm Trooper. On the other hand, it doesn’t really control as tight as it should. You can force pull any targeted item by holding down the right trigger, and moving the object around is done with either the left trigger (horizontally) or the right trigger (vertically). If you’re just throwing the object (push the left stick in the direction of your target and let go of the right trigger), it can be easy, but actually dragging objects around is slow, and cumbersome, and doesn’t allow for much accuracy.

The rest of the moves only require you to be able to push down one of the face buttons, which I’m hoping you can all handle. Individually, Force Push and Force Lightning aren’t all that usefull in the demo, since they aren’t leveled up. Combined with the Lightsabre attacks, however, they are much more potent, and allow for a very nice variety of moves to use given the limited amount of them you have. The camera, on the other hand, is definitely not your friend in this game. It’s set very close to your character, but not locked behind him, so you’ll find yourself constantly underfire from areas you should be able to see, but can’t. You can center it behind you by clicking the right stick, but there isn’t always time for it. It’s certainly something I could see becoming a problem later in the game.

Graphically, the level is pretty impressive, even if it is your average starship. Considering the sheer number of physical objects moving and exploding and shooting at once, it’s impressive as hell that the frame rate never really dips too much. The lighting and textures all look good, but I really wish they had chosen a level that showed off the art design a little. Fact is, starships all look generic, so I couldn’t really get a sense of how the other levels might look–though a new trailer at the end of the demo shows some nice diversity.

The only real beef I had with the demo, besides the length, is that there’s only really one moment that presents any idea of a challenge. While I won’t spoil it, since it was a nice surprise, it doesn’t really last all that long. For most of the demo you’re pretty much invincible, something I hope changes as the game goes on. I mean, sure, it’s cool to be a badass unstoppable Sith, but that wears off real fucking fast.

Judging from this demo, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is shaping up to be a fun ride, though an unintelligent camera and some sticky force power controls may hold it back from being excellent.

–Ramin Ostad