I have been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

My quote for the box of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed would be “If this is the force unleashed then I think someone should put a leash on the force pretty quickly before it gets sent to the force pound. (And then put down for being a dangerous force-dog.)” George Lucas did not put this quote on the box because I only thought of it today which means that he would have to invent time travel to put it on the box and even people in Star Wars can’t do time travel. This isn’t Star Trek you know! Also George Lucas knows a lot about marketing so he probably wouldn’t put a quote on the box that would make people think the Force Unleashed was a bad game. He would have to be “the force unhinged” to do a thing like that. He would put on quotes from magazines that said things like “I like the bit with the Lightsabers” and “You get to be Darth Vader.”

The irony being that I bought an unboxed copy of the Force Unleashed from my local Blockbuster so even if George Lucas did invent time travel I would be the last man to know about it. (And probably even after he invented it he would keep bringing out new versions of time travel with better graphics and instead of Han Solo shooting a man he goes inside a fridge. Eh readers!?)

Anyway I played the Force Unleashed for a bit and it turns out it is rubbish and it also turns out that I am still sick of doing 3D combat. This was the Wii version so instead of pressing X button I was waving my hands about in order to thwack enemies with melee weapon. To be fair the Force Unleashed has new ideas about 3D combat such as instead of having a “rage” bar you have a force bar that lets you throw barrels around, but you don’t really need to throw barrels around because you can just throw the actual people around or even better you can just run up to them and hit them with your lightsaber lots of times. Yet another in a long line of games where you are given a lot of abilities but are given no reason to use them because all you have to do is hit people with your weapon over….and over…and over.

Having only played the first couple of levels before taking it back to the shop and pretending it was broken I can’t say if this game features a giant mashy hands boss – but it probably does. It certainly contains the second most common boss in all games which is the dashy sword man. Dashy sword men are bosses who are the same size as you and they dash about doing long sword combo’s that knock you over. The way to defeat them is to kind of sidestep out of the way at the last minute and then hit them in the back while they continue the dashy sword combo.  Sometimes he will do a teleport- dashy sword comb which will make him even more irritating but you can always win in the end by tediously dodging and hitting him once in the back before running away.

A lot of people seem to dislike this game because of all the stupid Star Wars things like how the main character is actually Bib Fortuna’s son or the bit where Darth Vader does a little dance. Those people are stupid though because even if this game had nothing to do with Star Wars and was called Tech Wizard 5: Tech wizardry Unleashed it would still be a very boring game that squanders the rich Tech Wizard license. Where is my Frenix Gambledor simulator?!

Overall I’m going to award the Force Unleashed a lowly Plo Koon out of a Kit Fisto and it’s only getting that because the shop didn’t have another copy so they let me swap it for Resident Evil 6.