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I have always wondered just how powerful the Force could be...well, now I have a pretty good idea. 

The Force Unleashed demo came out last Thursday and I only got around to wrapping my mits around it earlier this afternoon. For 900mb, you get about...20 minutes of content. 30 if you really take your time, and 15 if you just hit the ground running. I spent the first few minutes getting the hang of the analog-based Force Grip system, the left stick moving left and right, forward and back, while the right stick moves things up and down. If you're pressing in a certain direction when you release the trigger, the held object goes flying. It's where a lot of the fun comes from in the demo. Force Grip and Force Push are the major toys here. Force Push has some really neat uses, like dramatically blowing open a blast door while sending heaps of debris into the room before the squad of rebels on the other side knows what hit them.

"But what about the Lightsaber combat?" you may be asking. Well, it certainly performs it's function. Being a Lightsaber enthusiast myself, I can say that in a game where you play a Force User, a Lightsaber is only really exciting when it's parrying against another Lightsaber. That's where the demo becomes a tease, cutting out right before your fight with the Jedi Master Khota, leaving you with only a battle against an AT-ST "Chicken" Walker to fill the void. Otherwise, you're hacking and slashing through a legion of rebels and stormtroopers (under strict orders to remove any witnesses).

If you stick to your saber, the demo's challenges get kinda dull fast. But when you're yanking Tie Fighters off their hooks in a hangar and tossing them at stormtroopers, or trying to catch one out of the air in a later section of the demo, or making them crash by hurling shit at them...that's where the fun is. The demo greatly displays the Physics/Force based fun to be had with just manipulating the environment with the Force. I'm really anxious to see what the final product has to offer.

Demo-Wise, it sells the game well. Give it a try if you haven't already.

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