For those who don't know, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed bridges the events between the two Star Wars movies, Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope by putting players into the role of Starkiller, Darth Vader's secret apprentice. Starkiller is discovered as a little boy by Vader and is raised to become a Jedi hunter. The Ultimate Sith Edition includes the original game along with extra bonus campaign missions that take the story in hypothetical directions. These bonus missions imagine what might have happened if Starkiller rose up against Vader and took his place at the Emperor's side. In this alternate reality campaign, players square off against iconic Star Wars characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett. Although these mission stories will satisfy the inner Star Wars geek in many of us, one has to actually enjoy playing The Force Unleashed to fully appreciate them.

The premise behind The Force Unleashed is a pretty simple one. Players have Force abilities that rival those of Vader and Yoda, except they have all the power and none of the responsibilities. Force powers are taken to the extreme with the ability to levitate whole TIE Fighters on a whim and wreak havoc on all that have the misfortune of standing in the way. While this might sound amazing, it turns out to be a fairly bland and straightforward action game that includes plenty of platform jumping and boss battles that end with annoying quicktime event sequences. Players can get through most, if not the entire game with only a handful of powers, particularly Force Grip and Push (the ones you start the game with). In the tradition of many Star Wars action games that have come before it, The Force Unleashed features a wide variety of conveniently located cliff sides, deadly pits and chasms so that players can shove entire armies to their doom. In the opening first areas, players have to make their way through a ship, and energy fields are put up to contain the battle. All players have to do is push enemies into the shield to vaporize them, which made us wonder why we bothered to pack a lightsaber.

Eliminating enemies and completing mission objectives earns access to additional skills, Force powers, and lightsaber combos so you can take humiliating your enemies with overwhelming might to the next level. The lightsaber can also be upgraded with bonuses. Some of these powers are quite showy and impressive, although not totally necessary. However, the game's worst problem is the target locking, which targets enemies and objects that happen to be in the center of the character's view, but doesn't offer a means of manually switching between them. When battling several on screen enemies at once, things rarely involve strategically picking out the right targets to take out first. They usually come down to focusing on the one that's conveniently locked on to and moving forward.

Generally speaking, the controls are ported acceptably well to the PC, but all the quicktime events (including having to tap to get out of a saber lock) and other aspects make it clear that this game was designed with a gamepad in mind. Using a gamepad helps in many respects, but the game still performs sluggishly at times. Jumping controls are often slow to respond, causing us to repeatedly plunge to our deaths with some of the jumping puzzles. Similarly, Force powers can be slow to activate, which is a real problem, because it's hard to tell the difference between laggy controls and an enemy that's immune to certain abilities. Frankly, the whole "immune to powers" bit comes off as contrived, since this is supposed to be the Force unleashed. There are giant heavy troopers that can't be lifted, when we have it on very good authority that size matters not. Some things simply don't make any sense, like clone soldiers that survive being impaled by a lightsaber for five seconds.

Other performance issues include frequent graphics stuttering and getting stuck on (sometimes invisible) objects. Enemies would sometimes get hopelessly stuck on things too, which takes away some of the sport in finishing them off. Our system exceeds the recommended requirements, we installed the rather sizable patch, and turning down the resolution didn't help much. All we can surmise is that the Force is weak in this port.

For something that touts itself as The Force Unleashed, the game provides a pretty tame experience. On the bright side, the story is very good, and the alternate reality bonus missions should be great fun for Star Wars fans as long as they don't mind the bland and often frustrating gameplay.