I had been looking forward to playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed with some relish, and after sitting down and popping it in my Xbox 360, I was pleased with many aspects of the game yet also disappointed with some minor details that I think could have easily been fixed or altered. But overall, I enjoyed it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, The Force Unleashed chronicles the tale of an apprentice to Darth Vader during Vader’s slow rise in the dark side and hopes to supplant the emperor. Vader decides that the perfect distraction for the imperial spy network would to be to have his silent partner — in this case, you — form a rebellion. As the Empire chases the rebels, the emperor would be blind to your gradual studying until you can overthrow him and lead the galaxy under Vader.

I immediately liked the angle of the plot. Specifically, I liked being able to use dark-side powers to do good things. I loathe the Star Wars prequel movies, mainly because of how they dealt with the Force. I could never get over the fact that killing people with a lightsaber was OK but killing with the Force was evil. And you could use the Force to “push” someone to their death in hot lava, but using it to choke someone to death was evil.

In this game, there are no such pretenses. Using Force lightening, crushing someone’s windpipe with the Force or using the Force to fling someone from a balcony to their death is all in a day’s work for the greater good of forming the fake rebellion. You’re free to do all the things you wanted to do as a Jedi but couldn’t because of the inherent “evil” quality. In The Force Unleashed, you’ll use every tool necessary to get the job done.

As the plot unfolds, your character will end up developing a burgeoning love interest with his pilot, be forced to fight other Jedi and Sith, and you as a player can play as different characters, such as Vader himself, which was fun, if you can get to the end of the game (which I did in about three days; sorry, kids, this isn’t a complicated or long quest).

Along with the plot of the story, my next source of pleasure was the method of lightsaber combat. The nuances of the combat were (for the most part) as if the control pad was an extension of the tip of the blade. Every cut of the blade, every thrust, every parry felt like the blade itself was moved exactly where my thumb indicated.

I really hate button mashing games, when you have to remember combos and remember that if you want to make a strike then XXYX is the strike for you, but if you want to make a parry it’s XXAX. It’s confusing and frustrating, and this was a lot easier to master.

The Force Unleashed had a lot of the aforementioned button mashing. You constantly had to remember certain codes and patterns if you wanted to do the really spiffy combat moves. But if you’re a simple guy like me, who likes things a little more basic, you can move through the levels with a few basic moves, and the level of finesse is entirely up to you. You don’t NEED to remember codes if you don’t want to, and in fact, the few times that you are required to use codes to defeat bosses for the great cinematic closure, the game pauses slightly and shows on the screen exactly what button you need to push. This presumably prevents players from just hacking out the same button over and over until the bad guys are dead, but you clearly don’t need to remember the buttons because the game literally shows you.

Now, as a diehard Star Wars fan, I’m a bit of an epicure of the genre, and there were several issues in this game that I need to bring up because they rubbed me the wrong.

First, the Star Wars universe is so vast and diverse that is almost impossible to classify cannon unless you go with just the core movies (and even then, is that the original release of the first three movies or the special editions of said movies in which Greedo shoots first and Jabba looks like a grainy PhotoShop rendering ... grr, don’t get me started). But the game deviates from the core movies and seems to link with books and stories that may or may not support the idea. For example, in The Force Unleashed, both the Rancor and the Sarlaacc monsters were from planets other than Tatooine.

OK, I can see Jabba importing some big monster to kill people in his pit of death, but how the hell did the Sarlaac monster get out into desert by itself? Are we expected to believe a massive meat-eating plant could be transported from a tropical jungle world with tons of water then live and thrive in the middle of the Dune Sea (yeah, I know; The Comic Book Guy must be spinning in his grave). But do you see my point? If you’re going to immerse me in a universe that I know and love, you have to make it so that I feel like I am part of that universe. Otherwise, why not just make a game and call it “Guy with red lightsaber and magic powers kills the bad guys” or something like that.

Star Wars games need to make me feel like I am playing Star Wars. The Force Unleashed did a pretty good job of that, except when it took the game in wildly different directions from the movies and the books (or at least, the ones I’ve read), and made me say to myself “this is a little too far-fetched, even for the genre.” Like, say, destroying an entire Star Destroyer with just your Force skills?

Yeah ... size matters not, we get it. But not in all cases. See, the final insult was that with our chum the hot pilot, apparently size plays a very important role — above her hips and below her neck.

Look, like most stereotypical videogame players of the male gender, I have no problem at looking at hot, digitally rendered, scantily clad chicks. But (again, that epicure factor kicking in) it has to be in a realistic content. Having a female officer in the Imperial Navy seemed odd, as we never see a female officer in the chauvinistic, human, white male only Empire in any of the movies (clearly a metaphor aligning the fascist Empire to other fascist governments in the past, I assumed). But I’ll allow for a female officer in the game despite the fact that it breaks the metaphor, because why the hell not?

But give her a standard Imperial uniform, for God’s sake! I like space jugs as much as the next dork out there, but I want to see my imperial officers wearing their dress black uniforms buttoned to the collar, because that’s the way you wear your uniform. This whole business of having the chick wearing her uniform opened real wide at the neck so that we could see all the way down her cleavage was even harder for me to swallow than Wookies calmly sitting back and being allowed to be taken as slaves.

You want a hot chick running around with plenty of ample cleavage to attract the teenage boys who were not excited enough to pick up just a Star Wars game without some sex appeal, fine. But just keep it in context. Strip her down to Leia’s gold bikini because she likes the outfit if you want to, but only on her down time, not on Imperial missions.

The thing is, this game really did have a pretty decent sense of Star Wars graphics, otherwise. For example, Bail Organa looked just like Jimmy Smits, and the Emperor looked just like the Emperor. I think the game played a lot with the ideas of customization with the graphics, as it gave the player the option of choosing what “costume” they wanted in the mission or what color lightsaber crystal they wanted to use for their blade.

Of course, even as the costume you choose makes you look cool in different ways (and has no actual purpose in the game), that same problem happened with lightsabers. In Star Wars cannon, for example, different lightsaber crystals have different strengths. Blue is typically the densest so it is poor for cutting but good for blocking. Red crystals are the thinnest and so excellent for cutting and damaging but poor for blocking things like blaster bolts. And green is somewhere in between. (Which is why typically beginner Jedi and padawan have blue, for defense, Sith — who want to just kill you — use red, and Jedi masters use green.)

Knowing this, and seeing the variances in the blades made me excited to see how they would operate on screen. I didn’t except much of a change, but sadly, there seemed to be no change, except that things looked cool. Sure, the graphics are nice, sure they’re pretty, but in the end, they didn’t quite bridge the gap between the reality of Star Wars and just looking nice. Again, seeing a hot Imperial in a low-cut uniform looks nice, but it departs from cannon. Different-colored lightsabers that do the same thing is a departure from cannon.

Those few minor departures from the feel was really my only big complaint about the game, though. I liked the plot, the story was interesting and fun, the action intense and intriguing, and the characters fairly cool. But please keep in mind that when I am playing a game in specific universe that I am kept in that universe and not ripped rudely away by people who forget the nuances that sold me on it to begin with.

If you’re a fan of Star Wars, or interested in a unique twist on “shooter” games, I’d recommend The Force Unleashed. Just know going in that it departs slightly from the standard universe and uses a more videogame style than they could have opted for. And considering how long it took me to beat the game, unless you're positive you'd replay it, I'd say this is a rental.

That said, May the Force be With You!