“You were destined to destroy me. Do it. Give in to your hatred!”

If Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had managed to stretch the campy rampage of its prologue out to a full-length game, it might have been a hack ‘n’ slash classic. Unfortunately, after only a few moments playing as Darth Vader, calmly waltzing around Kashyyyk, tossing Wookiees off of bridges with the Force, the player assumes the role of Starkiller, the orphaned son of the fugitive Jedi that Vader executed in the opening sequence. Something of a secret apprentice, Starkiller is much nimbler than Vader, and actually quite a bit of fun to control when everything comes together. The problem is that everything comes together on exceedingly rare occasions.

It’s plagued not only by unpolished gameplay (uncooperative camera, falling through the floor, stuck in walls), rudimentary level design, unsatisfying platforming, quick-time boss fights, and other markers of dispassionate game development, but also a number of odd design choices that seem included exclusively to annoy the player. Chief among these are the broken one-on-one combat system that, in an arbitrary manner, changes attack strengths, prevents you from avoiding or blocking enemy attacks, and renders your opponent impervious to yours. This unbalanced implementation of Starkiller’s abilities carries over into the general platforming sections, where individual stormtroopers will provide impossibly stout resistance as the game seeks to curtail your burgeoning powers. If the Force is truly unleashed when you play as Vader, it is decidedly leashed the further the player progresses as Starkiller. Even worse, the Force targeting system—which, I should stress, is extremely satisfying to use when it works as intended—is quite unwieldy. All of this means that a fairly solid physics engine goes to waste on a Star Wars game that, outside of its false promise prologue, fails to convey the awesome powers at the character’s disposal. Don’t get me wrong, the lightsaber combos and Force powers look the part with a bunch of slick animations, but actually using them in a coherent manner is a fool’s errand. And none of it really matters anyway because the game mostly boils down to non-strategic button-mashing and elementary puzzles.

But of course, The Force Unleashed is not just an action-adventure game—it’s another piece in the Star Wars puzzle (pretty sure it’s officially non-canon, but who really cares at this point); a chance to draw on the expansive lore, aesthetics, and storylines that have captivated so many. After a dozen or so hours of finely-presented cutscenes, the story’s apogee remains the opening cutscene which sees the toddling Starkiller use latent Force powers to wrest Vader’s lightsaber from his grasp. Even so, it provides a scrumptious pulp space opera cheeseburger and milkshake full of twists and turns as it plays with the same themes that made the older material so enjoyable, harkening back to the days when George Lucas was considered a masterful storyteller and the franchise wasn’t kept chugging along exclusively to sell nostalgia. It may be a lowbrow rehash shoehorned into the larger story, but the writers clearly understood the original Star Wars films in a way the game designers did not.

Hey, at the very least, this is a game where you can throw stormtroopers at TIE Fighters. Or throw TIE Fighters at stormtroopers. Every Star Wars fan needs to scratch that itch at some point, right? But if you’re lukewarm on the franchise and don’t necessary need backstories of backstories all filled in for you, there are far better ways to spend your valuable time.