Preview by: Justin Amirkhani

When I first saw Kinect Star Wars on the stage of E3 2010, I immediately sensed a disturbance in the Force. The game looked like a forced, on-rails experience that had no business being tied to the seminal franchise of my childhood. When I saw it on stage at E3 2011 and heard the presenter shout “Lightsaber, on!” my fear turned to anger and as I stepped into a Kinect Pod on the floor and gave it a go myself that anger quickly turned to suffering.

Flash forward to last week where a brand new build was presented to media. Sure, the game still looks like that abhorrent Clone Wars mess, reeks of the prequels and functions much in the same way as my previous demos, but the game feels a lot more finely tuned. Where I would be taking exaggerated swings to have any effect in my first demo, my more recent play was much closer to 1:1 motion than before—a critical element to the success or failure of this game. My lightsaber still lagged milliseconds behind my intention, but overall it was much more accurate.

Precision is fine and dandy, but what struck me most about this demonstration wasn’t how much easier it was to hit what I wanted, it was that I got to watch kids play the game. E3 isn’t for kids, and therefore not a great place to sample kids games. At the event I attended late last week, children were invited to sample the games, Kinect Star Wars included. I sat back and watched them jump around, swing their imaginary lightsabers and generally act like regular kids pretending to be Jedi. Sure, they weren’t doing anything different from the other times they play with their imagination but here they could see something take hold of those desires and react to them. This is really what Kinect Star Wars is all about.

Part of the new build included a section that let the kids play as a Rancor and stomp through buildings and squish stuff with their feet. When I tried it, it felt impossible to calculate any sort of precision – no way to make the game function optimally. When the kids tried it, they didn’t really care; they were wrapped in the illusion of being a giant monster. The kids weren’t thinking about high scores, quick level progression, or even how silly they looked strutting around a demo room with dozens of people watching. They cut loose and had fun the way only kids could, and I was a little jealous of them for it.

As the kids did spin-moves and jumped around like little maniacs it became very clear to me that no matter how much I loved the Star Wars franchise there would never be an experience good enough to get me that excited—Kinect or not. This is a game meant for children and it is a game that will be loved by children. You’ll probably have an absolutely awful time playing it, but in all honesty you were probably never intended to enjoy it in the first place. Star Wars Kinect is going to make a lot of little boys and girls really happy when it ships next year, and I’m okay sharing the best series of my childhood with theirs – even if the originals were way better.