I’ll be honest. I expected to hate Kinect Star Wars. Everything about it felt wrong, from the moment we saw it teased at E3 in 2010. First, it’s set in the Clone Wars era. I’m not a big fan of the Clone Wars era, on account of the horrible, horrible movies, the wooden characters and the atrociously bad story telling.

Second, every visual suggested Kinect Star Wars would be an on rails game. After years of Star Wars games, from Dark Forces to Force Unleashed and even the LEGO games giving you the freedom to run and and explore the environment, it’s a perplexing question to ask if gamers are willing to trade off that freedom for the pretense of swinging a virtual lightsaber.

The single level on display  at E3, following a brief tutorial, featured a nameless young Jedi and Jedi Master Kit Fisto (the green octopus headed guy from the prequels). It appears that Separatist droids have taken over the Cloud City on Bespin, familiar from Empire Strikes Back, and it’s up to the intrepid heroes to use the Force to repel the invaders.

The Kinect controls worked as advertised, letting you slash and deflect with the lightsaber or Force grab enemies and objects and toss them around. The biggest drawback though is that you can’t actually move freely in the game. Instead, as seen in the demo level, you appear to be limited to lunging from point to point, creating an experience that’s more 1990′s arcade than 2011 home console. In fact, if you remember the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade machine in the mid nineties, you may have a sense of deja vu, as this feels like a spiritual successor to that title, sans joystick.

Unfortunately, that was about it for information on the game, so there’s nothing available on the story, whether the game will span more than the Clone Wars era, or whether you’ll be a Jedi in every level. The preview video shown at the Microsoft Press Conference did show flight sequences, but could have easily been a cinematic rather than an actual level. The official website through does speak of Jedi training, pod racing, piloting iconic ships and speeder bikes, and promises much more.

If the game can deliver on a greater variety of gameplay that just the point-to-point lightsaber duels, that will definitely be a positive thing, and the more it can take advantage of the large Star Wars universe, the better. It’s good to see that, despite my reservations about the limits of the controls, that it does feel rather fun to play. This isn’t going to be Force Unleashed, or anything in a core gaming vein, but the sheer weight of the Star Wars brand, and the relative novelty of Kinect should still be enough to put this into a lot of homes this Christmas season.