Oh my. That was my first reaction upon seeing the graphics in the Nintendo DS version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Oh my. It only goes downhill from there.

It's tough to figure just what the developers were thinking with this atrocious attempt at bringing LucasArts' epic storyline and lightsaber hack-and-slash to the DS as a 3-D game. The action in the top half of the screen looks utterly terrible, with absurdly blocky characters and environments. It's hard to tell what's going on when anything is more than a few feet away from your character, at which point everything dissolves into clusters of shuffling pixels. Instead of helping, the fixed camera is more often a problem, with enemies straying off-screen to attack you from where you can't see them. The levels are often closed in by invisible walls, giving the gameplay a "rat in a maze" feel.

It's not that the Nintendo DS is incapable of 3-D action games. The DS version of Metroid demonstrated very well how it can work, and indeed it works well when you use the stylus and touch-screen as a mouse stand-in. But The Force Unleashed takes no such approach. Instead, the d-pad moves your character and the touch-screen is a control panel, with your stylus pressing buttons for particular moves.

The touch-screen is adorned with confusing icons for various moves. Tap the foot icon to jump, one of the lightsaber icons to swing and another to throw. There are a variety of glowing fist icons for Force Grabbing, Lightning, Pushing and Choking. Then there are the special powers you unlock, which require touching certain areas and then dragging the stylus to another area. The idea is that you're making a combo. With a better and more intuitive layout, this could have worked. Instead, it's contrived and needlessly difficult. You'll end up not bothering with combos most of the time because it's hard to tell if you're doing them wrong, or if you're simply out of Force juice, or both.

Instead of the quick time button-press segments you have to play to get past the cinematics in the other versions of The Force Unleashed, the Nintendo DS version has something special in store for you. And by "special," I mean "terrible". "Feel the Force" events (yep, that's what they're called) require that you drag colored Force sparklies into a moving black hole. It's as ridiculous as it sounds. I never thought I'd long for the opportunity to press X, circle, square or triangle.

The story is told in glib 2-D screenshots that at least look better than the 3-D gameplay. The basic plot involves a young boy raised by Vader as his secret apprentice. Once he's grown up, he's sent out mostly to hunt down fugitive Jedi, but he also seems to be doing a little subterfuge on Vader's behalf. Hence the opportunity to slaughter Stormtroopers left and right. The genius of the Force Unleashed storyline is that it taps into the things that made Star Wars good back when it was good: shame, betrayal, redemption, family, love, destiny and the storytelling insight to realize that Galactic politics, droids, spaceships and aliens were just a backdrop. But very little of this comes through on the Nintendo DS, which plays out like an incomplete series of comic book panels.

Unlike the other handheld version of The Force Unleashed for the PSP, there are no additional modes on the DS. You do, however, get a unique multiplayer mode that lets up to four Jedi fight each other. It only works locally, so you'll have to know four other people, each with a Nintendo DS and the misfortune to have bought a copy of this game. There's also a one-on-one duel mode that you can only win by moving a tug-of-war marker to the far side of the screen to achieve "Unleashed" mode.

The Force Unleashed goes a long way to tarnishing not just the reputation of LucasArts' Star Wars games, but also the Nintendo DS itself. With games like this, the DS continues to earn a reputation as a dumping ground for shovelware and bad game design.

This review was based on a review copy of the game provided by the publisher.