My favorite awesome trend/marketing gimmick that newfangled next-gen systems have brought us: downloadable, free game demos. Last night, LucasArts released their demo for The Force Unleashed on PSN and XBox Live.

The demo offers a brief tutorial on how to control your Force Grip — i.e., the ability to levitate and throw practically anything in the game — and a brief level of you versus everyone as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice (yawn — seriously, why does every new Star Wars story involve someone’s “secret apprentice”?). Players can use Force Lightning, Force Push, their lightsaber, the aforementioned Force Grip, or combine any and all of these into combos. In many ways, this is God of War with a lighsaber, from the combos to the timed button presses for the boss battle (an AT-ST!), but whatever; the real surprise is actually how much fun this thing is and how well it plays.

For the first time in ages, LucasArts seems to have delivered a game with truly intuitive controls and collision detection. See that droid in front of you? Want to throw him out the window and into space? You can. Want to slice that stormtrooper with your saber, and finish him off with a Force Push through a door? You can. Want to drop that TIE fighter on a swarm of troops below? You can do that too. It all works insanely easy and looks amazing.

So yeah, Star Wars hasn’t been fun in awhile. But this actually looks very promising. The Force Unleashed comes out for seemingly every game system in the known universe on September 16th.

Video Games