I watched gameplay footage from people who seemed to be less biased then the MSM or the haters. They had either not given a rating or were mostly okay with the game being as mediocre as these games can get.
Some of the things I noticed were:
- the hate on the graphics looks unwarranted. It looks perfectly fine and even stunning on some rare occasions
- was the main character uglified for the modern day audience? sure, she was. It's bad. Do I care? Nope. You'll be looking at her back 98% of the time, when it comes to the gameplay it doesn't really matter.
- the merchandizing insert, aka your companion plushie, is cute and a fun touch
- you get to ride on the endor style bikes, and crash. A LOT! The pre-animd crash looks worse then ewhat GTA4 had though, so not really a positive there...
and that's about all the slightly good things I can say. Now for the not that great:
- looking at the gameplay, the world, the thing as a whole, it teeters on the edge of feeling like a Star Wars world but I couldn't shake the feeling that it's sci-fi themed modded Assassins Creed. Slapping a couple of stormtroopers into the middle of a generic sci-fi spaceport doesn't turn it into SW. The SW elements felt out of place just enough to not click for me.
- the AI is as dumb as it looks in the viral hate clips. This game is probably meant to be played slowly, acting like we're playing an old AssCreed game where you couldn't just run around and GTA the whole town. It doesn't work in this setting since you have an infinite ammo blaster on you at all times that can seemingly kill every single thing in the game, and if someone gets too close you can one-button kill them with zero effort, or sick your pet on them and then kill them with a press.
- because of the above, there is zero reason to play this game as it was "meant" to played, slow and methodically. The AI doesn't really support it, it's as dumb as they come. Shooting one from a pair of guards facing the same direction won't alert the second one standing next to his friend that just dropped dead. Other times they raise the alarm and spot you through concrete walls for no reason. Just like they did in the last asscreeds. Again, a reskin.
- haven't seen much of the story playing out but the little I saw was generic fetch quests that you were supposed to complete silently. One of the players decided to go the TEST kind of silent, murdering every single non-civilian until they stopped coming. This included about 3 settlements/bases, and an imperial starbase. Literally hundreds of kills, on the hardest difficulty. He did die a couple times but only lost so little progress it didn't matter. There were no consequences to this. Zero.
- the "full of activities" you can do on planets is the usual ubi grindfest. Capture outpost, free setllemnts, climb towers, find 255 thingamajigs to get a hat... literally the same inconsequential as in every other ubi open world.
- ship flight is the same as in Starfailed, you launch into space and pass through a thick layer of clouds as the loading screen, then point and click your way to victory. It's there, but it's no Black Flag ship combat.
- I'm guessing there is crafting and upgrades, I haven't seen any, at least nothing that caught my eye enough for me to remember.
All in all, this looks and feels like a reskinned version of any recent asscreed game, without tha charm of an exotic locale or the mystery of history. The reason I'm not comparing it to Far Cry is because those had compelling villains at least, and decent gunplay, both of which this game seemingly lacks, but I could be way off on the villain thing as I haven't even seen a proper villain yet. Every NPC I've seen is just either a quest giver or there to kill you, or generic background clutter.
It's a solid 5/10 reskinned Ubislop game. If you like the gameplay in those, I think you will like this as well. If you are just here for the Warring of the Stars, I'd give it a skip until it's on a steep sale around Christmas time. I know I will, unless it's out on the xbox pc pass. Not sure I can be bothered to waste the 100gig or so space on this, but I might.
