Release: 2019
Developer: Respawn Entertainment
Publisher: EA Games
Genre: Third person, Action, Metroidvania?
Gameplay Stats: 27 hours, 90% log completion, all but 3 chests, all secrets
Edit 8/26/20: EA added achievements to Steam! I got 26/39 on this play through
My wife and I have been working our way through the Star Wars movies over the past few months, so I've been getting a little more into the series. I heard good things about this game and had a particular itch for more Star Wars, so I decided to jump into this game when it was on sale!
Visuals: This game looks pretty good! Not the prettiest game I've played, but I have to praise the visual style of the game. Everything feels like it belongs in the Star Wars universe. The game strikes kind of an odd balance between cell shaded and realistic. The faces are definitely motion captured from real people, but I think the rest of the game is a bit more stylistically presented. I think it was a nice touch to present the game in this style to be honest. It kind of matches the way that the movies are captured, with a large amount of special effects to make everything look that much nicer. Some of the facial expressions looked a little stiff, but overall it was a very strong presentation.
Audio: They took a lot of inspiration from John William's masterpieces for the music in this game and it was a wonderful idea for the sound direction. The music here was very nice. I didn't play the game with any other audio, even when I was revisiting areas trying to collect more of the collectibles and I think that's a big compliment in 2020. They borrowed many of the sound effects from the movies which really added to the authenticity of the game world. The enemies/monsters all sounded good, I don't think anything really pulled me out of the game world. The voice acting was also nice! Nothing to complain about here.
Plot: I don't know enough about the Star Wars universe to really be able to comment on how this story fits into the universe. No idea if this game is considered cannon or fan-fiction. Those caveats out of the way, I thought the plot here was pretty good. It felt like a bit of a Star Wars story, a relatively simple tale with some added flair in the presentation. I think my only real gripe here is that the character you make friends with in the end of the game ends up being very important, but she is in the game for such a short amount of time it almost felt like a Deus Ex Machina. She didn't have enough development or personality. She also didn't really add anything to the gameplay, which felt like a missed opportunity, but I digress. Learning more about our main three characters was very nice over the course of the story. I liked the characters and the ways that they interacted felt real, they were that well written. Also, BD-1 is really cute.
Gameplay: I'm actually surprised that this game wasn't compared to Sekiro in any of the reviews that I read about it. Both featured parry-focused swordplay as the main combat mechanic and it was done well/similarly in both games. The big difference here would be the length of the games and the fantasy/sci-fi settings. This game also featured more revisiting locales than Sekiro, but also less story/NPCs. This game features an upgrade system pretty similar to what Sekiro had, but it feels a little milquetoast in this game. The upgrades and new moves weren't very meaningful. That being said, the basic light saber combat is extremely fun and doesn't really need anything added to it.
Overall, I really liked this game! It was definitely a bit shorter than I thought it would be, but what is there is extremely polished. This game is a very easy recommendation from me. [9/10]
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