Man I had a blast playing this game. I loved the moment to moment of it, loved the traversal mechanics, loved doubling back to find extra things with new upgrades. BD-1 rocks. The lightsaber combat rocks. For me each component works.

It is definitely lacking in depth and diversity of content. It needs more enemy types, more interesting side content, better collectibles to find. The story also doesn't nail every beat, but it works fine.

I love this game though.

After years of looking at the title from afar, I finally jumped on it during a sale. Star Wars but make it Sekiro was how the developers talked about this game[www.pcgamesn.com] when announced, but with its own spin and a brand new Star Wars story.
The game delivers on all these points while being a breath of fresh air in the Star Wars gaming franchise that was being milked with low-effort multiplayer games, and was recently forever scarred by the comments of EA for Battlefront 2.

While the game is a good product, when I started it I was more positive about it especially because when comparing it to many AAA games, I liked that this title didn’t have a thousand different filler activities or a map with hundreds of landmarks to explore just for the sake of it. It felt like a throwback to old Prince of Persia titles with solid gameplay and combat, a nice story, and a lot of replayability.
Going forward, I wasn’t thrilled about the first map already having Metroidvania-like exploration elements that require movement abilities that with hindsight I now know are unlocked almost at the end of the game. This only encourages the player to rush through the game’s story and then spend the next dozens of hours collecting everything you couldn't before. I don't dislike it, but I also wished it was a less steep curve.

The combat system is where the game shines, but also starts to show its weaknesses. The Sekiro-like combat is ideally perfect for a Star Wars game. This implementation, however, is nowhere near as polished and clean as Sekiro's, instead it's much harder to read enemy movements, with very tight windows and fewer ideas when approaching combat. This considering Sekiro has also more bosses while keeping the combat fresh all the way to the end, SW:JFO falls shortly and sadly starts re-using enemies quite fast, especially with mini-bosses.

In spite of that, my biggest gripe with the title was that the more I progressed, the more I started getting the feeling the game was becoming less polished.

The whole late-game abilities, maps, and especially underwater sections seem more of a last-minute addition than something that was properly planned from the beginning, I'll give some examples.

Something that caught my eye was when I unlocked the ability to swim underwater, and even though Cal – the main protagonist – uses a respirator to breathe underwater, which keeps his mouth busy using it, he can start talking. I thought it might be another Force-shenanigan, but this is undoubtedly unintended behavior because when jumping into the water, during any dialogue, he stops abruptly and starts back when you get out of it. I did not play this game at lunch but, instead, at its end-of-life support when EA finally decided to remove Denuvo which was causing performance issues for me. The fact that such a small bug wasn't fixed years after launch was a bit concerning.

Additionally, when underwater, to make things more interesting besides new paths and secrets in the maps, there is some loot around on the water floor. When opening any chest in the game, the little robot companion, BD-1, goes in it, makes a mess, shakes the chest back and forth, and then comes out with the loot for you. This happens underwater as well when opening a chest, except BD1 never leaves your shoulder, but still, the chest rocks back and forth as if it'd be inside.
Although redundant, I'll add that when opening loot underwater, Cal comments on the loot he gets, while busy underwater breathing. The mysteries of the force...

To provide other examples, the hair of Cal is highlighted so much so that he has an idle animation passing his hands through them, and the hair physics are great, but when swimming they look as if he has a bald patch. It shows the weakness of how they designed the hairstyle, with lots of locks on the front, but nothing on the back since the longer hairs would be falling there covering it. I don’t think Respawn would want Cal to look like he's balding, and especially would not include BD-1 shining a light on his scalp every time the player swims as it is in the final product.

The more powers you unlock the more the game struggles to interpolate different animations in between each other, which is weird from a AAA game that came out that same period as Marvel Spiderman on PS4, a master at that while having double the movement abilities and animations. The worst offender is the double jump, which often bugs out the animations when trying to grab and climb ledges. The game uses the same button for jump, climb when attached to a ledge, or double jump, and instead of grabbing the ledge, he does the double jump spin on it.

Should these seem like small complaints, let me provide a better one.
Around 90% I got a game-breaking bug triggered by a cutscene that would lock me underwater and under the graphics collisions. No way to escape it or avoid it.
Solution? I restarted the game 12 times until it didn’t miraculously happen.
The last time I saw anything this bad was during the launch week of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and it was fixed shortly after, yet this AAA could not get it sorted after all these years.

When I bought this game a year ago and tried to play it, it was impossible to get past a few seconds of gameplay without traversal stutters, which were not uncommon in Unreal Engine games, worsened by Denuvo. While the developers have not optimized the game further and stutters are still there, on the same hardware, at least the game doesn't completely freeze down to a standstill as it used to.
My final vote would have been upped by a +1 for removing Denuvo which also translates to improved performances, but hindsight makes me not to, more on that shortly.
The game still stutters sometimes on 4-core CPUs, but it’s nowhere near as bad as when the game had Denuvo.

I appreciate this game for trying something new in a stale gaming franchise, and I'm happy they had commercial success to fund and justify a sequel while under a company that believes single players are dead. I'll lo̶o̶k̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶w̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶e̶q̶u̶e̶l̶ ̶h̶o̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶’̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶s̶h̶e̶d̶ avoid the sequel like the plague since it looks like Respawn double down on the disgusting PC port. As of when I review my review, according to the latest Digital Foundry video on the subject, the sequel has not improved at all in the 7 months since the release.
From frame pacing issues to traversal stutters, it looks like Respawn hasn't learned either how to keep the game in the oven a bit longer nor to optimize better in Unreal Engine.

5/10

A única coisa que salvou dessa era de Star Wars da EA. Foi um dos jogos que mais me surpreendeu em 2019, tava esperando uma cópia genérica de Uncharted e recebi um jogo que pelo menos tentava fazer algo diferente nesse universo Star Wars da EA, com elementos de souls e metroidvania.

A historia é simples mas efetiva, um "vá do A ao B e do B pro C", sem muito twist, a não ser no final INCRIVEL que é um grande fã service bem-feito, mas antes assim do que algo forçado como Rise of Skywalker, o protagonista é convincente em seus motivos e os secundários são bem divertidos e cativantes.

O combate do jogo é bem divertido no início quando vc ta fraco e aprendendo o jeito, o desafio entregue é justo e tem uma grande pitada de Souls, mas depois de um certo tempo ele fica muito fácil e repetitivo, falta variedade. As boss battles tbm são fracas, o level design das "arenas" são terríveis pra movimentação, e os problemas técnicos do jogo tbm não ajudam em nada essa parte.

O jogo é bonito, a ambientação dos planetas é muito bem-feita e detalhada, uma pena os momentos de exploração serem fracos, o backtracking que ele tenta te forçar a fazer é horrível, mas até que eu gosto dos puzzles.

Respawn salvou a EA. Se não tivesse esse jogo eles teriam gastado milhões pra nada. Partiu Jedi Survivior.

A fairly solid game that's brought down a bit by some slower "roaming around trying to find out what to do next" moments and also being a star wars game.

Enjoyed the gameplay mainly, the last boss fight is too close to dark souls in that it tries my patience with the expectation of constant perfect blocks and timing. Also the combat barely functions with more than about 3 enemies and everybody having at least one unblockable attack.

I liked the characters a lot, my main issue with the story is that the main movies are written in stone. As such I know that these characters can't actually save the galaxy because the movies have to happen and the owners of the ip are too tightfisted to let this be its own alternate timeline thing.

Also just a very flawed understanding of what those first 3 movies were doing, probably due to worry about my least favorite thing in star wars "the cinematic universe." The light and dark side are set in stone. This series still has to drag all the prequel baggage with it. There's no iffyness to it. You either are a monk or you go full crazy murder man. Can't have any questioning that being a pious monk that pushes anything worldly away is maybe not the best way to be balanced.

7/10