i got halfway through chapter 3, and quit playing the game. while the presentation is immaculate, the gameplay was completely unengaging.

the shooting felt clunky, apart from the dead eye mechanic, which was fun but oversimplified shootouts to an embarrassing degree. riding your house to the waypoint, mashing the x button, while feels good for the first 5 hours of playing the game gets old super quickly.

seeing as i wasn't enjoying the gameplay whatsoever, i decided to just watch the rest of the story on youtube. and that's why as a game, this is a 3.5 for me. the story is incredible for a video game. i found myself enjoying watching the cutscenes quite a bit, coz the story is just that good.

while the animations are incredibly well done, my impatient ass got pretty tired of them early on. looting a bank with these slow ass animations is really funny, because you hear the police coming yet arthur still has a very calm animation when collecting the money. don't you think there would be a little bit of urgency in the looting at that time?

i feel like an insane person because, this is a deeply flawed game with many shortcomings, but i feel like the story and presentation distracts players from the issues. idk man, phenomenal story, but i probably wont return to this in a while.

super ambitious, very well executed, the sound design is easily the highlight of the game. gameplay wise, while the puzzles were cool for the first hour or so, they got old fairly quickly for me.

combat is pretty good, and i really like how when you're low on health your moves are actually slower and senua looks more tired. it suffers from a lot of just walking forward very slowly like many other 3D games of the 2010s, and apart from the concept, some of it feels pretty conventional at times.

apart from that, i think everyone should at least give this a go, it's definitely an experience, one that i haven't fully appreciated yet.

1,050 hours on the game and casually, it's fantastic. content wise it is insane, but competitively or anything that isn't casual feels awful. ultimate's neutral is akind to two rams running into each other mindlessly and whichever ram gets hit harder is the winner. neutral has as much depth as a fucking shallow kid pool. characters like palu are rewarded for running in with a mindless move and will get 50 percent off of it. characters like snake are in the very small minority where you have to condition your opponent and actually be clever about winning neutral. the game feels terrible to play. input lag, buffering, online, sticky platforms, it makes some inputs impossible or just really difficult to do. thanks for sora though that was cool.

if you like games that work and are playtested, this game is not for you! this is like if an amateur game dev team made sekiro with a star wars coat of paint, naughty dog scripted ass bullshit, and a checklist for every modern single player game. the story was cool, and when the combat works it feels really cool but it's rarely at it's best. enemy placement is dogshit, enemy AI and telegraphs are the worst in the industry, and the game is only challenging when it's being inconsistent and buggy. i played on jedi grandmaster, 70 percent of the encounters were genuinely unfun, and poorly designed, including the bosses. i enjoyed one lightsaber duel out of the few that were in the game. the rest ranged from absolutely horrible to not good, the last boss could've been cool but there is a certain point with a droid where the game can be all out of sync making it super impossible to not get hit. EXPLORATION IN THIS GAME IS ALSO FUCKING POINTLESS. YOU EARN NOTHING FOR EXPLORING THESE PRETTY OKAY DESIGNED LEVELS. THE MAPS ARE SPRAWLING AND INTERESTING VISUALLY (FOR THE MOST PART) AND LOOP IN ON ITSELF LIKE FROM SOFT LEVELS. METROIDVANIA ELEMENTS ARE USED WELL TOO. BUT THE REWARDS AND ITEMS YOU COLLECT ARE SO FUCKING POINTLESS IT MAKES EXPLORING FEEL LIKE A CHORE ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GAME IS SO BUGGY AND INCONSISTENT. i experienced two crashes out of my 20 hour playthrough, only really towards the end of the game did they occur. (SPOILER) order 66 was cool to witness, young cal VA or whatever they did with his voice was LAUGHABLE but besides that the acting was really great, and i loved the presentation apart from the cutscene to gameplay animation jerks, and the animation in general being a bit wonky at times, or outright just glitching and breaking. there is stuff i like about this derivative, buggy, shit show, but there's probably more stuff that i hate about it. if this wasn't a star wars game it would probably be like a 3/10 but i enjoyed the star wars STUFF and the combat when it works, is really fun. so

FINAL SCORE: 5/10