Another game in my list of “sequels that don’t live up to the tight design of the first game”. There’s a lot in this game, and it is continuing off of the excellent gameplay set by the first game, but I didn’t find the story as interesting or easy to follow. The characters are ok but veer a little into being somewhat one-note, and some of the dialogue can be annoyingly quippy, even for Star Wars. I will note there were some entertaining highlights in the dialogue and some of the encounters, which were intentionally quite funny and made me laugh. The game continues the sort of Metroid Prime-style mapping, although I found it a little harder to discern and follow, and there is a lot of trinkets to find of varying types, all of which are used for different cosmetics or upgrades. I quite honestly found the cosmetics a little overwhelming and didn’t engage with them much - I suppose I could have given Cal a dirty boy moustache and a bomber jacket but this wasn’t the main draw of the game for me. I’m not opposed to a game full of gimmick collectables (I mean, I love Assassin’s Creed) but I have trouble with them when I feel like they aren’t adding much to the game. I suppose the concept is that you’re completing tasks for your allies on Koboh, but it feels fairly tacked on and unengaging.

The game is also fairly buggy still. Part of the delay in me actually finishing the game was due to the, at the time, terrible performance and messiness. The performance mode has been fairly fixed now (mostly by fully disabling ray tracing), but there are still some game breaking bugs that more than once made me need to either restart from the nearest checkpoint or kill Cal intentionally so that he would respawn in a bug free environment. BD-1 won’t activate sometimes, I get stuck inside a fence, etc. I didn’t notice this much in Fallen Order, and I think it’s because this game tried to go a little harder and maybe wasn’t ready to do so. Falling from a large height also causes a death, but sometimes it seems like I’m falling from a vaguely inconvenient height and still die.

All of that being said, there is still much I enjoyed. The lightsaber fighting, as with the last game, is quite good and requires technique to master. I certainly got frustrated fighting some bosses and learned how to better dodge or soak attacks to avoid getting ruthlessly murdered. The depth in the lore is quite good, as is the music, which sounds ripped straight from a Star Wars movie. There is a lot of ambition in this game, even when it isn’t fully hitting. Ultimately I liked Fallen Order more as a package, but I think Respawn still gets the formula for a good Star Wars game and I am interested in playing the next one at some point.

This game really left an impact after I played the first one - the opening sequence alone got me invested and I was impressed at the improvement from 1 to 2 in basically every aspect. The visuals are better, the gameplay is for the most part better, and the plot is better.

The squad is full of very interesting characters with different backstories and motives, and even for the ones I didn’t like much I was interested in figuring out their background and doing their loyalty missions. The loyalty missions are satisfyingly varied which I appreciated as well.

Most of the missions in general are snappy and quick, making them less daunting than in the first game. After spending so much time driving the Mako around, I was thankful BioWare realized this part of the first game was super boring and made the Hammerhead missions quick and straightforward. The only missions where the driving took a long time was the DLC mission with the rogue VI, but that was ok in the grand scheme of the game.

The gameplay itself is more interesting than the first game, particularly the inability to power heal through bad tactics. I died a lot more in this game and it made me have to interface with the mechanics and specific talents more than I did before, which made me appreciate the game design and variety more than before as well. I do miss the quantity of skills I had in the first game, but I can appreciate the decision to focus more. I didn’t end up engaging with the customized armour or weapons as much, partly because the customized armor was really ugly and because there didn’t seem to be a lot of options to choose from anyhow. The planetary exploration part of the game was also more interesting, with the fuel and probe system, although by the end of the game I was pretty finished with that as well and left large areas unexplored.

The structure of the game orienting effectively around one large mission was very cool to me. The number of things that can change on the final mission is very cool and even though I had set everything up for success, I still was worried that I might have forgotten something or made a wrong turn and it kept me on edge, in a satisfying way.

The plot and dialogue as a whole was written really well - I was worried playing the first game that maybe the trilogy wouldn’t fully click with me, but after playing this second one I realized there are large differences in how the story is told that I appreciate.

My one main gripe with the game, which is small but still an issue, is that the auto-saves are bugged and it meant I had to spend extra time redoing missions at times which really threw me for a loop. If you die at the same time as a big enemy, which weirdly can happen somewhat often, the game deletes your old auto save but can’t then save your new auto save, meaning you have to reload your last full save or the very start of the mission you are on. While the missions are snappy, they can still be 30-45 minutes long and it was a real buzzkill when this happened. I got in the habit of manually saving very regularly because of this, but don’t think I should have needed to.

The dialogue trees from the first game also still, with few exceptions, encourage you to hyper focus in only one direction (Paragon or Renegade), which seems to oversimplify a lot of decision making. I found myself constantly picking the upper left or upper right options to keep my Paragon score going so that I’d have the blue options available when I needed them. I did notice a small handful of scenarios where only a blue or a red option was available, and I wish more of those were in the game to encourage some investment in both angles, and somewhat break you a little from hyper investing in one direction.

Other than those two issues, an incredibly good game that I’m impressed ran on an Xbox 360!

Finally got a chance to play this game! It’s very interesting, I played a remaster of it that was fairly recent but it was originally released in 2007. Thinking of other games released then, it was surprisingly like games that would be released recently in its general format.

The visuals are sort of ok and I can see where it has aged. The lore is neat and the overall story is decent, although a little war hero-ey which doesn’t fully jive with my energy but I respect the way to was told for the most part. The branching dialogue is neat conceptually. The Paragon and Renegade system begins to feel a little thin and it would be nice if there was more incentive to try more varied options. Sometimes the dialogue tree makes the conversation take very abrupt turns and it can feel a little rushed.

The actual gameplay is fine, the fighting is pretty good and there are different ways to attack enemies and engage with environments. I enjoyed that I could decrypt things, but the ABXY unlock sequences got repetitive over time and I would have appreciated more variety in puzzles. The game also has some whack bugs that got frustrating at times, particularly with progression or traversal.

Side quests were similar, where there was a lot of driving in the Mako to trailers and compounds that all looked identical on different planets. I think with a bit more variety I would have been more encouraged to try different things.

Generally, a solid first entry I looked forward to playing with a few faults but interesting enough to play the second game.