This is mindlessly pleasant for broad sections and competently includes familiar feeling Star Wars sights and sounds as well as a glutted mishmash of open-world action RPG systems you’ve seen in better games before. It’s a decent enough version of this sort of big budget IP-laden game, but it really pales in comparison to Spider-man 2 and it’s a shame I played that immediately before this.
And wow does it need to be edited down to about half its size (something it could learn from Spidey 2). There’s so many little systems and collectibles that feels included for reasons that aren’t “they’re consistently fun and fresh to complete.” There are so many boring collectibles dotted around in obvious and stupid locations; oh no, a T-branch in a hallway…guess it’s time to figure out which way is the advancing path so I can run to the end of the other path first to collect a shiny bit of nothing!
This is also a shockingly rough game technically (on PS5, not even the poorly regarded PC version). It hurts immersion so much to see the graphics oftentimes quickly painting themselves into place when coming out of the map+menu screens, to say nothing of how many times I got stuck in or under level geometry glitches, and ran into several occurrences where the textures seemingly all got dumped and left me in a black wire-framed void for several seconds. Worse than graphics stuff are the narrow strictures on intended traversal in a game that asks you to explore its environment using an air dash and double jump and gliders. Oops, you managed to get to a ledge for a collectible we didn’t intend on yet and you haven’t stopped at a save point in a while? Well, guess who’s stuck until they kill themselves from fall damage and lose progress! I’m not the sort of player who thinks about or attempts sequence breaking, and I stumbled into four separate occurrences here without meaning to. That could be neat if progression didn’t feel so tightly authored, but instead it always left me feeling anxious wondering what buggy nuisance I’d run into since I’d wandered out of the intended experience.
And wow does it need to be edited down to about half its size (something it could learn from Spidey 2). There’s so many little systems and collectibles that feels included for reasons that aren’t “they’re consistently fun and fresh to complete.” There are so many boring collectibles dotted around in obvious and stupid locations; oh no, a T-branch in a hallway…guess it’s time to figure out which way is the advancing path so I can run to the end of the other path first to collect a shiny bit of nothing!
This is also a shockingly rough game technically (on PS5, not even the poorly regarded PC version). It hurts immersion so much to see the graphics oftentimes quickly painting themselves into place when coming out of the map+menu screens, to say nothing of how many times I got stuck in or under level geometry glitches, and ran into several occurrences where the textures seemingly all got dumped and left me in a black wire-framed void for several seconds. Worse than graphics stuff are the narrow strictures on intended traversal in a game that asks you to explore its environment using an air dash and double jump and gliders. Oops, you managed to get to a ledge for a collectible we didn’t intend on yet and you haven’t stopped at a save point in a while? Well, guess who’s stuck until they kill themselves from fall damage and lose progress! I’m not the sort of player who thinks about or attempts sequence breaking, and I stumbled into four separate occurrences here without meaning to. That could be neat if progression didn’t feel so tightly authored, but instead it always left me feeling anxious wondering what buggy nuisance I’d run into since I’d wandered out of the intended experience.