This review contains spoilers
The two stars are there because the Pokémon designs are great, the trainer designs are great, and Hop has a great character arc.
Everything else is rubbish.
Galar is an ugly region, and half of its routes consist of straight lines. The game that decided to make the Escape Rope a Key Item has ONE cave in the entire region, and it too is a straight line. Team Yell are a non-entity that feel like a pale imitation of Team Skull without understanding anything that made them good or memorable. Marnie and Bead get almost no screentime, their character arcs happen offscreen, and are both completely unrelated to anything we're introduced to them caring about. Marnie gets forced into taking over as her town's gym leader despite the whole game expressing that she had zero interest in the role, and Bede gets kidnapped by a witch and brainwashed into believing Fairy-type Pokémon are the only thing he has ever thought or cared about.
Zacian and Zamazenta have no place in the greater world of Pokemon for being box legendaries, Eternatus has zero story attached to it outside of a few lines of dialogue involving a dream of an energy crisis, and the game's BIGGEST sin is missing the entire point of Pokemon: that anyone can participate.
The whole game the player character is constantly being told that they should focus on their gym challenge instead of getting involved with whatever shady plot seems to be happening in the background, that the game makes zero effort to detail in the slightest, or give us any glimpse of. Nothing happens the entire game until the last ten minutes of it, which comprise of an elevator ride into a non-encounter, and a final boss that had decent spectacle but was ultimately devoid of player input.
EXP share has been made to be ON by default at all times, and as a result, if the player at any point decides to catch new Pokemon in the new Wild Area, or does any sort of battling outside of the main straight line that is the gym challenge, you will became hopelessly overleveled with no way of course correcting without picking a completely new team, and will steamroll the rest of the game with little issue, robbing the game of any tension for the rest of its meager playtime.
The game's new gimmick, Dynamaxing, is essentially just another take on the prior game's Z-Moves. Unlike Mega Evolution, any Pokémon can do it, and you get three turns to either use big powerful attacks or guard against big powerful attacks. There's some strategy to using certain moves to lay down weather or stat boosts, but visually they're a step down and mechanically they lead to forcing the other player into activating theirs just to avoid losing their whole team strategy to funny supermoves.
There's also 'Gigantamax' forms, which have unique appearances, but ONLY while that Pokemon is dynamaxed, and prior to the soup introduced in the DLC they method of obtaining a Gigantamax Pokemon was laughably absurd to a degree I don't have the energy to rant about right now. I'll just say that Raid Battles sucked - either you got absolutely wiped playing solo cause the AI partners were useless, or you steamrolled the fight playing with a human squad with zero difficulty, still hindered by the fact that you can only do a set amount of damage max to the boss before it caps and enters another of like 5 phases. Just a colossal waste of time.
Lastly, thanks to the decision to leave the National Pokedex out of this installment and future ones to come, more than half of the franchise's mons are completely unusable even with Pokemon Home support, which limits post-game teambuilding to whatever's available in the region.
Sword and Shield, in my opinion, are the most hollow, phoned-in, devoid of soul Pokemon games in the entire franchise, and it speaks volumes that at the used game store I work you'll find copies of these titles taking up an entire shelf themselves.
Everything else is rubbish.
Galar is an ugly region, and half of its routes consist of straight lines. The game that decided to make the Escape Rope a Key Item has ONE cave in the entire region, and it too is a straight line. Team Yell are a non-entity that feel like a pale imitation of Team Skull without understanding anything that made them good or memorable. Marnie and Bead get almost no screentime, their character arcs happen offscreen, and are both completely unrelated to anything we're introduced to them caring about. Marnie gets forced into taking over as her town's gym leader despite the whole game expressing that she had zero interest in the role, and Bede gets kidnapped by a witch and brainwashed into believing Fairy-type Pokémon are the only thing he has ever thought or cared about.
Zacian and Zamazenta have no place in the greater world of Pokemon for being box legendaries, Eternatus has zero story attached to it outside of a few lines of dialogue involving a dream of an energy crisis, and the game's BIGGEST sin is missing the entire point of Pokemon: that anyone can participate.
The whole game the player character is constantly being told that they should focus on their gym challenge instead of getting involved with whatever shady plot seems to be happening in the background, that the game makes zero effort to detail in the slightest, or give us any glimpse of. Nothing happens the entire game until the last ten minutes of it, which comprise of an elevator ride into a non-encounter, and a final boss that had decent spectacle but was ultimately devoid of player input.
EXP share has been made to be ON by default at all times, and as a result, if the player at any point decides to catch new Pokemon in the new Wild Area, or does any sort of battling outside of the main straight line that is the gym challenge, you will became hopelessly overleveled with no way of course correcting without picking a completely new team, and will steamroll the rest of the game with little issue, robbing the game of any tension for the rest of its meager playtime.
The game's new gimmick, Dynamaxing, is essentially just another take on the prior game's Z-Moves. Unlike Mega Evolution, any Pokémon can do it, and you get three turns to either use big powerful attacks or guard against big powerful attacks. There's some strategy to using certain moves to lay down weather or stat boosts, but visually they're a step down and mechanically they lead to forcing the other player into activating theirs just to avoid losing their whole team strategy to funny supermoves.
There's also 'Gigantamax' forms, which have unique appearances, but ONLY while that Pokemon is dynamaxed, and prior to the soup introduced in the DLC they method of obtaining a Gigantamax Pokemon was laughably absurd to a degree I don't have the energy to rant about right now. I'll just say that Raid Battles sucked - either you got absolutely wiped playing solo cause the AI partners were useless, or you steamrolled the fight playing with a human squad with zero difficulty, still hindered by the fact that you can only do a set amount of damage max to the boss before it caps and enters another of like 5 phases. Just a colossal waste of time.
Lastly, thanks to the decision to leave the National Pokedex out of this installment and future ones to come, more than half of the franchise's mons are completely unusable even with Pokemon Home support, which limits post-game teambuilding to whatever's available in the region.
Sword and Shield, in my opinion, are the most hollow, phoned-in, devoid of soul Pokemon games in the entire franchise, and it speaks volumes that at the used game store I work you'll find copies of these titles taking up an entire shelf themselves.