2 people found this review helpful
5 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 95.0 hrs on record
Posted: 20 Apr, 2021 @ 2:18pm
Updated: 20 Apr, 2021 @ 5:45pm

I didn't buy this game, I rented it by subscribing to EA Play for 4 months for £3.99/pm, with the first month [edit: for 80 pence], so I finished the game paying just £12 GBP [edit: $16.75 USD]. Even still, I have to warn people not to waste their time with this game, because unfortunately it's mostly a bad game because of the terrible combat mechanics.
I had a look on the metacritic scores given by users, and I cannot agree with the positive ratings, while agreeing with everyone who gave a negative rating.

There are of course several positives in the game, otherwise I wouldn't have spent 95 hours playing one playthrough of it (no restarts or anything like that), getting pretty much all of the exploration-related rare achievements, like "A Galaxy Far, Far Away - Complete all of BD-1's holomaps", "Collector - Collect all chests and secrets", Complete the story, etc. But this is because I'm stubborn, I like games where I can explore (like Fallout 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn, both way superior games), and because I couldn't believe that this game could be so bad, and that it would have to improve later on, SURELY.

Well, the sad reality is that by the time I faced the villain called Ninth Sister I was utterly convinced that I had to finish the game and give a truthful but negative review about this game. In fighting this villain the game reared its ugly head, forcing me to put up with all its flaws in one boss fight:

- The sudden and inexplicable frame drops (more like frame craters, and I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, an AMD Radeon RX 6800 16GB, 32 GB of DDR4 at 3600 MHz with a CAS Latency of 16ns, an NVMe SSD of 2TB with a read/write speed of 3400 MB/s/3000 MB/s, so a really powerful computer for April 2021).
- The inexplicable unrecognised/ignored button pressing (I used a wired DualShock controller, the one that came with the PlayStation 5).
- The inexplicable delay in executing my input commands (what buttons I pressed).
- The inexplicable delay in animations, where it keeps doing the animations of keys I pressed two seconds ago.
- The horrible game design decision to make the stim healing animation really long, to the point that the game triggers the boss's AI to begin a series of deadly combos to ensure that you died from trying to heal.
- The inexplicable misses by the stronger bosses in the game, namely the Sisters, when they're charging at you and they clip through your character instead of dealing you damage.
- The obscure combat mechanics where sometimes you deal a blow first, and sometimes you will never hit first, even if you can clearly see you're attacking first, because the game decided that this enemy and that enemy will always have some sort of higher initiative and will hit you first instead. That is NOT how a modern 3D combat engine should operate!!!
- The level progression is actually very linear, and virtually no exploration is actually necessary if you don't want to, making the game a lot smaller than it was for me, who explored everything, tried all the puzzles, and then went on Youtube to check the ones I had missed.
- The game expects you to come back to the same levels at a later date. I wasted a lot of time trying to reach areas that I'm not supposed to yet. This means that there are very very few levels, but they're very very large, and you will get disoriented a few times even if you're good at reading a 3D map. If you're not good at reading a map, you will get lost often unfortunately, especially if you're trying to find the secrets.
- Oh if you're afraid of heights DO NOT play this game. I don't like heights, but I can cope. Be careful if you can't handle walking along a chasm, or jumping over one, or dangling over one.

The journey can be pretty interesting if you like exploration games like I do, but the plot is, unfortunately, pretty poor. Which is a shame to all the actors involved, I think they did a great job, namely the actors for Cal Kestis, Eno Cordova, and Merrin. The justification for the very endgame, and this "journey's" conclusion will leave you with a jaw drop, but in a really bad way. I can't help but feel that at a certain point a manager decided to cut corners and impose on the writers to reach a conclusion to the game's script immediately, and they went "you know what? fine! they do *this*! DONE! ENJOY!!!".

Guys, really, don't waste your precious free time with this game. EA failed.
But if you don't believe me, and still want to go through all the pointless grind, and the terrible combat system, and the confusing and unhelpful level design, and you're absolutely convinced that you WILL be pushing through all of these failures because you're such a Star Wars fan... just remember Master Yoda's words to Luke:
"You will be... you will be."
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