I picked this up a few days ago, I’ve been enjoying it although it does feel like a mishmash of ideas from other games.
Like its forbear it leans very heavily into the souls genre and I’m still not convinced that’s compatible with Star Wars as a thing. Star Wars should be a swashbuckling adventure not a brutal death march. There’s now a grab bag of things from Breath of the Wild too. All the while you’re playing it you’re like “oh, that’s from Elden Ring” and “that shrine was lifted from Zelda”. It’s fine to borrow from other games but sometimes it feels this struggles for its own identity.
The exploration is sort of fine but suffers from a lack of rewards. Again like the first many rewards are just cosmetic. It’s a big anti-climax to spend ages transversing some ravine only to find a slightly different material for the grip of your lightsabre. The game makes a big thing about tweaking and upgrading your weapon but it seems all cosmetic to me. This can’t be a big draw for people, can it?
There is some decent fun though, the lightsabre combat feels weighty and powerful. The parries are very forgiving and like in souls some of the tougher enemies can just be skipped. There’s some fantastic animation work and some brilliantly dorky robots. BD-1 is still adorable. That said the brutality of the combat often just seems at odds with the rest of it. It feels that the developers couldn’t agree what kind of game they were making.