They have the aesthetic down, but Ubisoft is playing very safe with the Star Wars brand and the result is a bland space cowboy game with copy-paste Ubisoft shooter mechanics. The abilities are boring, there are no cool characters, there is no real progression system. The environment design is actually very solid, but the story and writing is too bland and uninteresting to hold my attention. The camera takes away from immersion. I cannot recommend this game.

Stealth unfun, but at least I can just set off every alarm and play normal with guns blazing. Questing however is centered on the stealth, so it feels disconnected and immersion breaking. Yup, I'm playing differently than it was meant to be played and it's just not as good as any other expansive open world game.

The one thing though that really grinds my gears, is the camera. Camera control is far too frequently taken from your control - and it drives me insane. Worse, the camera will auto recenter forward when walking/running unless you are constantly moving the camera. So, I'm forever enraged at the game, screaming "stop stealing my camera!", "look where I'm telling you to look". There is no option (among an absurd number of other options) to turn it off. So, you're forced to fight the game for the camera.

Also can't really identify with Kay, or the words coming out of her mouth. I'll push forward, purely because I love the Star Wars world - particularly the architecture, droids, and aliens, which are very well done. I'll just be yelling at my monitor half the time.

Fisher Price version of Cyberpunk 2077.

Gets very repetitive quickly, extremely linear despite being technically "open world", and all in all not very fun. The "cute" animal sidekick might be the dumbest part of the gameplay, but really this game isn't willing to commit to being one thing or the other, and is filled with boring and silly mechanics and meaningless "choices".

Given Ubisoft's reputation, it's actually not a bad game. It felt like a Star Wars game.

Pros:

- Visuals/environment are top tier
- Speeder traversal
- Classic music and transition scenes
- Movement didn't feel super clunky
- Character development/dynamics with each other were decent
- Fresh, non-jedi/lightsaber gameplay

Cons:

- Performance/optimization
- Overall writing was average at best
- Frame Generation crashed game instantly whenever activated
- No option to turn off ray tracing
- Gear/speeder/ship upgrade system needs more depth

Reasonably enjoyable. It's like many other Ubisoft games you've played before, with a fairly average story and familiar gameplay, but it's just good enough to be worth buying, when it's on sale.

Ubisoft Launcher.

I will ride this game out but cannot really recommend it. There has been a lot of good work done on the game by the developers but the problem is that the root issues are fundamental to the game and not just graphical or bugs.

The stealth mechanics are shockingly weak for a studio that has done it well in Far Cry, AC, Ghost Recon, etc. Within an hour or so you realize the stealth segments are largely mini-games to use the AI companion (Nix). Once you learn this, they become a hodge-podge of far too easy or oppressively difficult (until you time out using Nix correctly).

Gunplay is thematic: you are a criminal who really only knows how to use a pistol. But that said, it is surprisingly half-baked when these same studios gave me the Division 2 combat that I loved. The traversal and physics of the character are so awkward that you will often find your character standing up randomly during a fight, rotating for reasons unknown, or unable to barrel roll because the game engine doesn't understand what you are trying to do. How they have fixed this? Buffed the pistol (your only real weapon, beyond temporary blasters, etc.) a ton so the upgrades make you one-shot everything. But this doesn't make the gunplay more fun--it simply stands as a testament to the developers trying to out-fox their own physics and AI system's shortcomings.

The space travel and exploration is interest to me, but it is downplayed heavily. Again, the developers way of patching up disparities has been making the ship upgrades turn your simple pirate cruiser into a high speed Death Star and is virtually indestructible. And again, this doesn't make the gameplay more compelling or enjoyable. It just makes the loop-de-loop dogfighting take less time.

The issues I mentioned herein apply to general traversal. There are far too many instances where a rock formation you walk or drive over perfectly is replicated moments later--only this time you either stop dead in your tracks or crash the vehicle taking 50-95% of your health in damage. Given the speeder in the game is very tempermental the way it is, the issues with textures inconsistently stopping you makes the entire speeder experience a total grind. The best zones in the entire game to just drive around and explore are uncoincidentally an open desert.

The minigames are fun to start, but the scale to their difficulty is very boring (faster rhythm, more code-master nodes, etc.). The in-game poker game is pretty fun and straight forward enough--but I like poker, and if you do not you probably will spend close to zero time on this.

The story is good though. The graphics and environments are phenomenal (on PC with my build anyways). The voice acting of the lead character is very well done, especially with how wooden most of the acting has been in recent AC games. I imagine most players early on will immediately take a liking to the AI companion, Nix, and he is a high point of the game. They wisely included some of the least frustrating POIs to be exploring with Nix.

It feels like the studio either wanted to make a stealth platformer like Uncharted, but was forced to expand it, or they lost their way in trying to make a stealth game somehow. I understand what they intended with the objectives of the game. Unfortunately the AI, engine, and physics prevent this one from being on the same tier as the Division games.

The game is fun so far, still on the first world. Game crashes all the time though and is poorly optimized.

I have a 4080 super, this game should not be crashing every 30 min to and hour.

These guys still force you to install uplay

Runs at 60 FPS on max settings with DLSS Quality and Frame Generation on, with a 4070 Ti... Is this Ubisoft's new thing? This game somehow runs worse than Avatar: Frontiers, but it looks even worse. Imagine a game being harder to run than Cyberpunk and looking super mid.