I'm not sure how much patience I'll have for this game if it takes as long to get to the good stuff as Outcast and has all that game's flaws, but someone said earlier that it might have better level design, so we'll see. I get the impression that it's heavier on the lightsaber fights, though - I never really managed to master the intricacies of those so they felt rather button-mashy and not that enjoyable for me.
-
You start with lightsaber and a lot of basic Force powers (most importantly heal and speed), which is great - thank fuck I don't have to go through a couple of hours of overly-tough non-Force combat.
It was a bit weird at first not playing as Kyle, but you can customise your character and then Kyle trains you and accompanies you on missions, along with characters like Chewie and Luke so it's pretty cool. I'm one of those weird pizza-face dudes with the metal goggles (Kel Dors, apparently), and I've got a purple lightsaber.
The engine is starting to show its age a little now - everything feels a bit jaggy and basic - but it's fine. I had to fiddle with a config file to get 1920x1080 even playing the Steam version, hopefully it won't reset every time I launch the game.
It lets you choose from a handful of Jedi missions, in the order you want. Pointless (I assume I'll have to play them all), but nice.
The plot is mirroring the new films in certain ways (spoilers for Force Awakens) - Luke has started a Jedi academy, one of the padawan (iirc) goes bad...
-
This is really fun so far - I haven't got lost and the combat is pretty easy going so far - you can slice your way through a bunch of tusken raiders no problem, but you have to be a bit more careful when a bunch of mercenaries are shooting at you. It turns out you have to do all but one of those missions, but can choose to do all of them if you like. There's a lot of variety here, too - fighting alongside Chewie on Tatooine, a Tremors-esque level where you're scavenging for parts by jumping across parts of crashed ships being careful not to step on the ground and get swallowed by baby Sarlaccs, running along the top of a giant train as it speeds through a rainy city...
They also give you a choice of two guns and a projectile explosive at the start of each level, alongside your saber and pistol. Obviously, I choose the space-shotgun, the space-sniper-rifle and the space-grenades every time. I'm also exclusively levelling up my heal and protect powers. These games could really do with simplfying down, there's a lot of stuff that is never really developed as a mechanic. Like, what's the point, as the player, in fucking around with Force lightning or choke when you can just shoot someone?
-
Okay, Force Lightning in this game is great! All the Force stuff is levelled up much quicker, in fact, and makes the game a lot more fun. I'm about three quarters through now, I think, and having great fun. It hit a bit of a trouble patch with a couple of crappy switch-pushing mazes and an awful speeder bike section, but then it got back into more inventive levels, like the one where it takes your lightsaber off you, so you're doing some proper FPSing but still using Force powers, the Coruscant level with zero snipers, and the Jedi tomb level which has a real Mines of Moria feel to it. It feels great doing huge jumps between buildings and bridges, then zapping people off ledges into the depths like Palpatine does to Mace Windu. The level where a mutant Rancor is running about so you can manoeuvre the dark Jedi into its path and watch them get eaten is just hilarious.
-
I'm kind of going through the motions with this game now. It's about 80% lightsaber battles by this point and I just don't find them very satisfying. LOTS of quickloading until I happen to get enough random hits in to defeat my opponents. Speed plus jumping and slashing seems to do the trick a lot of the time. Not particularly interesting, but there you go. It still gets held up as the best sword-fighting system in games, so there must be stuff I'm missing.
-
The game got a bit ho-hum towards the end. There were some nice big vistas and Attack Of The Clones style battles going on, though, which was cool.
Overall, very much enjoyed this game, I just wish I could have got a bit more out of the saber combat.
Rating: Green
No comments:
Post a Comment