I have played about 35 hours at launch with the Ubisoft + subscription. I acknowledge that there are a number of updates coming that would address a lot of the major complaints about the gameplay, some of which appear in my review below. However, in my opinion, this game is fundamentally flawed and extremely disappointing, and nothing would ever convince me to come back. Ubisoft should just move on.

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I am so tired of Ubisoft open world games.

I am a big fan of Star Wars, so the idea of playing as a scoundrel visiting iconic locations from the Star Wars franchise and interacting with legendary criminal syndicates seemed appealing to me. Also, given that Ubisoft Massive was making this game, I was expecting a bit of innovation when comparing to other Ubisoft open world games. This could not be further from the truth. EVERYTHING in this game could've been a lot better than it ended up being, and I was left extremely disappointed.

The open world stuff is what you'd expect from a Ubisoft game: question marks all around you, tons of useless gear/collectibles that is all designed to waste your time, and an overabundance of fetch quests. The single noteworthy thing I can mention about the exploration is that question marks now show up when you're near the location as opposed to always being on the map, but it's all still functionally the same to me when the content of those question marks is not significant or interesting. I have been clicking the right stick so much to pick up random gear lying around that my thumb began to hurt, and I still don't know if I ever used that gear to upgrade anything.

The gameplay itself is surprisingly bad for a game studio with a pedigree like Massive's: combat is reduced to shooting with one blaster pistol with various firing modes, but overheats every few shots so you have that cooldown mechanic. There is no snap to cover or anything like that, and the gun just doesn't feel great to shoot, with poor feedback when your shots hit enemies. Of course, there are other weapons you can pick up from enemies, but they become unusable after a few shots so you have to scrap them (yep, that makes sense in the Star Wars universe!). A lot of people complain about the forced nature of the stealth, and how getting caught would trigger a fail state. I personally didn't mind this much, because it was finally a case of this game taking an explicit and bold direction in how it should be played. Shame it sucks though, as it is very one-dimensional, providing you with very few tools to help you sneak around enemies.

The story is pretty much non-existent until the last hour of the game. My favourite YouTuber Skill Up summed it up perfectly when he said that this game prioritizes structure over storytelling. The narrative never has a chance to take off because Ubisoft wants you riding around performing menial tasks and collecting useless stuff on 4 different planets (only one of which appears in the original and prequel trilogies, btw). Aside from one character I liked, characters don't have any interesting depth to them (including the lead) and they barely interact with each other. The main villain barely appears in the whole game and I can't help but feel that the talented actors that gave these characters their performances were absolutely wasted with the classic Ubisoft writing.

And as always, nothing actually matters. A huge selling point of this game is the syndicates and the need to constantly balance your reputation between them all, but.... why? If I have a horrible reputation with the Hutts for example, I do a few contracts for them and I'm back up in the "Excellent" reputation, sometimes without even needing to affect the reputation of a rival syndicate. And what does that get me? An "exclusive" set of gear that looks like someone threw up on a jacket and some pants, and better prices from merchants so I can buy some random resource, of which I need 10 to upgrade the shields of a ship I rarely even fly around in? There's no incentive for me to stay in the "Excellent" range of any given syndicate, because I've already unlocked anything meaningful that they could ever give me, and there's very little of that in this game. This afterthought of a syndicate system is even more insulting when you consider that your allegiance affects literally only one cutscene near the end of the game, but the ending remains the same.

In terms of visuals and performance, I was at first stunned by how detailed the environments were, and how raytracing looks. Populated areas felt dense, lived in, and bustling with so many different NPCs. I really felt immersed and that I was finally living my Star Wars fantasy. Then I noticed how horrible the lipsync and facial animations were, how the same alien species kept reappearing despite the rich lore of the Star Wars franchise. Then the graphical glitches and bugs kicked in - this intense flickering that would appear in bright areas, and textures that would constantly pop in and alternate between different resolutions. I went from thinking that this game was one of the best looking this year, to barely managing to stomach it.

The only thing that kept me going was the next new area or story beat, but it all ended up being laughably boring and mediocre. Funny enough, the moment I abandoned all hope that this game would get good is when I finally got inside Jabba's Palace: there were about 5 NPCs in the main throne room all just awkwardly standing around waiting to be talked to, there was no music whatsoever, and there was a cheap easter egg of Han Solo in carbonite to appease the fans. This perfectly encapsulates what this game meant to me. The hollow tagline of this being the "first ever open world Star Wars game" prompted all sorts of red flags in my mind when I heard it back when this game was announced, and I was sad to see that I was right to be skeptical.