Game Review - Star Wars Tales from the Galaxy's Edge

Game Review: Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge by ILMxLAB
Score: +1/-5

In this action-adventure virtual reality experience, you’ll travel to the planet of Batuu and get caught up in your own unforgettable story. Fight alongside classic characters, and face intimidating villains, as you explore all-new regions and eras of the Star Wars galaxy. With multiple difficulty settings, Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge has been crafted for all types of players and fans.

Just the fact that it uses the Star Wars IP is probably good enough to get rave reviews from Star Wars fans. But in this review we're going to examine it's quality as a VR game.

Which also means that we can't expect the same level of polish and convenience as a game for desktops and consoles. VR games that try to retain as much immersion as possible will try to get players to do everything with just their hands instead of opening up layers and layers of menus. And movement becomes really tricky in VR when you are trying to do something with your hands but you also have to direct movement with your hands.

• The story is... okay. It's short and straightforward, but that is generally to be expected of VR titles at the moment.
• It's so short that when the main quest ends, it felt like it ended prematurely, that this was just the first chapter of a longer story.
• -1 So much gameplay time is spent by you going through linearly designed maps shooting things and generally not doing anything terribly exciting. The range of action gets boring really fast.
• -1 The final boss fight was highly unsatisfying. At some point the fight will transition to the end phase where someone else defeats the boss for you. It's not even clear what actions you took to push the fight to that phase as you don't seem to be able to do anything to the boss at all.
• The tavern tale side trip involving the padawan and the evil relic felt more interesting and intense.
• +1 Larger than life dramatic things happen, just like in Star Wars.
• The scripted scenes are generally very good. Big action, big explosions, big excitement. Too bad there aren't that many.
• -1 Things cost too much.
• Depending on how you manage your money (which in turn depends on the difficulty you are playing at and how many consumables you need to buy), you might not get a good gear upgrade till after the main story has ended. And then there's really little point because the new side quest available after the main story isn't really worth playing as there's basically no story involved.
• What the gear upgrades do are generally also underwhelming compared to cost.
• After the main mission ends, consumables apparently stop dropping so you need to go around killing easy wildlife to get body parts to sell to buy the consumables you need to keep going. That's if you are bothering to try for some of the tedious achievements like killing things with repulsor darts.
• -1 Inventory management is tedious.
• You might come back from your adventure with a couple dozen animal parts that are just junk for sale. In order to sell it, you have to drag them, one at a time, onto a table and pull a chute down to vacuum it up.
• And you can't just drop as many as you like onto that table because the glitchy physics can cause one or more to go flying, sometimes far enough away that you have to move to go get it.
• Why not some kind of switch or button to sell-all-junk?
• -1 Drone management is bizarre.
• You are recommended to use little spherical flying drones in combat, but once launched it is insanely hard to grab them and put them away. They just keep buzzing around generally out of range of your reach.
• What you can do is shoot your own drone a few times so that it now requires repair. That will get it to float unmoving in the air, allowing you to finally grab it.
• What if instead pointing your hand at your own drone and using a grab motion caused it to come to you? They already have a similar mechanic for force grab during the Tales segment.
• -0 Combat is okay if you can use smooth motion but tedious if you have turned it off because it can cause motion sickness.
• This is a game where getting into cover is important, and smooth motion means you can duck in and out of cover more easily (you can't always just crouch or jetpack up and down).
• -0 Throwing things is terrible. Like the repulsor darts tavern game. A similar motion can cause a wildly different result, and in the case of the tavern game, each attempt costs in-game credits and the endgame is really tedious with its limited range of activities.
• -0 Some odd glitches like enemies occasionally going through obstacles, but it's thankfully rare. You're more likely to encounter things dropping into terrain and becoming unreachable.