Overview
As a disclaimer, this review will be written based off of the initial tutorial as the actual experience itself is around 6+ hours long. Furthermore, this experience was Live Casted onto a tv so that myself (a casual fan), my boyfriend (hardcore fan), and my other friend (also a hardcore fan) could all take turns playing and participating without missing any action. Now for the review. Playable on the Oculus Quest 2 for 25$, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is an action shooter that interweaves typical Star Wars narrative components and interactions with various gameplay mechanics and engaging aesthetics. Upon loading up the game you play as a droid scrapper tasked with finding and delivering certain parts to people. In the tutorial phase, you are guided by a Non-Playable Character, a droid named J-4X, and shown the basics of movement, inventory, and other available mechanics. In terms of the story, your ship is attacked by space pirates, namely Tara Rashin, who kills J-4X and forces you to escape your ship on an escape pod. Upon the space pirate invasion, the player enters several combat sequences in which they learn how the health and combat systems work on a preliminary level. After the tutorial phase is complete the player finds themselves at Seezelslak’s cantina which is as far as we got, but is a good and seamless introduction to the rest of the game.
Onboarding
Upon opening the game, you are met with several company names and a loading screen. I thought the loading screen was a little unintuitive because it was plain black with presumably a droid logo (even a hardcore fan such as my boyfriend didn’t recongnize it). Because of the long loading time (at least 5 minutes), I think having a progress bar would have been helpful here as I was confused as to if the game got stuck or not. The menus were relatively intuitive and there were many customization options available. However, as we were playing, it was a bit difficult to hear (granted we were in a semi-loud space). Regardless, I think presenting the caption option in the main menu would’ve been a great idea as opposed to hiding it in the in-game menus. Furthermore, I was a bit disappointed that before starting the game, we didn’t get the classic Star Wars intro roll and music. The only text that appeared was the classic, “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away”, however it quickly cut to the actual game itself. I think hearing that music and seeing the Star Wars logo, or at least playing into that theme a little bit more, would have really excited any fan who has any general interest in Star Wars.
Actual Gameplay
As we played through the tutorial, we found positives and negatives to the game as a whole, but overall this was a very exciting and positive experience. Starting with the positives, the combat was definitely a pull factor towards playing. As we are people with firearm experience, the shooting was fairly accurate. We noted that you had to actually look through the sights for accuracy which was a nice touch. The blaster combat was also very immersive when it came to sounds and visuals and in my opinion was the selling point of this game. We were all relatively new to VR technologies, so specifically for me, crouching in the game and getting to physically hide behind in-game objects was very cool and something I’d never done before. Similarly, there weren’t many restrictions to what you could do in combat as things were fairly realistic and accurate. For example, if your gun overheated, you had to vent it in order to continue shooting. Furthermore, this wasn’t explicitly stated, but dual wielding the blasters was an option that I discovered and wholeheartedly enjoyed. Definitely would recommend to others for combat! One final thing I think is important is that if you wanted to hold your gun with both hands, it automatically adjusted for both left and right handed people which is an important accessibility feature I appreciated. Some of the negatives of the gameplay can be found mostly with the obscure or unclear tutorials themselves - particularly with the multi-tool, jetpack, and inventory systems. Just trying to complete the tutorial alone, each of us definitely got stuck at different points. For example, it wasn’t made clear that the multi-tool was placed on your body and moreover that it had several functions depending on the joystick input. This stumped us for a while, nearly to the point of restarting the game because we thought we broke it, until we eventually figured it out. However this could have been avoided with better instruction. Lastly, the movement specifically with the jetpack was unintuitive for people who aren’t accustomed to certain types of movement systems. For example, once you are engaged with the jetpack, the player can no longer normally move through joystick inputs but rather must use a user defined target placed on the ground in order to move. I don’t think there was enough tutorial material to introduce this concept/mechanic to people who aren’t versed in several different types of movement systems, unlike myself who is a game design major.
Pains and Challenges of Playing
One of the pains we noted was that pointing and selecting, specifically with menu items, was particularly cumbersome. Maybe the pointer was a little off or something similar, but especially for those players who don’t have steady hands, I think adding button input functionality to cycle through menus and the inventory would be helpful. We also noted that general VR headset pains were problematic while playing. This could be attributed to the fact that because we were switching who was playing, maybe we didn’t adjust the straps, but particularly with my boyfriend and friend, they were saying that their eyes felt strained and the headset was heavy for what we were doing (Eye Strain and VR). On another note, this could have been due to the high processing power of running a full game while Live Casting, but there was slight lag and almost uncalibrated feel to the players hands at times. That or because you had to hold certain buttons down in order to hold certain objects (heavy blasters and health packs), this made it easy to accidentally drop items when you didn’t mean to, which was mildly annoying.
What makes this game different and why you should play it
According to my boyfriend a hardcore star wars fan, the tutorial was a little lackluster, but as soon as he held a blaster he felt immersed in the world. Getting to learn the mechanics and further the narrative of a classic and widely known franchise is very rewarding as a fan. I wouldn’t particularly recommend this game for someone who doesn’t really care about Star Wars but rather recommend it to anyone who is any degree of fan of the franchise. I think being able to rely on series established concepts and lore gives this game a significant edge to other VR shooter games who may have to establish new lore and mechanics. Despite the 25$ price tag, I feel as though hardcore fans and casual fans would see this as well worth the purchase. I know that I definitely don’t regret my purchase and am further interested to see if Vader Immortal is similar or ties into this narrative. As a Star Wars Battlefront player, I see a lot of potential in the future for a VR Battlefront to be successful (Battlefront3 ). Particularly the Survival mode with multiplayer would be well received due to the longstanding success of previous iterations. There’s a lot to work with, and I think this game sets a good foundation for future Star Wars games.
