Tag: star wars

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Game Ramblings #158 – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

More Info from Star Wars

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series

It’s been a bit since my last ramblings. I decided to do carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists at once, as one does. What that does is makes videogames surprisingly not very fun to play. When I was figuring out what I wanted to play first after getting my sutures out, this one was sitting there ready to go. It feels like it’s been forever since The Force Awakens, but the full 9 episode saga is here and it’s a lot of fun.

The Lego games have always just kind of been collectathons, but it surprised me how much this felt like a complete game, and not just a Legoified version of the movies like a lot of past games. There were some pretty obvious changes to the core combat mechanics as well as a much better expansion to the metagame between story segments that really made the whole thing work.

The biggest obvious change is that there’s ranged weapons everywhere! You’ve got blasters of every flavor, bows of all sorts, you can chuck your light saber like a whooshing boomerang. However, unlike The Force Awakens, which sometimes had ranged weapons but clumsy aiming due to the fixed camera angle, we’re now seeing a full third-person game. You’ve got all your typical trappings of shooters, such as ADS on the left trigger and full camera manipulation on the right stick. In doing this change, the game now feels like a modern title along the lines of something like a simple Ratchet & Clank, rather than a sort of clumsy Lego-themed isometric platformer.

The metagame is also just a lot more free flowing in a way that encourages the use of the typical large character roster of the series. You’ll jump between segments of free roam where you can use any purchased characters and segments of story where you’re restricted to relevant characters. In allowing the free roam segments, the game is doing a great job of slowing down the pace of the game in a way that is still fun. Where a typical Lego Star Wars title was around 10 hours, this one is about 20. While that is much longer, it now covers all nine movies instead of just a handful, so the pace slowing down is definitely necessary.

What you end up doing is completing a specific story segment, then being unleashed into what is essentially a movie-themed playground. Scattered around are all sorts of miscellaneous rewards, so it becomes a game of finding out how to get them all. Some spots are simply puzzles of choosing the right person to get to the glowing spot. Some of them are mini races or combat segments for a reward. Some of them are side quests where you interact with characters from the movies in fun ways in order to unlock them for play. However, the important thing is that it’s varied and quick to do. You’ll spend a few minutes per-reward, then move on to the next thing. It keeps things fresh so you aren’t stuck in one spot for long periods of time, but also provides a nice change from the purely linear story segments that you’re doing the rest of the time.

It’s also worth a mention that space combat is another one of the things that acts as a nice pace change. Some of the areas are Star-Fox inspired – such as the Death Star trench run – and some of the areas are distinctly open flight. Mechanically these are definitely simple. You’re basically firing a relatively large angle auto aim machine gun or firing a very generously homing proton torpedo. However, in all cases it’s another place I can point at where the segments are used as a way to breakup the pace of the game and keep the overall flow fresh.

Ultimately that’s the biggest thing about this title that I could point at as an improvement over past entries. You’re running through a bunch of story very quickly to cover nine movies, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming or boring at any point. Because the specifics of what you’re doing change so much, you don’t really have time to become bored with any specific type of gameplay. You kind of do one type of gameplay for a few minutes in a story mission, then go into free roam, then go into another story mission with completely different gameplay, then back to free roam. Because everything has some currency being given that allow you to get more stuff, it also never feels like you’re doing something unrewarding.

If you’re a fan of past Lego titles this is an easy recommendation. If you’re a fan of Star Wars this is an easy recommendation. However, more than that this feels like a much easier recommendation to the general game audience. This is a much more complete game than past titles. Rather than being a game that leans on its IP to be good, this feels like a generally good game that is instead boosted by its use of the IP. While the reports of severe development problems put a bit of a black eye on things, this game is showing a bit of hope that the Traveller’s Tales Lego series can be a bit thing again going forward.

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Game Ramblings #122 – Star Wars: Squadrons

More Info from EA

  • Genre: Space Flight Sim
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

Now I’ll be honest – I didn’t spend a single second in the multiplayer here. By all accounts it’s pretty fun and well made, but that was not at all what I wanted out of this game. What I wanted was a pretty specific thing – a quick hit of space flight in the vein of the Rogue Squadron or Starfighter games, and this really hit the mark there.

Compared to those two series I mentioned there’s really two main things that make Squadrons work so well as a modern game, and the first of these is perspective. The entire game is absolutely designed as a first-person experience and it makes the games work far better. I know that sounds silly, but it’s the same reasoning why I vastly prefer first-person views in racing games. The immediacy of input when you have a fixed perspective gives much better feedback to the player when they’re changing directions. That sort of immediacy in third-person more often than not feels awkward, so you get things like drag and delays on camera booms of third person cameras, which works well to smooth out the camera but gives the feel of delay on input.

It’s a fairly subtle change on the surface, but it results in a much better pace of gameplay. You see the results of input faster, so your reactions are faster, your dodging is faster, your kills are faster. However, that doesn’t just mean everything can just be faster – it means there can be more. Avoiding enemy fire effectively means there can be more enemy fire. Killing enemies fast means there can be more enemies. Quicker controls means there can be tigher spaces and debris that aren’t annoyances – but actual interesting gameplay opportunities. It all works well to ramp the spectacle at the same time as ramping the gameplay, and feels far more interesting than what came before.

The second real change is around handling of AI. It’s not so simple as to say they’re competent, but that they’re controllable. In a way it reminds me a lot of another Star Wars title – Republic Commando. The AI on their own can do a fine job, but where the real benefit comes in is in telling them what their focus should be. Have a guy on your tail that you can’t seem to quite shake? Direct the AI at them. Want the AI to focus on the main target while you take out TIE Fighters? Direct the AI at them. Again, this is a pretty subtle change, but its impact is immense. The battles become less about one-on-one or going after a specific target, and more about managing the flow of battle as it comes to you. If there’s only a main target left, you can all pile onto the target and take it out, but for larger battles you have a lot more flexibility to direct both yourself and your team in a way that pays the most benefit to you.

There’s some smaller systems that also work into this, but are more loadout based. On the surface, the loadout option to add a rechargeable repair droid to your ship seems like a safety valve for less skilled players. However, when I used it it allowed me to play extraordinarily aggressively, often to a stupid level, running right at larger ships and running through their shields while laying in damage. There were also options for main guns and missiles that allowed me to disable enemy ships, giving me options to disable and move on while sending my AI folks in for the cleanup. It’s things like this that add that touch of customization that modern games really lean into. It’s a level beyond merely picking your ship, and leans into making the game work for you instead of you fitting into the game.

I guess all of that is a long way of saying that this was fun and it really felt like it pushed the space flight Star Wars gameplay in a nice direction. You can feel hints of the Rogue Squadron and Starfighter games in there, but this is definitely a more modern approach. It’s also focused in its execution. Ya there’s single and multiplayer, but it’s not trying to be something it’s not. There’s no open world, there’s no overarching metagame, there’s no distractions. It’s space flight done well that doesn’t overstay its welcome. In that, it did exactly what I wanted it to do.

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Game Ramblings #101 – Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

More Info from EA

  • Genre: Action
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

I’m honestly a bit surprised that I really enjoyed this game. In general, I’m not a huge fan of the Souls games. I generally don’t have the patience for the slower methodical combat style that those games have, and just end up getting my ass handed to me. This game isn’t really much different in that regard, but it played just enough into the power dream of being a Jedi to push the Souls combat into a slightly quicker and twitchy pace to a point where that balance between speed and patience really clicked for me.

At its core, combat in this game is fairly similar to Souls. Attacks and movement have a significant amount of heft to them, and poorly timed attacks or lack of defensive maneuvers can result in a whole lot of your health bar disappearing in one hit. However, you do have some fun Force helpers at your disposal. Force push and pull are there to mess around with enemy balance, and in some cases throw them straight off of cliffs. Some Force-based heavy attacks provide a nice burst of offensive output at key times. However, it was the combination of Force slow and a very lenient dodge that gave the combat the feel that I needed.

In general, if I were to pick between parry-based and dodge-based combat in an action game, I will always go dodge-based. Something about the physicality of moving the character to defend feels more intuitive to me than trying to grok the timing of parries. Fallen Order definitely followed that pattern. There were some fights where I was able to parry fine, but something about the scale of the fighters combined with the camera angle really screwed with my ability to time parries a lot through probably the first half of the game. While I was able to be decently effective with it by the end of the game, dodging was still the way I generally played.

Not that that always went as planned…

Luckily for me, that was also a way that the game was tuned. There’s skill tree bonuses in place for properly timed dodges. There’s some skills around doing quick dodges with secondary kicks to knock enemies off guard. With hard lock in place, dodge rolls keep you in range of the enemy, allowing for a consistent way to circle around to the side or back of enemies to lay in some attacks. In general, the dodge was also much more lenient than Souls around the dodge being triggered quickly within the window after my attack. It just ended up feeling slightly more gamey than Souls, but in a way that felt fairly believable BECAUSE you’re playing as a Force-wielding Jedi.

In general, the exploration aspect of the game also gave me a lot of leeway to grow my character in a way that made the game a lot more safe. There’s a bit of a Metroidvania aspect to the game, where going back to worlds that have been completed still offers new paths and new secrets to collect as your power set grows. A lot of these are cosmetics, but some of the secrets are really part of the player’s power curve. There’s your upgrades for the player’s health and Force meters. However, the most important one is the health stim upgrade. Health stims are basically the health potions of the game, but they automatically recharge when meditating at save points. For a player looking for a real challenge, these can be easily avoided. However, for impatient jackasses like me, these are invaluable.

The health stim upgrades provide both important health for getting through bosses in a more safe manner without having to do a bunch of redos, but they also gave me a lot more freedom to explore for long periods of time without worrying about where my next save point would be. They’re also tied into some helpful skills, where their effectiveness can be improved, and their ability to also heal the force meter can be added. This specific upgrade path was probably the single factor in my enjoyment of the game, as it provided an optional way for me to tune the overall difficulty of the game in a way that I enjoyed, without the game really having to simply be balanced around babying players like me.

That’s not to say that combat always entirely worked out well. There were a number of spots where the combat arenas were simply too small against some heavier enemies, so I would spend a bunch of time fighting the camera instead of fighting the enemy. Overall, the combat in place also felt like it started to really fall apart when I started getting above more than 2 or 3 people. This is a great 1 on 1 combat system, but trying to fight multiple melee people while also trying to deflect blaster beams back at ranged enemies just feels like a hectic chore, rather than a cool Jedi power trip. Where it probably wanted to be something akin to the Arkham games, it definitely fell flat. It doesn’t really have the enemy AI attack queuing or the good parry timing tells of that game to really handle a multi-enemy combat scenario in a clean fashion.

The rest of the experience was simply the fun of being a Jedi. The force powers used in combat are also used for traversal. It will always be fun to force pull a rope at me, do a double jump over some gaps, and land light saber down in a Stormtrooper’s skull. It will always feel badass to deflect blaster rounds back at a ranged guy trying to take you out from a ledge. It will always be incredible to fly into Kashyyyk and have a Wookie yelling indecipherable things at you. It was also always fun to try and spy out the little secret areas and find out what might be hiding in that crate around the corner. In general, the game plays a really good balance in being in-combat and being in-traversal, so I was generally able to get the down time I really wanted, while still being able to play that experience of being a ridiculously cool Jedi running all over.

This was definitely a game that I went in expecting the worst, and came out being pleasantly surprised given my history of not really liking the Souls experience. It definitely is a Souls game, but it leans away from the crazy difficulty and crazy combat precision enough to find a balance that I was able to get through in a lot more pleasant way. The set dressing of being a Jedi definitely helped keep me engaged, but I kept coming back for the gameplay. End of the day, this game gives me a bit of hope that there may just be more Souls experiences out there for impatient idiots like me to still play.