I’ve had this on my wishlist as a sort of “whatever” game for some time. The Fall sale came by and it was the best deal I’ve ever seen on it, so why not?

I’ll tell you why not. This game is like going to a cheap buffet. There’s stuff for everyone but none of it is any good. Ok, that’s harsh. I’ll give the art and sound some props. It certainly has that Star Wars feel, through and through. That’s about it.

• Nix is effectively a contextual menu that changes based on what you are targeting. They are a tool to extend your stealth window. I think it generally works.
• Combat is floaty and is clearly an afterthought. This is clearly designed as a stealth game above all else. None of the weapons feel good, grenades don’t do much, and enemies feel like sponges.
• Stealth just feels bad. Line of sight make little to no sense. You can knock out enemies mere feet away from others with no impact. And then there are times where you cause a chain reaction of enemies and just plain ol’ die.
• The speeder (ground transport) is mostly just exploring an empty landscape with sheer walls to keep you on track. It feels slow and unresponsive.
• Upgrades are spread all over the place and feel impossible to track. Why? It’s just fetch quests everywhere.
• Space combat…every game in the past 15 years has done better.
• Quests are a combination of NPCs randomly strewn about the map, and then a custom-built environment that is made of ladders and tunnels. Rinse and repeat. You’re given no tools or mechanics from the tutorial or beyond to improve the work.
• Sabbac is sort of highlight. It flows well enough and you could probably play it at home.
• Lockpicking and slicing computers have bad mini games. The first is a rhythm game that doesn’t detect much, and the second is a worse version of Mastermind in every respect. Thankfully you can (and should) disable all mini-games in the menu.
• The 3 factions (4 if you count Imperials who will always hate you) are all the same, or at least in any meaningful way. Their rewards are asymmetrical, as only one of them actually allows you to avoid Imperials. The push/pull with them is interesting in concept.
• There are 9 experts here, and they unlock additional skills/abilities. Aside from the act of finding them (which is itself a slew of weird quests), all the upgrades are unlocked by activity checklists. Find 10 material, knock out 6 guys, jump across a large gap.

It is a rare thing to play a AAA game that is this bad. And still bad after multiple kitchen sink patches too! What in the world happened to the studio to think this was an acceptable state is beyond me. I honestly feel bad for the devs here, there are so many good ideas that are just poorly executed. Maybe if it had another 9 months in the cooker this could have worked… like actually having the experts offer you quests, or adding more movement stealth tool, or heaven forbid, an actual skill tree.

Things have to improve from here. They just have to.