Really solid action-adventure game, brought down by an overall roughness around its edges and lack of compelling innovation in combat, traversal, and storytelling. A slightly derivative amalgamation of what other games in the genre have done better, in a fun Star Wars package.

The story is fun and surprisingly engaging on a replay, but it feels overly familiar and tropey. Characters are well designed but lack proper development and opportunities to interact with them. Cutscenes are spectacular, they look great and are very well animated, outside of them character animation tends to be rather stiff looking and inorganic.

The story has some great moments, spectacular set pieces, and it’s overall pretty well paced. Doesn’t overstay its welcome and has a few surprises sprinkled about. A great Star Wars adventure that can’t fully shake off a feeling of familiarity and predictability.

Traversal gets more engaging as the game goes along and the player starts unlocking new abilities, but it doesn’t ever come close to being as engaging and polished as what Naughty Dog perfected in Uncharted 4. I’ve never been a big fan of this style of platforming, and while double jumping is fun enough, it still hasn’t won me over.

Combat is where the game struggles the most. When it works properly it’s an extremely engaging attempt at bringing Souls-like combat to a mainstream audience, with the addition of unlockable combos and cool force powers. Sadly, it lacks the polish and exactitude that From Software tends to bring to their games, specially around collisions and character animations. There are plenty of combat encounters that are just annoying to get through in any of the very welcome difficulty levels because of this reason. It feels like with some more time in the oven this could have been fixed, as the bones of the system seem really solid and fun to play.

Easily the best Star Wars game in a long time. A solid foundation that I hope the sequels build upon.