NOTE: easily one of the best Star Wars games in the markets, a lot of improvements and new features comper to Jedi Fallen Order, and game's performance isn't bad but not perfect either (mostly smooth)

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☑ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☑ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ 9 / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

The game is great but even after all this time is not optimized at all. It freezes, drops are always there, and it really breaks the immersion.

I think in terms of the game-play this is an excellent sequel to 'Fallen order', with refinements to the combat, platforming and exploration. I won't go into much detail here, since this is pretty pointless to pick up if if you haven't already played the first game, and if you liked the first then you'll like this.

It follows the mantra of "bigger and better" but I'm not quite convinced that pans out here, as it does have some flaws. The combat certainly has more depth and remains fun, while the traversal options are expanded upon and nicely integrated into the environmental puzzles.

Where it isn't perhaps as ambitious, or works as well, is in the set-pieces and boss-battles. My memory of 'Fallen Order' is a bit hazy by now, but the sequel seems to have fewer set-pieces albeit those that are here are more impressive in their scale. Similarly there are much more "bosses" to fight, but a lot of them tend to be quite samey in tactics and aren't that spectacular.

You simultaneously get a bigger game and better game-play, yet it comes with the expense of most of it being not that memorable. It's still fun and there's still some exhilirating scenes and encounters, but there's a lot more padding too. None of that padding is boring or un-enjoyable, though I'd rather have less content if it meant the rest was all of a super high standard.

At its best this is excellent, at its worst it's good, so I guess I'm just being greedy with the hope that they'd trim off some of the fat and make it all excellent. I imagine that it's quite a costly game to have made even in its current form, so this mild padding is possibly the least expensive way to fill it out. It's also not like this is the only game doing it in this day and age, but gone are the times that a AAA game would be hi-octane from start to finish.

Those are mild gripes compared to the performance. Running in unreal engine 5 this isn't alone in having performance issues, but the huge open locations it takes place in probably don't help matters. I don't have high spec hardware yet could generally hit 60fps in most places, yet one of the worlds it took place in would run anywhere between 40fps to 60. With texture pop-in and occasionally hitting sustained sub-3ofps in locations that ran fine before.

I didn't find it unbearable, at least when it wasn't outright wheezing from the strain, but it doesn't seem to have perfect performance even on much better hardware. And this thing for open-world games doesn't always result in a better game, it's just easier to pad it out with stuff to do than designing a linear action-packed experience. Albeit seemingly at the cost of needing much more processing power to deliver something lesser overall.

Finally: the story....hmmm. Is it good? yes. Is it necessary? Um......noooo. This is a prequel due to it being after Order 66, and so it happens before the time of Luke Skywalker, Leia and Han Solo etc. Which means that although you don't know what will happen to the characters in terms of the game, you do know that nothing has any relevance to the world of Star Wars in general since you've seen events long after this took place.

That worked for 'Andor' because it was so different than most Star Wars media, but here it doesn't work as well due to the presence of someone who makes a certain event not even quite predictable, but pre-ordained lest it breaks canon. What should be an emotional moment is undercut by the fact that it couldn't happen any other way, so this is hamstrung by it taking place in the past.

It wasn't so apparent about 'Fallen Order' because, well, this thing didn't occur in that game, and so it wasn't as much of an issue that it is a prequel narrative. Going ahead with a third game might just further underline how moot it all is, unless they are able to introduce something that feels like it could affect the "modern" Star Wars universe (which is, I don't know, set thirty years later?) otherwise what is the point?

Anyway it's a recommended overall, as it is slick, fun and generally engaging. I just wonder if its all leading up-to being a big bag of nothing like Shadow Of Mordor and every other prequel that adds nothing new to the established time-frame. It's a pleasant but perhaps pointless distraction.