Recent reviews by Mystic Exarch

I don't understand the hype for this game. Its got a very generic "starship troopers" space sci-fi aesthetic to it which I just find very boring. It reminds me a lot of Starfield and the near-future "nasapunk" vibe. Lots of sleek gunmetal gray. The planets are pretty boring too. Usually just procedurally generated, empty, wide-open moon-like rocks and craters as far as the eye can see.

Then there's the micro-transactions. Many claim they're not necessary and they're cosmetic only but this is not true. You have to progress down an "unlock track" that requires purchasing a certain number of items before unlocking more items. This means you're wasting a lot of credits buying cosmetic crap instead of unlocking new weapons. The micro-transactions speed up this process a lot so it definitely is "pay to win" and not cosmetic only.

This issue is even more obvious when you look at the fact that the main way the game thinks of making things more interesting is to just throw waves of more heavily armored enemies at you. At early levels, you don't have the right guns that have armor piercing to actually damage these enemies, so you get wrecked by them over and over until you either suffer it out, get lucky and match with a team of other players to carry you for a while, or spend real money. Then you unlock some of the better guns and this makes things a lot easier. I expected something more like Darktide or Vermintide where there are radically different special enemy types that serve different tactical roles. But its mostly "small and attacks you in melee" and "bigger and badder and armored and attacks you in melee".

The stratagems play a pretty big role in this too. There is a pretty clear "meta" to which strategems are the best and if you look online you will easily see most of them are garbage. A select few seem to be required to deal with things like those heavily armored enemies and if you don't have that stuff, you're just screwed. There's no way of knowing this meta ahead of time and if you don't look it up and just buy whatever you think is cool, you can get stuck in a bad situation where you can only grind lower difficulties that take a lot longer to progress, leading to the game feeling very frustrating and repetitive.

Add onto this the lack of RPG mechanics like talents or gear score upgrades and the appeal of grinding up a character in this game pretty much vanishes. I'm at a point now where playing just doesn't feel rewarding. Darktide is doing the same thing right now but has a lot more complexities to it, more stuff to grind and improve, more enemy variety, better level design, more interesting aesthetics, etc.

Lastly, I couldn't play this game for a single session without encountering glitches. The worst one seems to have to do with closing enemy bug holes (this never worked for me no matter how many grenades I chucked). Also weird stuff like the camera freezing while my character moving around in second person, getting stuck while using objects, etc. Its also pretty laggy at times, which shouldn't happen since I have a high end PC and a solid internet connection.

One thing a lot of fans cite is the ever-changing galaxy map and how it creates this shared world campaign. Its a neat concept, but most of the time, I don't really feel like this means anything? Maybe if they had a greater range of events like one time 100 player battles, invasion of super earth, bugs boarding spaceship, etc. it would be more interesting. But as far as I've seen, its mainly "ok, the bugs/bots are attacking this sector now. Go grind regular missions in this sector until they are all dead." Then repeat next week. Its not as dynamic as advertised and very disappointing.

Skip this one and play Darktide instead.

Despite being a big fan of Blade Runner and other fiction about "androids developing human emotions" and the like, I couldn't get invested in this game.

The glaring issue for me is the gameplay. This game feels like a directionless arthouse mishmash of many different genres. Bullet hell, hack n' slash, souls like, boss rush, sidescroller, platformer, twinstick shooter, jrpg, and more. It doesn't really focus on any one of these genres enough to succeed at what that genre does well and the constant clashing/switching back and forth of these genres is really jaring. I don't mind a little genre bending but this is just too experimental.

For example, one moment you might be fighting with an over the shoulder camera, then suddenly its a sidescroller. But you're having to now fight a boss like this despite none of the prior bosses doing this so you're scrambling to figure out how to dodge attacks without the 3 dimensional movement you're used to in the rest of the game. Or you're trying to control the shooting in top down mode but the controls suck so you can barely hit anything. Or you're enjoying this epic setpiece of a boss battle just to suddenly start playing a hacking minigame that looks like an arcade game from the 90's.

This happened to me several boss battles in (which by the way, have terrible pacing, basically just one after another). I decided to quit out and try again later. When I came back, I discovered my last save was an entire boss battle behind because I hadn't used a save station since then, even though each death I had against that second boss was putting me back at a much more recent save point. The game tells you it doesn't autosave but getting a reload right before a boss battle seems a lot like autosaving to me, so it should be completely understandable to be confused and upset about this. What a crappy save system. What's even the point except adding extra frustration? Just let the player save freely. And if you're going to claim to be a super gritty "manual save only" style, actually commit to it.

And that's when I decided to stop playing. The gameplay is nothing special even when its not doing weird stuff like this, so I just didn't feel like replaying the content I'd already beaten. I'm not an action game expert or anything, but I'm pretty sure most games have different combos and movesets you can do. In this all you get is a basic dodge, light attacks, heavy attacks, and a gun that does jack. That's about it. I found a few others by randomly mashing keys but I'm not certain if that's it or if there's more. Either way, the game doesn't tell you, and all the upgrades/improvements are just super slow incremental upgrades like +2% blade damage or whatnot. Boring.

Then there's the level issue. Enemies aggressively scale with story progress, but it doesn't seem like a well thought out system because by the time I'm level 12, most enemies are level 25 or more. They are still beatable, but the scaling makes them bullet sponges that take forever to kill. I'm hacking them apart for what feels like minutes. And this applies to bosses, too. It feels like I'm fighting a raid boss in an MMO or something with how huge their healthbar is. This gives combat a very repetitive and slow feel which is the opposite of what you want in an action game.

And I don't even really understand the point of the level scaling since levels don't seem to do anything but give you bigger numbers. There's no talents or anything, this is only vaguely an action RPG. The only thing levels do is seem to gatekeep bosses behind grinding enemies for hours, which isn't easy to do because the overland map isn't exactly full of enemies grind on. I could run around for 30 minutes clearing a whole giant map and maybe killing a few hundred guys for some measly XP. But even if the grind wasn't so ridiculous, I still don't see the point in this kind of leveling system except raising stats for the sake of raising stats.

The best thing about the game is the aesthetic. I was only mildly invested in the world, narrative, and characters because the writing feels pretty sparse and mediocre. I loved the aesthetic though, its very unapologetically punk anime "rule of cool". I just eventually realized that's the only thing I like about the game, and the rest of it feels like a chore.

When you think of Grey Knights, do you imagine 8-foot tall genetically modified 2-ton demigods getting demolished by poxwalkers and cultists with modern day ballistics? (You know, those guys that 4 regular inmates can kill by the thousands in Darktide?) If the answer is no, congratulations, you're a sane person.

Seriously, this is utterly absurd. Its laughably goofy and insulting to see these legendary warriors of warhammer lore getting treated like they're common guardsmen. Actually, you know what? There was a mission featuring actual guardsmen and they dealt/received just about as much damage as my space marines. If that doesn't tell you how terrible this game is, then nothing will.

Now sure, I could have lowered the difficulty. But you know what? You can't change the difficulty once you started a save file. That is ridiculous, and I'm sick and tired of games doing this because there is literally no reason for it. Why make the player redo hours of content just to adjust their experience with a single player game they paid for? Even then, I'm not sure replaying even on easy would be all that fun due to the many other issues this game has.

For example, that stupid deterministic "no rolls to hit/save" system that so many modern TRPGs keep insisting on. I don't see the appeal of this at all because it makes game play a whole lot less dynamic and strategic. If every round you're guaranteed to take some damage no matter what, it really doesn't matter how strong your characters are. They're going to fall to sheer numbers eventually. (And boy, does this game throw ridiculous amounts of enemies at you). And when they do, they'll take -4 or -8 hit points for literal in-game months because I guess you're punished for not finishing missions with full health? Which should be logically impossible with the aforementioned deterministic system, I'll remind you. If they get knocked to 0, they get a critical wound and take even longer to recover. I lost all my marines after several medium difficulty missions and had to wait, ignoring missions for months so my units could heal. But by then, I was forced into an "extreme" difficulty mission. So much for astartes superhuman healing...

That said, there were some times that attacks seemed to miss or not work on both sides, and it was never clear why. Sometimes cover seemed to help and other times it didn't. The rules are really not explained that well at all because I didn't know what was going on half the time. What do "hobbled" or "disrupted" status effects mean? No clue, because there is no in-game glossary to actually explain the ruleset.

Not that the system is very complex, or anything. Basically you've just got shoot, move, take cover, reload, etc. That's it. Not even special cleave attacks or anything like that. Sometimes you can get spells, but they aren't very impressive or interesting. They usually just inflict some kind of vague status effect in an area, or do +1 damage or something. The rest of the upgrades in the progression tree are boring stuff like +1 armor or +2 willpower as well. When D&D 5e has more tactical complexity and options than a TRPG, you know you have a serious issue.

To the game's credit, the campaign scenario presented is very cool. I like the writing, characters, atmosphere, sound, visuals, etc. But then again most Warhammer games get that right, this is nothing new. But like many quick cash grabs to exploit the IP, the actual gameplay is terrible.

I didn't hate Mechanicus but I didn't love it either. It has a lot of the same flaws as this game, but Mechanicus is still miles better and more complex than Demonhunters though. If they wanted to make a very gritty game, they should have either just used regular humans as the subjects or sent the Grey Knights up against bigger enemies. Playing super slow and hiding behind cover just does not fit the power fantasy of being a Grey Knight.

I rage quit after the screen got stuck during an enemy turn in which a suicidal chaos marine somehow set off a crazy explosion that insta-killed my squad.

I definitely can't recommend this game at full price. Its extremely short, to the point that I'm almost done after 4 hours. But even if you can get it for 6 or so bucks like I did, its not a question of money really but whether you think its worth your time.

Carrion presents an interesting concept, certainly. A reverse horror game where you're the monster? Sign me up. But the execution on that concept is rather poor, in my opinion.

You'd expect a game like this to mean that you, as the monster, are going to be some kind of unstoppable killing machine. Especially when you start unlocking larger and larger forms. But even though I'm a mass of tentacles and eyes and jaws the size of a house, I still get melted down by enemies with guns in a few seconds. Even worse than that, they have literally infinite bullets and never need to reload. Later on guys with shields start showing up, and those are also infinite. No damage threshold or counter, nothing. The humans in this game are demigods, avatars of war and death incarnate that oppress and terrify the player with their sheer badassery,

There are also indestructible turrets and not even mind controlling a human enemy and pounding them with a thousand bullets is enough to destroy them. A tiny helicopter drone can't be grabbed by tentacles because of the spinning blades, I guess? Even though a tentacle monster could easily grab it from the underside or something.

Ok, I get what the devs are going for. They still want it to feel like a survival horror game where the enemies are stronger than you and you need to rely on wits and stealth to survive, almost more like a puzzle game. I don't agree with that design and I think that totally ruins the power fantasy of being this crazy monster, but alright. At least if the goal was to create an oppressive and nerve-wracking atmosphere, the game succeeded in that. But I wouldn't call that a reverse horror game by any stretch.

So then what is the point of getting larger forms with more health and abilities designed for directly confronting enemies if none of that stuff works well? I finally started using the smaller forms and relying on stealth, only for the game to throw me into massive death battle arenas filled with mechs and drones that close off until everything is dead like this is an arena shooter or something. This gets really annoying towards the end of the game and you're dying over and over. Its not clear what kinds of abilities work on what enemies because none of it follows real life logic, and the game doesn't explain its moon logic to you either.

All of this could have been salvaged by a decent story, but there isn't one. Maybe there's some grand revelation about what you are and why you're here at the very end, but for me its not worth getting through. It would have been nice if stuff like that was spread out through the levels, maybe some terminals you can read or conversations between scientists to overhear. But there's nothing like in the game. Disappointing.

Its a completely stripped down and streamlined version of DA:O that aggressively tries as hard as it can be to not actually be an RPG. They did away with skills, moved crafting to vendors, speed up the combat, made it more hack n' slash, implemented a dialogue wheel, made most companion equipment not actually changeable, and more.

What annoys me the most though is that even as a hack n'slash game, it could have still been fun. But they designed combat and encounters in the worst and most lazy way possible. Every encounter seems to have 2-6 waves of generic enemies that don't use special abilities and require tactics. At most, you might get one "bandit captain" and then literally 15-20 bandits that spawn magically out of nowhere. Its a quantity over quality approach that leaves most fights feeling like a slog. Imagine playing a tabletop RPG, and instead of facing more complex enemies as you level up, the DM just keeps throwing more waves of level 1 goblins at you.

You're sitting there watching your mage (in my case) auto-attack, then occasionally casting a spell. Each spell has a cool down in addition to a mana cost, so even if you have mana available, you still can't cast that spell two times in a row. Why? If its tactical to the situation, and I have the resources for it, why not let me do it? Because the developers arbitrarily decided so, I guess. This gives combat a very video-gamey feel. This system works in mass effect because there isn't a point-based resource system, so cooldowns are how they limit power usage. Mass effect leans into being an action RPG in this way, but DA2 feels like its trying to be both that and a tactical real time with pause system. The result is a mismatched clash of both styles that bears the strengths of neither and the weaknesses of both.

For example, combat feels both very fast and very slow at the same time. The animations are quick but as I said before there is a lot of waiting around, which feels slow. A lot of enemies are damage sponges and you're incentivized to focus on DPS builds rather than support/persist play-styles in order to make fights not tediously long. Sure, you can turn down the difficulty, but it makes fights even more tedious because they then become a question of when you'll finally kill everything, not if. On higher difficulties, it is very easy to get swarmed and overwhelmed by sheer weight of spongy enemies, no matter how good your tactics are.

And perhaps all of this would have still been ok if the narrative and world were interesting. But no, the entire game takes place in a single city. You revisit the same areas over and over again, lots of loading screens and fast traveling. In DA:O each area was a unique, long, and elaborate dungeon. In DA2, you'll visit multiple identical caves (or even the same literal cave) for different quests. Asset re-usage is rampant.

The quest design is likewise dull. "Go here and kill this stuff, no go turn the quest in, now go back to the same spot and do it again." Are you kidding me? You may be thinking "well that's just side quests right?" and yes, main quests are definitely more bespoke. But the problem is that the main plot is extremely boring and gives you no reason to care. In DA:O you're the last Grey Warden, trying to navigate politics and assemble armies from different factions to save the world. Here, you're some random refugee doing tedious busy work to fund an expedition because...I honestly don't know. There's a profound lack of focus and direction.

You don't even get to create a custom character aside from gender and class. You can't choose any race other than human, and there are no origin stories, which was one of the coolest things about DA:O. It really made you more attached to your character and provided more foundation for who you were. Instead you're playing as Hawke, and the game speedruns your backstory so quickly that it really doesn't even matter.

Go ahead and skip this one. You can look up a plot synopsis on youtube or something and get the same effect.

Its a stripped down version of an RTS. No base building, workers, or resources. Unit and upgrade variety are very low for each faction. Combat is also an overly simplistic rock paper scissors system. You can barely field any units to the battlefield.

Because of that, it feels less like a strategy game and more like micromanagement. You have to constantly micromanage your army composition while also spreading out your units over an entire map, because resources are based on controlling nodes. So you're running in circles to constantly defend your stuff. Lose a command point, go take it back, which takes 5 minutes. In the meantime, another control point got taken so you run back to retake that one too, and then you just lost the one you rebuilt. Rinse and repeat. Its a very tedious back and forth tug-of-war situation that makes matches feel like a slog.

I think what they were trying to do is make an RTS that's more thoughtful. Less focus on maximizing APM, predefined build orders, and massing units into a mindless death ball and attack moving like SC2. That's why the units move and fight a lot slower. And I totally respect that goal, because SC2 combat is lame.

However, slowness does not make a thoughtful RTS game by itself. It can certainly help, but its only one piece of the puzzle. Without bases and other RTS elements, all you're doing is micromanaging the units, making the slow speed of the game a detriment rather than an advantage. If there was more stuff to do in your base, more of an emphasis on macro-management, this would actually complement the slower paced combat very well. But since the combat is all there is, it gets very finicky and boring, fast.

Another problem is there only being one match type, which is control all the objectives. I always hate this in RTS games because its such an abstract victory condition. If I have a much better economy and army strength than the AI, and more control points captured, obviously my forces would eventually win, so why does the enemy still win because a lone orc was scratching its ass on some random rock that the developers decided was important because reasons?

The story is nothing great either. Maybe if it was on par with the quality of WC3 it could have supported the shallow game-play, but its nothing special.

A perfect example of why I wish Steam allowed ambivalent reviews.

What the game does well: the writing has improved drastically from Original Sin. Granted, the bar there was on the floor but I still feel the need to commend Larian for this. Characters are no longer either absurdly clownish, or sounding like a 7th grader with a thesaurus trying to meet a word requirement for an essay due in five hours.

The narrative is excellent as well. The main plot of the game is complex, with all these little interwoven pieces that come together beautifully and draw on the the rich lore of Forgotten Realms. You get many huge choices to make that can drastically affect your run, such as who to ally with, kill, etc. A lot of factions are at play and NPCs all have unique goals that intersect in surprising ways. Even side quests are tangentially related: you might stumble across a sidequest that seems a generic, straighforward objective that has nothing to do with the main story, but eventually affects one of your main quests by giving you new information, new paths, taking you somewhere you were supposed to be anyway, etc. There are multiple ways to end up getting the same information or reach the same point and as a result you never truly feel lost (except for act 3, more on that later).

The voice acting is mostly fantastic, as is the audio/visual design. D&D feels very well represented here in a high budget way, giving it a more mature and refined look than the vast majority of pop D&D content.

What the game does poorly: Act 3. This is where things start to fall apart. Quests don't have markers, which is actually good because it forces the player to use their brain and engage with the world and I wish the rest of the game was like this too. But the problem is, there are no contextual clues to point to certain objectives. Expect to have to use a guide to look things up constantly in this section. There are also points where a certain choice seems idiotic, like it will lead to an obvious failure, when it fact that is counter intuitively the one correct way to go. Forget branching narrative paths. In most of acts 1 and 2 I could talk my way through any situation, but yet in act 3 there were times in which I was forced to fight, or steal, or some other specific solution.

According to what I've read, this is partially because there are HUGE chunks of story that are completely missing if you played a custom character (which I imagine 99% of people will immediately chose without thinking about it). These gaps are filled in, though if you play as Dark Urge. So what is Dark Urge? In short: the reason the game was ruined for me.

I spent 100 hours playing a generic nobody of a custom character with no backstory, no connection to the main plot, chaperoning and playing second fiddle to NPC companions with rich backstories and ties to the main plot. When in reality I could have had all of that for myself as well if I'd chosen Dark Urge, who does have a backstory and ties to the main plot. Thionk of it like the Bhaalspawn from BG1 and 2. Grew up in Candlekeep, orphan, mentor Gorion, friend Imoen, all that good stuff? Yeah, that.

The game tells you none of this. Instead, the character creation screen makes it look like Dark Urge is another origin character like Shadowheart or Gale when in reality they are the protagonist of the game AND fully customizable. In fact, Larian released a statement saying you shouldn't play Dark Urge on the first play-though, which I find to be nearly criminal.

So now I'm stuck wondering if I should replay 100+ hours trying to delicately recreate the same outcomes as my original play-though, all while knowing the important story spoilers that kind of make role-playing pointless anyway, or just finish my run so I at least don't have to wait 100 hours to see the ending for a run I already spent so much time on. But then that would just spoil things even more for me.

Character creation used to be fairly simple in CRPGs. You were expected to make a custom character AND be the focal point of the story as the only option. I wonder if Larian has even played BG1 and 2, let alone other foundational classics like Fallout.

So to summarize: I think you should buy and play BG3. Just play as Dark Urge. If you do that, the game will be mostly fantastic, a solid B or maybe even a B+. But with what happened to me, I just feel extremely resentful and bitter to the point where I just want to uninstall the game and maybe go play Rogue Trader instead.

Just really not a fan of the machine combat. That's why I decided to stop playing. The equipment sandbox (settings traps, using different kind of arrows, etc.) is perfectly fine. In fact that's what drew me into the game initially. I was really excited to use them tactically to take down different types of machines.

The problem is that every machine past the first few weak types is a bullet sponge. You have to knock of their armor slowly, pumping arrows into them and doing only 1 damage at a time, so you can eventually deal more damage (60-90), or deal reasonable damage immediately with a hard to land critical hit. They can also kill Aloy in a few hits which I guess makes sense for giant machines, granted. Ok, so play tactically right? Fine. But the worst part is that once you aggro one machine, you aggro them all in a whole area. So even if you use your items intelligently to take down one machine, by the time you're halfway done using traps/bombs to stun it with an elemental weakness, run in and get a critical hit, then retreat, you got anywhere from 2-10 or more machines all swarming you at once before you even killed the first one.

And its a shame too, because I really liked the setting as well. It reminds me of Numenera or other science fantasy settings, a really underappreciated genre. There was a way to make this concept work too. Just put less machines on the map. spread them out more, don't make them fight in packs, and give more XP per machine kill. That would make individual machines more rewarding and fun to fight. Instead the game wants you to just avoid the combat, I guess? Which makes it a pain in the ass to go anywhere, because the machines are literally all over the entire map.

Putting the game on easier difficulties doesn't really fix the problem either. Sure, it makes machines beatable, but then you're just cartoonishly watching Aloy shrug off mortal wounds from a swarm of machines like Wonder Woman. Not exactly fun either. So its a deeper design flaw.

Then you got all the generic open world quest design where you do boring fetch quests for NPCs, don't make any choices, etc. Its your typical side quests for busy work/collectibles.

I was mildly invested in the story and wanted to learn more about the setting, but it isn't worth playing for that. Especially when the voice acting and writing is so poor in a lot of places.

One thing I will say is that the visuals are amazing. Proof positive modern games don't need experimental military hardware to look amazing while also running well. AAA developers should take note for that, but maybe not everything else in the game.

You have to understand that game is AAA first and Star Wars at a distant second. Its chock full of repetitive, generic AAA stuff we've seen in hundreds of other games. Stuff like platforming, pointless collectibles designed to pad out progression, janky combat, surface deep pseudo RPG systems, and a terrible story. I'm surprised there weren't hacking minigames and stealth added as well.

To start with, the platforming gets old very quickly. Its got wall running, jumping, sliding, etc. but to such an extent it feels more like a Tomb Raider game. Or a Disneyland amusement park. Its a bit hard to take a game seriously when you're bouncing all around the place like fun house and doing stuff that would be impossible even for jedi. And to make matters worse, it sometimes doesn't work: Cal lets go of an edge for no reason, doesn't grab it at all, etc.

Combat has a similar issue. Its not responsive, Cal often doesn't do what you want him to. But I think it was actually by design. If you take any amount of damage, Cal gets stun and loses his action. Even if you spent force points on it. You still lose the points, but the action doesn't connect. And he gets stunned for so long that by the time you recover, you get hit by another attack. Its essentially "dodge every attack perfectly, or get stunlocked" just like Dark Souls. This is what made me hate the combat. Its 5 minutes of rolling and blocking, make 1 attack, then repeat. Combine this with how ridiculously tanky bosses and certain elite enemies are (having a second healthbar you have to damage just to open them up for 1 hit at a time) and it makes combat feel like a slog. Fortunately, you can cheese it sometimes with force powers, but you only get 3 of them, which is incredibly lame, and they're progress gated like all other unlocks.

So you're not actually doing "builds" per se, even though that defeats the point of having a skill system. I hate this in action games that pretend to be ARPGs, but there is no build diversity. So instead it just feels like mandatory grinding. You're expected to unlock every incremental bonus because the game is balanced around it, so its juts action with the "RPG" being extra steps.

The most annoying thing by far though is that Cal's lightsaber is basically a pool noodle. You can hit enemies multiple times, and they just get red scratches. Even when they finally die, they don't get cut it half or anything (at least the human ones), just fall bloodlessly to the ground. It doesn't feel like you're actually a Jedi with a lightsaber, which ruins the Star Warts vibe completely. I'm guessing they did these for family friendly reasons or some nonsense because the Disney Overlords said so, which is even more annoying.

Lastly, lets talk about the story. Here's a spoiler warning, but the story is so thin and nonsensical it really doesn't matter. Anyway, the main plot goes something like this: you meet a robot that had its memory wiped, except for a hologram of a dead Jedi telling you there is a secret vault built by ancient, extinct aliens with a holocron in it containing a map of force sensitive children. You then have to go from planet to planet, randomly unlocking the droids memory in random places for seemingly no reason, until eventually you find out there is a mcguffin that opens the vault.

How did the aliens know about the force sensitive children in the present day? Don't know. Why did they record and protect this information? Don't know. Why did they hide the key to the vault on another planet? Don't know. Who were these aliens and how did they get wiped out? Don't know. How did the dead jedi learn about this? Don't know. Why did he wipe the droid's memory and send us on pointless quests? Don't know. And so on...I mean, there is literally a part where you're exploring an ancient tomb, and the only interesting thing that happens there is "oh look, these people drew trees on their walls. Guess that means they want to Kashyyyk because its the only planet that has trees amirite? Now you have to go there too." Remember how cool the Rakatan empire was in KOTOR? Yeah, so do I.

Steer clear of this one. Its corporate Disney garbage with the same level of writing ability displayed in their litany of crappy reboots and endless spin off series like Ahsoka. Replay KOTOR instead.

Its trying to be like classic FE games, but completely streamlines most of the mechanics, stripping away the tactical depth that makes those games interesting and fun.

For example, there is no inventory management aside from healing items and buff items. Each character automatically carries 4 weapons of only one type that they always have access to and never break. Red/power, blue/criticals, green/accuracy, and yellow/speed. So combat is less about preparation and equipping the right units with the right items, and more like a puzzle that solves itself. You can just scroll through each weapon as you're deciding which one to use on that particular enemy and look at the stats. There will always be an objectively right answer. For example, if the yellow one is the only one that lets you attack twice, you will usually pick that if the damage adds up to more when multiplied by 2. If the blue, green, and yellow ones have two attacks, and your hit is close to 100% on all three, just use the blue one. Its not challenging while also being tedious. They should have had units able to equip multiple weapon types (and set up weapon ranks) with things like "spears counter horses, swords counter infantry" etc. That would have actually been tactical, instead of just juggling random numbers.

This also makes the weapon upgrade system very frustrating. You just get "tokens" that you can spend to upgrade each character's weapon colors individually. This even carries through each of their class upgrades in case the weapons change. But this just further makes everything feel streamlined and generic. Also, it makes it very hard to pick which color to upgrade. You kind of need all 4 colors to be upgraded, since the best one is really going to depend on the situation.

And then on top of this, the weapon triangle is very confusing. You have an "advantage" or "disadvantage" system that seems to be somewhat loosely based on armor type vs. weapon damage type instead of the classic swords > axes > lances > swords system. I was never able to figure this out through and it always just seemed kind of random which units were bad or good against others. Sometimes advantage or disadvantage would matter a lot, or sometimes it wouldn't matter at all. There is an in-game manual, but it explains this aspect rather poorly.

The mission design is very boring. Most fights are open arenas with very few terrain features where the objective is just "kill all". It makes fights turn into mindless, slow slugfest where the best strategy is to deathball all your units into a pile to protect the squishes and then proceed methodically. Healers get infinite uses as well, so there really is no reason not to play slow and boring, especially when the enemy outnumbers you 5 to 1 and will easily pick off your weakest characters immediately, giving them permanent injuries that reduce their stats.

And don't forget the UI. Its clunky. Most things are based on mouse but then randomly some will be keyboard. For example, the weapon scroll. You have to use the arrow keys, even though everything else about attacking requires using the mouse to click. Because of this, combined with the fact the game doesn't have a tutorial, I didn't even know there were different weapon colors until a few missions in.

Lastly, the story is pretty bad. You get recruited to fight a war, but spend a bunch of time goofing around fighting bandits and rebels. Some wizard shows up looking for an "aspect" and then disappears. Is this explained? No. Now back to fighting a war. There is no sense of pacing and getting the player used to the characters. Which are also pretty dull. Their main dialogue is mostly juvenile and expository. There are supports, but they're all things like "What's up, oh you like beans? Cool. Bye." For a game that focuses so much on the visual novel aspect (even to the point of having beautiful portraits of characters) this is an odd choice.

Skip this one.