Brad Weatherby

Great, if incomplete. Not including quidditch was a crucial error, the map is nowhere near as overwhelming as it should be for this franchise, no tri-wizard tournament, and the Azkaban mission being house locked was also an atrocious choice, ah and not having a story that adapts to player morality choices, missing those, imo KEY, things, but all together a wonderful game that delivers on ALMOST all the magic of the wizarding world. Everything is done tastefully, and to pretty book accurate standards. Nods are made where they should and make sense to be, the player is granted mostly total freedom in a properly populated world. It is also insanely fun if you are only looking at it from a new comers perspective. This game is sure to draw future generation into potter lore and hopefully will get a sequel with the upcoming series remake.

I really wanted to love it, but jeez Ubisoft really gave it to us on this one. The stealth is wonky and unpredictable, the blaster sucks, the ship sucks in dog fights, you’re armor basically never gets better by noticeable measure, the story is entirely too short and skips over major elements/just isn’t written well, the facial motions and character interactions are in no way synced to the dialogue and context, there is almost a complete lack of customization, the graphics are nowhere near up to par(200fps monitor), the missions are repetitive and are not open choice, and the progression, despite the story being so cut and dry that it isn’t really a story, is painfully slow when it comes to Kay and her gear/vehicles. The “map” is baby sized compared to past Ubisoft games and no more open than Jedi survivor or god of war at best, for gods sake it’s an Ubisoft game that only lets you climb designated areas, there just wasn’t a lot to like past the initial excitement, oh and the lack of force characters doesn’t help anything but that’s an afterthought given that starfield is actually better than this game. I’m just kind of astonished that this team put this product on the market and see no way it could be made better given the constraints the map system as whole and the small size of the galaxy already has put on the game, 5 “planets” that are really just maps the size of like maybe just Velen in the Witcher 3 with a small amount of mostly empty orbit space you can “fly” your not great ship in, you can’t walk around the ship in space or fly inside the atmosphere of a planet, the take sequence is ok but still nothing as awesome as no man’s sky, most buildings can’t be entered or explored, “exploration” is very much linear/guided. You’re very restricted as to where you can do what and where you can go at points. The gang system is a great concept but absolutely unfulfilling and seems like another face only feature without any real meat. Loot is basically non existent save for the small things you need to “upgrade” one of your non customizable starter items(ship, gun, speeder) you’re forced to use the whole game and keep the largely the same. Really disappointed I spent $100+ on this, it’s not worth $50. The characters and plot idea are cool but severely underdeveloped so that didn’t matter. Oh and they could’ve changed the name of the empire and basically called it Assassins Creed: Space outlaws mobile, the larger SW universe is basically non existent. 😔

You know why you’re getting this, shame on you rocksteady.

The cut aways for conversations are annoying as hell and break immersion completely, other than that it has made subtle improvements to little things that are appreciated like the chase mechanics, and overall is a great follow up to the first one, but the conversation thing is very bothersome and honestly lazy, let the character interact the way they did in Judgement and don’t cut away and add stupid layover screen conversations, literally no one ever has picked that form of dialogue (or any other for that matter) over natural environment encounters.

I enjoyed every second of this game and see amazing future content potential if Luminous follows through with this super solid, fun foundation and builds on the beautiful open world they built. The main character could tone it down a bit attitude wise but she was great for the most part, as was the main antagonist. All of it was really fun and I can’t wait to see what they do with this amazing, huge, gorgeous, full of life and potential for more world they have created.