This game does show a lot of promise in certain areas, but is an utter failure overall due to extremely deep issues with game design, underlined by very poor execution in regards to a lot of it. Honestly, this gives me serious Daikatana vibes.
The balance is bad. Guns do tiny amounts of damage, the enemy HP is generally huge and everything is spongier than a sponge factory. Despite theThis game does show a lot of promise in certain areas, but is an utter failure overall due to extremely deep issues with game design, underlined by very poor execution in regards to a lot of it. Honestly, this gives me serious Daikatana vibes.
The balance is bad. Guns do tiny amounts of damage, the enemy HP is generally huge and everything is spongier than a sponge factory. Despite the levels being littered with resources, you will routinelly run out of ammo and grenades and have to rely on your pistol which recharges ammo. Accuraccy of the guns is also pretty crap, you can reliably hit stuff only at very close range, with the exception of the sniper rifle. This is not challenging skill-wise, it is artificial difficulty - you do not have to target specific parts or use specific weapons which do more damage (with the exception of one mini-boss type), the enemies are not smart or even all that dangerous - they just soak up a crap ton of damage before going down and more than half of your shots will miss just for lulz, that's the only difficulty the game has.
The AI is utterly retarded - your enemies are dumb, aside from places where they are very specifically spawned and sometimes restricted from moving, they all just dumbly move towards you. Once could perhaps forgive it for the basic battle droids as it is lore friendly, perhaps, but even non droid enemies do this. Special category of stupidity are the several types of enemies who can fly or jump around - who will fly away from attacking you or jump away to show that they can - even when it literally saves your life and allows you to recharge shields and then kill them. The AI cannot even use basic manouvers like encirclement, despite outnumbering you literally all the time. A lot of the time they even forget to shoot / attack. and just run up to you and stand in front of you.
The same applies to your companions, who are presented to you as these specialist - a demolition specialist, a hacker and a sniper / CQC, leaving you as the leader and assault / heavy weapons specialist. But you and your bot friends can do everything without any contraints. Your hacker will snipe, your sniper will plant demolition charges and your demo guy will hack doors. Your hacker is down? No need to revive him to get a door open, just send the sniper to hack it while you revive him to save time, etc. - Oh, and sniping, for the bots, is also tied to very specific interactive pieces of cover. They look like any other piece of cover, but have special sign hovering above them, so you know you can send your guys to snipe from there. Most of them are not well placed for a sniper overwatch... Oh, also, some objects which are marked as "enemy", but cannot by destroyed by shooting, your guys will infinitely shoot at while ignoring actual enemies around them. Some of these can be blown up by planting charges at them - sned your guy to do it, and you will see him, more often than not, slowly crouch walk to it, shooting it all the time, doing no damage to it, before snapping into the "planting charge" animation. At least they have infinite ammo (and more HP/shields than you, because the devs knew their AI is crap). Also, in some levels, they just refuse to move. They reach some room, and just stay there. You give them a specific order, they will walk from the other side of the map to do it, and then walk back.
Now, finally to the padding - the reason why you have locked doors that you need to unlock everywhere and spend half a minute each time, and why killing a droid that takes 3 shots in the movie and in the TV series takes one and a half magazine, is that the game, without all of that, would probably be 3 hours long, perhaps around 3.5-4 with all of the cutscenes. This way, it has around 7-8, I would say. I finished it in 5.5 because I could not take it anymore, and about 90% into the first location, I rebalanced the HP pools... It really feels like someone play tested the game like a month before release, found out it is way too short, so they ramped up the HP pools 3-5x (no joking, for you to have a good time, you will have to reduce the enemy HP that many times, and you will still have a few engagements where you will run out of ammo by the end of them), but it was not enough, so they put door breachign everywhere. Then, they found out you won't really be progress in some places where you do not have some / all of your bots, so they just said "screw it, let everyone do everything".… Expand
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