Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge - Enhanced Edition

It's sad, I think. That this, along with a whole bunch of other PSVR2 release titles, are being hailed as fresh when they're basically years-old Oculus Quest titles that felt stale even when they first launched. But, but... It is what it is now, and along with Horizon: Call of the Mountain, Moss II, Gran Turismo 7, Tetris Effect, Rez VR and a host of other games, I've spent some time on Batuu and feel pretty ready to hand out some sort of rating for Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge - Enhanced Edition.

As I said, this is a Quest 2 game that is over two years old, plus the Last Call expansion that has been baked into a single game and polished a bit, in a few places. A bit of graphics here, some haptic effects against the skull, some extra effects there, some better tracing here and wham! It's a launch title for PSVR2. The set-up is straightforward; you're an unnamed droid mechanic whose ship crash lands on Batuu and from here you drop right into a grand adventure based on dialogue written by a seven year old. I'm not kidding when I call the dialogue sequences and story in general lousy in this game, something that feels super remarkable (still) considering ILM and Lucasarts were involved in its development.

The dialogue in this game, in addition to being rotten to the core, is performed by over-the-top sketch comedians such as Bobby Moynihan from Saturday Night Live, and here we find conversations and exchanges in the same tone as the things Jar Jar Binks blurts out, something that I think drags this game down quite a bit. It becomes dull, tedious, lame and doesn't fit into the Star Wars world that I like (New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Rogue One, Mandalorian) and it's also impossible to push past any of the dialogue sequences, making the opening hours pure torture. Then it gets better and Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge - Enhanced Edition improves, but it's never great.

All of the levels are ultra-linear, almost reminiscent of old-school shooter corridors, and for you as a player it's all about using various laser-based Star Wars weapons to take down hundreds of enemies. The game mechanics are clever and the haptic feedback built into PSVR2 helps create a more immersive gameplay experience than the Oculus version ever managed, but it doesn't save Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge - Enhanced Edition as the action parts quickly become monotonous and the enemies constantly come across as dull.

The graphics also feel old. The design of course oozes Star Wars and there are effects such as the laser shots lighting up parts of Batuu that are nice but on the whole it is of course noticeable that this is old cabinet food that has just been repackaged and released for PSVR2. It again feels sad that there really is a lack of fresh, new, ambitious blockbuster games for the PSVR2 now that it's rolling out and that the draws to this VR headset are old Quest titles. Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge - Enhanced Edition is certainly not something I want to play again, nor is it an adventure that I feel is representative of what PSVR2 as a technology is capable of.