A game I saw a bit of when it came out about a year ago was Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Now I've not really been engaged with Star Wars for the past couple of years, for Last Jedi shaped reasons, but this piqued my interest. Recently I saw its price had dropped enough for me to snatch it up.

Whatever I may think about the gameplay, the experience of playing it was not a smooth one from a technical standpoint. All the way through the game I had weird little graphics bugs, as some of these screenshots can attest. There was also a ton of frame rate stuttering, and even complete pauses in order to load new assets. Later on in the game I even started to get hard crashes, kicking me out of the game altogether. This crash problem was exacerbated by the fact that there is no way to skip cutscenes. I had to watch a very lengthy one just outside the tomb on Dathomir three times, because the damn game crashed twice as I tried to get back to my ship with a bunch of zombie Nightsisters on my tail.
And this was on a PS4 Pro after some patches. I dread to think of the experience base PS4 players had during the game's release window.

The best things about the game were the story and characters, which I quite liked. Though I'm beginning to wonder exactly how many more Jedi will be added to the ever growing list of Order 66 survivors, when the original trilogy made it seem like only Obi-Wan and Yoda made it. In this game alone we learn that Cal and Cere are still alive, and that does not even count Malicos and the two Inquisitors, who all used to be Jedi as well.

When in battle, sometimes I would feel awesome, and sometimes I would get incredibly irritated. That's because the combat in this felt more tactical, forcing me to be patient and focused, rather than allowing me to just run around swinging my lightsaber like I would have preferred. The reason for this is that there was no attack cancellation, so I couldn't swing my saber, then immediately change my mind to quickly block or dodge an incoming attack from another enemy. This kind of combat may work for some people, and in other games, but I've never really liked it, and it makes no sense when playing as a Jedi who is supposed to have split-second reactions. I mean, if I can see an attack coming, then surely he can, right?

The level design was also what I can only describe as janky. To get around each environment, you (a Jedi, no less), have to jump and climb all over the place and do all kinds of fancy shit to reach further into the level. But when you get there, there are always simple enemies already populating that area. If Cal had to go through all that trouble to get there, then how in the galaxy did a simple Stormtrooper manage to get there? It was dumb.

As what usually happens when I play a game like this with a controller, I got annoyed at the camera rotate speed, and the fact that I couldn't turn the camera and hit any action buttons at the same time. So out came the KX adapter for another try. For the most part, it worked better than it did for Horizon, as I did not need precise aiming in this game like is required for that game. But in the end, the KX's lack of rebinding meant I still couldn't figure out a comfortable control scheme (and plus I wanted to save my mouse-clicking fingers a bit more), so I switched back to the controller to finish up.

I can see why a lot of people liked the game, but for me it was somewhere in the middle. In conclusion, I would consider the game to be simply "alright", and it has done very little to interest me in anything new Star Wars has to offer.
Some of the older things though...
Yes. I might get back to those at some point...

I played the original Force Unleashed back in early 2010 on the PS3. If I remember right, I quite liked the early parts of the game, but lost interest later on with both the gameplay and the lore, as I didn't like how many Imperial enemies could neutralise your Force powers, when no such enemies existed in the films.

When the sequel came out, it got worse reviews than its predecessor, so I never considered it until I picked it up on sale from GOG about a year ago.

As I'd not completed a game for 7 months, I needed a fairly short game to get through, so went with this one. Well, I'm glad it was a short one, that's all I can say.

For a start, the keyboard and mouse controls that are supposed to be in the game do not work. I read online you have to disable all the controllers in device manager for this to work, but it did nothing for me. So I had to play with the controller, and its incredibly slow camera rotate speed. Urgh.

I also had trouble trying to unlock the frame rate, which in the original game is fixed at 30fps. I found a modified .exe, which did indeed let me run at 60. However, I had a lot of weird bugs and glitches in the game, especially going up elevators, which ended up being the fault of that modified .exe. So in the end I played with the original 30fps locked version of the game. But even that still threw up problems, as the cut scenes seemed to want to run at over 4000fps, and kept stuttering. I had to run RivaTuner to cap those at 30 as well, just to make everything work.

Even after getting it to seemingly run right, and using the original .exe, I still had some glitches and crashes. This was most evident in the level where the rebel fleet turns up at the planet Kamino, and you have to repel Imperial boarders in a hangar. Three times I had to clear that level. The first time, when the game told me to remove the boarding clamps, it crashed. The second time, I killed all the enemies, but the game never told me to remove all the boarding clamps, so I was just stuck in an empty hangar unable to proceed. Pain in the ass.

I really had no fondness for the story or characters in this game either. The original Starkiller at least had some character development. This clone of him is very one note, and very boring. I don't remember what Kota was like in the original game, but his constant orders and irritating tone really pissed me off while getting through this.

I suppose it doesn't really help that I'm really off Star Wars lately, ever since that ridiculously awful Last Jedi spoiled the entire franchise for me.
But at least it's a game done at long last.

But I have managed to install some of my older games, always a fun task on Windows 7, and we recently gave Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds a run out. We used to play the hell out of that game once upon a time, but we really did struggle to get back into it. Yes, we couldn't remember what the hell was going on, but it was just so very slow compared to RTS style games we've played in more recent years. Also, we put it on easy thinking we would need it due to our lack of practise, but we stomped all over the enemy. I'll be quite surprised if we play it again, but hopefully I'll keep some interest in it as I never did the campaign, and could do with going through it.