I’ve been playing this. I’m 19 hours into it, and I’m kinda feeling like not playing any more of it.

So I figured I wanted to talk about it a little bit because there’s some fuck going on in this one.

So let’s just go!

The game itself

Cal Kestis is a fucking idiot. So dude’s a Jedi, right? He knows he can use the force to, you know, move things? With his mind? Yeah he knows this, he trained for this. So why does it take him literally 15 hours into the game for him to figure out “hey, maybe I can MOVE SHIT WITH MY MIND” and he finally starts being able to lift enemies in the air and slamming things down on the ground? You’re a fucking Jedi. A decently strong one, as far as pre-Rey shit goes. There’s so much stuff in the game where I kept thinking “why can’t Cal just move this thing up with the force?” because obviously that’s something he’s able to do. Well, the answer was “first he has to randomly for no reason have a flashback where Cere moves things using the force 15 hours into the game”. Fuck off game, do you think everyone playing this game is stupid? Yeah all those things that I figured you could move with the force… TURNS OUT YOU CAN MOVE THEM WITH THE FORCE. So why wait to let me do that?

One thing I really hate about this game is the collectibles. There’s so many fucking collectibles, and almost none of them are worth getting. You’ll go through a decent puzzle or something, into a place that has a collectible, just for it to be a goatee or something you can put on Cal. Or a set of colors to change the look of your lightsaber even if you can’t really notice the color of your lightsaber, ever. But you still gotta do it, in case the reward is actually, like, a skill point or a perk slot or an actual necessary upgrade for progress (you sometimes randomly find those if you explore, I guess the game would usually send you there at some point naturally, but there’s a bunch you can find if you just explore and have the upgrades needed to advance through some places).

It has SO many of those “walking extremely slowly through tight spots” segments that are literally just there to waste your time since they’re not gameplay, or story. Most of the platforming is semi-automatic “just hold the correct direction and press jump when we want you to press jump” which has been shit since… at least the first Uncharted. I also hate the one BIG boss battle that was meant to be this really cool visual spectacle… which you end up doing some of that shitty semi-automatic fake platforming a bunch, and then there’s a cutscene, and then during the cutscene you press the R2 button and win because it wasn’t actually a boss, even though it should’ve been and would’ve been fun to fight.

Otherwise, this is much like the first game. Solid combat, if a bit too easy outside of a few really strong mini-bosses (actually it’s WAY easier than the first game, IMO), the exploration is fine (but would be better if the rewards weren’t dumb) and Bode’s a cool dude that I assume is actually secretly a bad guy because of how he’s written. While it’s mostly fun, the reason I got tired of it is that every new segment felt like exactly the same shit I had just done.

What happened to this PC version?

I think the devs for this game had absolutely no idea how to actually develop a game. Namely, the PC version was a complete afterthought in development, even though PC should always be the lead development platform.

Before I talk about anything, just a reminder on my PC, which features a pretty solid last-gen CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, and a pretty solid “last-gen” video card, the 10GB NVIDIA 3080 (which runs better than most 40-series cards, nice one NVIDIA). It’s pretty nice. Not the best money can buy, but solid.

First issue… Well, no matter how you put your settings, regardless of resolution or quality settings or even FUCKING ray tracing, the framerate gets neither better, nor worse. I was stuck at a somewhat-unstable 85fps, with fairly frequent stutters, no matter my settings. I figured at first that reducing my settings would equal more framerate, as it SHOULD… but that never happened. I have no idea what the fuck’s happening.

Second issue… Well, clearly my PC should run well above 85fps on this game, with the ability to adjust settings to get better or worse framerate, with better or worse visuals. But there’s actually a very good reason (actually a very bad reason on the dev’s part) that it doesn’t. And that reason is: The devs have no idea that computers have something called a “CPU”. They just don’t know. Running this game using MSI Afterburner to monitor framerate and temperatures, something pretty obvious was happening. GPU usage is pinned at 100%. That’s fine, my PC has good enough air flow for that not to overheat it. CPU usage though, bafflingly, only goes up to, at most, 5%, but usually in the 2% range. The game is literally not using the immense power of my CPU (slight exaggeration). That leads to a bottleneck. In this case a CPU bottleneck, because the CPU barely working is causing the GPU to have to take on as much of that load as possible. Graphics and performance would be better if the CPU actually did things, because it wouldn’t leave the GPU to do everything on its own. I actually don’t get how this happens. I have no way to know if this is consistent with all PC hardware, but I know it’s happening with mine.

Third issue, related to the second one… Sometimes my GPU usage just randomly drops to 40-50%, and as such the game’s framerate goes way down the shitter. Usually that fixes itself pretty quickly… but it’s still pretty annoying and weird that it happens at all.

Overall

So yeah, decently fun game, a lot of issues with it, and the PC version is craptacular… still better than the console version, but still crap. I gave up on it because I feel like a lot of the game was getting a bit too same-y.