The contemporary games that Galaxy’s Edge clearly evokes are structured around tech trees and incremental upgrades.
In an experience that’s otherwise jam-packed with features despite its short length, that’s an interesting and elegant decision. Galaxy’s Edge is one of very few modern action games where your character just doesn’t really get more powerful, sitting alongside indie titles like the bullet hell game Furi. Meanwhile, the disposable weapons keep you constantly looking for new equipment. Without any upgrades to help you out, there’s a real sense of accomplishment when your combat skills improve. Its narrative rewards - even small ones like finding collectibles - feel richer because they’re not competing with a mechanical grind. (A few placements are especially awkward if you shoot left-handed.) Games like Half-Life: Alyx have set a high bar for well-designed VR shooting, and Galaxy’s Edge doesn’t clear it.īut Galaxy’s Edge puts a welcome focus on the rhythm of shooting and exploring. Among other things, the droids get destroyed so suddenly that repairs are mostly useless, and the interface - which consists of pulling guns and equipment off your body - kept me accidentally grabbing the wrong device. The combat system feels a little clumsy and under-tested. You’re given a multitool to help solve mechanical puzzles and repair your combat droids, but the puzzles get only slightly more complex over the course of the game. Blasters can’t be recharged, so you spend the entire game killing Death Gang soldiers and stealing their weapons, which come in a handful of variations.
It features no weapon or character upgrade system and a single unlockable power: there’s a jetpack that lets you reach high places, and midway through the game, it lets you hover slightly higher. Galaxy’s Edge basically keeps the aesthetic of a high-budget open-world game but dispenses with any kind of statistical or mechanical progression. It feels like a demo for a game five times its size For now, it’s an interesting experiment: a studio squeezing a particular genre of giant game into an extremely compact package. And to be blunt, if you’re looking to really sink into a virtual world, you should wait for this one to grow. ILMxLAB has announced a second installment of Galaxy’s Edge for next year. I played through virtually all of Galaxy’s Edge in maybe four hours - less than half the length of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, another recent take on short open-world games.
But it’s barely the length of a side mission. If you craft that item, you can access a separate mini-story within the game, framed as an epic tale from Seezelslak. It’s got a crafting system but only one craftable item. It’s got fast travel but only between a half-dozen locations, including the cantina and Mubo’s workshop.
Like a lot of Oculus exclusives, the game shoots for what I’ll call “AAA vibes”: graphical fidelity and gameplay options reminiscent of huge PC and console titles, but designed for a lower-powered mobile console by a comparatively small team on a ridiculously tight timeline.Ĭonsequently, Galaxy’s Edge plays like the demo of a game about five times its size. ILMxLAB built Galaxy’s Edge for Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset. Between chats with a level-headed cantina bartender named Seezelslak (voiced by Saturday Night Live alumnus Bobby Moynihan) and a slightly twitchy droid dealer named Mubo (voiced by Matthew Wood), they have to explore Batuu and defeat the Death Gang using their blasters and some helpful flying remote droids. Your character, a droid mechanic, has drawn the ire of the local Guavian Death Gang. It takes place in the wilds of Batuu, the setting of Lucasfilm’s Galaxy’s Edge attraction at Disneyland and Disney World. Where Vader Immortal was an interactive cinematic roller coaster (and not in a bad way), Galaxy’s Edge is more open. Galaxy’s Edge was developed by Lucasfilm effects studio ILMxLAB, creator of the Oculus Quest launch title Vader Immortal. And the new virtual reality game Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge comes surprisingly close to offering a compromise - or it would, if there were more of it. But while I appreciate my freed-up nights and weekends, I miss the specific cadence of open-world action games: that distinctive combination of pitched fights and methodical, low-stakes scavenging. Titles like Watch Dogs: Legion and Ghost of Tsushima, with their huge maps and endless quest lists, feel like part-time jobs. I’ve avoided many of 2020’s big games because they’re simply too big.