Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge marks a clear departure from ILMxLAB’s Vader Immortal series, bringing gameplay to the forefront and using its campaign as a platform for further narrative-driven experiences, which will be available on a rolling basis in successive paid DLC packs. Galaxy’s Edge does an admirable job of approaching the sort of visual richness we tend to see in PC VR games, and the surrounding story is well orchestrated, but the meat of the game’s VR shooter campaign was a bit too basic to truly fall in love with.

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge Details:

Available On: Oculus Quest
Release Date: November 19th, 2020
Price: $25
Developer: ILMxLAB
Reviewed On: Quest 2

Gameplay

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge puts you in the shoes of a droid technician whose ship is boarded by a band of Guavian Death Gang pirates while in orbit above the desert planet Batuu. The First Order is offering up serious cash for some mysterious cargo in your ship’s hold, but under the threat of death you jettison the precious cargo and flee the ship, finding yourself back at Batuu’s Black Spire Outpost where you battle the pirates in your search of the cargo.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

Unlike Vader ImmortalGalaxy’s Edge pushes its theme park-style smorgasbord of adventure experiences to its ‘Tales’ DLC, instead offering up a shooter-based campaign for the game’s main course. At launch, it’s a significant chunk of the game, with post-campaign DLC designed to serve up more of that diverse mix of Jedi thrills seen in Vader Immortal. I’ll talk more about DLC below, but first the main campaign.

Galaxy’s Edge’s campaign is fairly basic shooter fare. Moving through a few of the pirates bases on the edge of the Outpost—making for a half dozen standalone levels—you’ll find a mix of bipedal baddies, flying droids, and wild creatures abound to blast away at.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

Having that mix of flying and ground enemies is good, but all of them are essentially bullet sponges, which unfortunately dumbs down gameplay overall. That’s not to say there aren’t some high points to the campaign—you get to meet some familiar characters and wield iconic Star Wars weapons—but I can’t say I was ever wowed by a single encounter, the sole boss fight at the end included. Basically you blast until everything falls over, and walk to the next section of the map with little variation.

As unexciting as enemy encounters felt, I enjoyed the overall  shooting experience. In Galaxy’s Edge, weapons include a variety of single-handed blasters that you either scavenge from downed enemies or find in unlockable weapons crates.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

All weapons are consumable, with some depleting their batteries more rapidly than others. Instead of fumbling for a mag and reloading, each gun comes with a charging slider on the top rail, which also acts as the gun’s rear iron sight. Each shot from the gun moves the slider a bit further away until you need to pull it back again to reload. A handy color-coded display near the grip tells you how much juice is left until you need to throw it away and look for a new one. It’s a nice VR-native reload style I haven’t seen before, and although arcadey, it’s a sci-fi world of magic and talking robots, so it fits pretty well considering.

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In addition to guns and a single thermal grenade type, there’s also three types of flying droids that you can deploy to help you automatically take down enemies. Oftentimes I would toss out three seeker types that would bomb out a level before going in, or toss out either shielded and unshielded shooter types to act as support fire. You can only use three of any type at a time, but you can also repair damaged shooter droids with your multitool, which I thought was a nice touch.

The multitool was another pleasant surprise. The pistol-like device has three interchangeable tips you can cycle through: a screwdriver, a flame torch, and an electric spark. It’s most useful in opening weapons lockers, which require multiple steps. Oftentimes you’ll need to unweld an access panel, unlock a mechanism with your screwdriver, and bridge two circuits with your spark tip just to open one locker.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

Levels are one-way journeys with discrete entry and end points, however they offer up secret areas to explore too. Because there aren’t many key items or any one-off weapons to search for in the game, more often than not secret areas are momentary detours housing crates with health packs, grenades, basic guns, and target droids, and plenty of junk to salvage. You may also find one of 12 mini-droids, the main collectible item.

Only approaching the very end are you given a chance to spend your credits in a shop, which feels like a missed opportunity. The only merchandise available includes standard items and an assortment of different glove skins. Still, it was nice to have tons of droids and health packs for the final boss fight, but I still would have liked to see the shop better integrated into the game from the very beginning, which would have brought some sense to all of the trash and credit collecting you’ll do throughout the majority.

The campaign mission took me a little under three hours to complete on normal difficulty (easy and hard are available), which included the main objectives and most of the additional side objectives. In the end, the campaign felt like the first level in a much grander game, which hypothetically might have given it more room to tease out more diverse enemy types, larger and more interesting levels, and grander, more clever boss fights.

Temple of Darkness DLC (included)

One of those side objectives during the campaign is to gather ingredients for a special drink, which Seezelslak prepares back at the cantina so he can recount his first tale, the only extra DLC at launch.

Called ‘Temple of Darkness’, Seezelslak’s story transports you to the past, hundreds of years before the events of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. There you take on the role of Padawan Ady Sun’Zee to work alongside Jedi Master Yoda. Like Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, you have to overcome both the literal and metaphorical darkness along your quest to become a Jedi master.

In ‘Temple of Darkness’, you’re finally handed a lightsaber, and given the ability to cinematically slash down baddies from the very moment you approach the temple.

I won’t spoil the inside of the temple, however you’ll make use of the powers you learned in Vader Immortal, including force powers and the ability to sling your light saber through the air like a boomerang. It’s well done (also, there’s Yoda, which is cool) but it was surprisingly short at only 15 minutes. I was honestly expecting a Vader Immortal-size experience, but maybe that will be something for future DLC to beef out.

Immersion

ILMxLAB astounds me with its ability to bring high-quality visuals to the Quest platform, and it doesn’t disappoint with Galaxy’s Edge. Characters are well animated, textures are high quality, and although environmental visual quality could be more consistent throughout—some popping occurs and background vistas appear flat—it leaves you in a rich and solid environment that feels much more like a PC VR game than one built for Quest.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

Audio quality is second to none too. The game’s music was fantastic, featuring Emmy-award winner ​Bear McCreary​ (campaign), ​Danny Piccione (cantina music), and ​Joseph Trapanese​ (‘Temple of Darkness’). Voice acting was also great, with C-3P0 voiced by original actor, Anthony Daniels, and Yoda voiced by the series’ puppeteer and voice actor, Frank Oz.

Object interaction is fairly good too, giving the user force grab and the ability to easily switch objects between hands if need be, which is something developers tend to forget. You can pick up nearly everything, but the game’s good object interaction is hampered somewhat by its inventory, which is a mixed bag.

I liked having two slots for guns on both sides, two slots for heath packs on my gloves, and an expandable inventory pack on my chest holding everything else—but that chest pack is so strangely organized that it becomes virtually useless during combat. Items automatically fill up in the first slots, which is fine if you could reorganize them easily to make a sort of hotbar of most used items. Because you can’t move stacks of items, instead being forced to move items one at a time, it becomes a real chore in setting up an inventory that’s actually useable in a fight—which is all the time. I really wish there were a better holster system to hold all important items, including droids, doing away with the inventory pack completely.

Comfort

You’re given the choice between smooth locomotion and teleportation, although it’s clear Galaxy’s Edge was designed around teleportation first. Most levels require you to teleport to get across gaps and reach high places, even if you’ve chosen smooth locomotion as an option. This was done to accommodate for the lack of jumping, which is a good thing from a comfort standpoint. You’re also given a hover pack, but this only lets you move up a notch vertically in the air, so you won’t be flying around and making yourself potentially uncomfortable.

The game offers both seated and standing modes, however the game’s holster system is placed in such a way that you’d be better off standing, or sitting in a chair without armrests, since you’ll need free access to your holsters.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall
6
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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Zachary Scott Dickerson

    Maybe someday we can get a jedi VR star wars game with depth.

    • shadow9d9

      SW Squadrons?

  • I greatly enjoy playing this. But I’m a real Star Wars nut. Throw anything Star Wars at me and I’m a kid again. Especially in VR!

  • MasterElwood

    Is this coming to PCVR? I have a Quest 2 – but i want the full graphics overload of my 3080…

    • benz145

      ILMxLab is non-commital on a PC release for now.

    • James Cobalt

      If it’s anything like the last deal, Quest will have timed exclusivity, follow by eventual releases on PS4/5 and Rift. But with Facebook sunsetting the Rift, who knows.

    • namekuseijin

      3080 running a xbox 360 game at full 8K 256fps

  • Jonathan Winters III

    Wow, rating it 6? You’re among a small minority, because most users rate it at nearly 5 stars on Oculus Store.

    • J.C.

      The average purchaser of this game isn’t reviewing it objectively, either. It’s a Star Wars game, and that alone gets it 5 stars from 75% of its audience. The remaining users likely see that it isn’t inherently broken and also give it 5 stars…because it says Star Wars on it.

      The reviewer on rtvr is required to NOT just see “Star Wars” and give it a perfect review. It’s judged as a game first; the franchise setting isn’t part of the score. In that regard, the game appears to be a competent but bland shooter.

    • To be honest, most games on the Oculus store has 4 or 5 stars. I don’t know if it comes from the lack of Quest content or something else but players on that platform are very generous. Steam reviews gives a better idea of how good is a game imho.

    • James Cobalt

      Are they though? https://www.roadtovr.com/road-vr-review-rating-scale/

      Those consumer reviews aren’t super useful. For many, the fact it is in VR and Star Wars makes the experience novel enough to be enjoyable; we know consumers tend to rate things on a simpler scale than they are afforded. This is why many companies switched from multi-point scales to thumbs-up/down.

      The Oculus store has plenty of 5 star titles that do not align with each other in terms of overall quality. Shooty Fruity is rated slightly higher than Vader Immortal. A professional critic is going to rate the experience on its own merits more than preference, relative to other games, and in a much more nuanced way than the typical consumer.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      But I think he explained why. Yes, it is a beautiful game, but it has not much content… which I think is true for many Quest games. Based on this review description I would have given slightly more than 6. OTOH, most people buy the game get in, play it a few hours, give it 5 starts and never come back, except to showcase to visitors.

    • namekuseijin

      it’s good, just as usual the case, very short

      I loved the graphics, among the best on Quest, and environments are quite decent in size and good looking – one of the best reasons to be in VR is to be somewhere else, preferably idylic locations and they nail this here. Too bad it’s over too soon.

      combat itself is quite decent as well, with enemies that actually take cover rather than just run at you to be shot. Gunplay is quite nice, VR interactions with inventory and holstered items is very polished.

      it’s good, but could be great if only it was about 3x its size. Which, I guess, is what they intend with the further episodes. just too expensive for this… but well, it’s licensed from Disney so hey

  • It’s a real shame I still haven’t figured out any other way to access and play Quest 1/2 games without going through the official store–if you catch my drift.

    Does anyone know of any [ideally not to complicated or convoluted] alternative ways of playing Quest 2 games without purchasing them from the Oculus Store?

    • jimmy

      i wish i could downvote you twice but cant :( ….

      • Don’t worry, I voted you down to make up for it. No need to thank me.

  • I hoped for something deeper, I hope DLCs will help this game

  • Pablo C

    it sucks to think that such a mediocre game will cost 25 forever.

  • benz145

    Thanks for reading our review! Please note the following before commenting so that we can have a thoughtful discussion:

    • We scored this game 6/10 – ‘Good’ by our linear scale.

    • Even if the text of the review focuses more on critique than praise, or vice versa, the score aims to boil down the reviewer’s overall opinion of the experience.

    • If you haven’t played the game, understand the limits of your knowledge.

    • If you have played part of the game, your experience may differ from those who have completed it in its entirety.

    • Road to VR does not ever accept payment for reviews or any editorial content.