I bought this because they were handing it out at a discount for people who bought The Way Remastered and various other titles. I liked The Way and the trailer looked interesting. Play as a giant killer AT-ST and side against the let's-not-call-them-Ewoks or some desperate human colonizers. This idea has legs!

(I apologize for nothing.)

Unfortunately the legs don't seem to take the idea anywhere. I'm not going to pretend this is a review where I slogged through it just for the purpose of providing an informed opinion about what is good and bad in this game. I played for a few hours, up to the point where you gotta choose between the fascist human military and the native aliens who throw thousands of their lives away daily getting chewed up by AT-STs so they can kill a few humans. I cannot bring myself to care about who wins.

It is not as though you can even find a reference point within the story's framework as a basis for making this choice. The catalyzing event is that some locals get infected with earth bacteria and the plague threatens to wipe out their civilization. The nice scientist lady wants to stop this by doing research to cure the plague and also for some reason this is related to modifying humans so they can breathe the planet's poisonous atmosphere (which is a thing). The fascist military... also wants to stop the plague for some reason? Except their preferred method is to just kill all the natives indiscriminately instead of letting the plague do it and also we have to kill the nice scientist lady because she didn't want to kill everyone with death rays?

It seems like the game wants me to feel something weighty about this decision, but my experience of these societies is limited to the following:

• Alien dudes hurling spears and arrows at me--which for some reason can seriously damage my elite interstellar combat mech suit--and dying by the hundreds as I shoot and crush them;
• Human morons wandering around aimlessly in front of my thousand ton interstellar combat mech suit while I try to move shit from place to place, and dying by the hundreds as I accidentally crush one and then machine gun everyone in sight because the first death means I failed the mission; and
• More human morons throwing instant messages into my HUD complaining that I'm not going fast enough, preventing me from seeing what's on the ground while I try to do both of the above.

So, everyone needs my help, they do their best to fuck it up while I try to give it, and then no one thanks me. I don't empathize with anyone's plight on this planet.

The gameplay loop is the standard: You accept a mission, the game gives you a set money reward for completing it, you use that to repair your AT-ST and purchase an upgrade, then you accept another mission. I don't think even this was managed well. It's optional to repair the AT-ST between missions, but required if you want to buy an upgrade. Repairs are not terribly expensive for major damage, but not that much cheaper if you only have a few dings--and on combat missions it seemed that there was realistically no way to avoid receiving at least a little damage. So you are punished for doing missions well, either by having to waste money on an inefficient repair or by heading out on the next mission without a repair or upgrade. I did not find this terribly fun.

It is left to the player to imagine why you have to use your own money to repair and upgrade this piece of critical military hardware that is all that gives humans dominance over the native species.

The upgrades themselves are basic stat increases and a couple of different weapon types. I'll be generous and assume that whether you're using a cannon or a machine gun might matter later when there is presumably a greater enemy variety. Up to the point where I called it it was just waves of various one-shot alien cavemen, one level with rebel humans who need a few shots, and a alien caveman boss who requires many shot because it's a video game and he's a boss.

I encountered 3 types of missions:

1. Go out and kill a bunch of aliens or whatever;
2. Go out and kill a bunch of aliens or whatever, but this time we took away one of your weapons and/or we added a passenger so your oxygen ticks down faster; and
3. Go out but don't step on any people or mines or whatever.

For non-story missions there seemed to be only a couple of canned dialogue lines explaining each, so the result is you see a lot of the same vague messages about some NPC needing supplies or evacuation or having to go to base letter-number. Almost without exception they complain that you're not doing whatever it is fast enough. It's so lazy it would have been better to just leave this dialogue out. The story dialogue is not much better but at least it's unique.

Piloting the AT-ST is mostly joyless. During missions types 1 and 2 you just let the game move the legs for you, and all you're doing is mowing the guns back and forth and managing your cooldowns, occasionally jerking yourself back and forth to dislodge dudes who dropped on your head.

During mission type 3, you're expected to manually move the legs. This is not mechanically challenging, you just hold and release ZL to lift and lower whichever leg is furthest back. There is no balancing mechanic or anything fun to manage. You can hold a leg up indefinitely, and often you will have to do that while you wait for some bozo to move out of your landing zone.

The first time they put you through the level where you have to avoid crushing the humans underfoot it's a funny gag. They throw some dialogue at you about how the staff are all so busy they're not paying attention to where they're going. Ha ha. The next time they do it, it's 5 times longer, there's 3 times as many idiots wandering around, and you're supposed to be delivering critical supplies from one side of the base to the other. There is only one check point in this level, and crushing a single dude anywhere en route sends you back to it.

Also all the idiots are wearing grey jump suits against a grey metal background (at least someone had the idea to make the aliens colourfully differentiated), and there's a constant stream of foreground mechanical effects to obscure your view when the dialogue isn't doing it.

I'm about 70% sure the mined levels are bugged as of the date of this review. Your legs have minesweepers in them, so they're supposed to show you where the mines are as you move over them, but they don't. You have to start putting down your leg and then quickly re-press ZL before it hits the ground to activate the check (this is not documented anywhere). The interval between release and the leg hitting the ground is split-second, so you'll frequently be trying to check and just put your foot straight into the explosive. The reason I'm not 100% sure this isn't working as intended is because these levels would be trivially simple if this wasn't the case.

I can think of nothing to praise. The sporadic voice acting is satisfactory given the uninspired dialogue. Except for the grey humans you have to avoid crushing the visuals are reasonably good. The game did not crash. The trailer was fun.

Played on the Switch.