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As the classic commentator’s cliché goes, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge - Enhanced Edition is a game of two halves. Originally released for the Meta Quest 2, this intergalactic virtual reality adventure bundles up the original campaign and its superior Last Call expansion. The result is a wildly inconsistent affair, which – despite paying careful care and attention to PSVR2’s innovative new features – can’t help but feel like it’s trapped in the past.

Indeed, play this after launch title Horizon Call of the Mountain and you’ll experience a significant comedown. Guerrilla and Firesprite’s title may not be perfect, but it’s building on an additional couple years of design iteration, and it really shows. One example is how Star Wars handles item holding: by default, you need to physically clutch on to objects, including weapons, with the L1 and R1 buttons. This feels horrible, so you’ll want to enable Sticky Grabbing, which makes firearms more comfortable to use – but ruins throwables like grenades. It’s just bad design.

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The campaign is loosely based on the Star Wars-themed section of Disney’s real-life theme park, but it gets off to a rotten start. You awake on a cargo ship, where characters relentlessly talk at you in a guided tutorial type sequence. While some great interstellar views save the scenario, it’s genuinely difficult to determine what the game actually wants you to do – and despite the underlying simplicity of the encounter, we found ourselves butting heads with it a bit.

You’ll eventually end up crash landing on Batuu, where you’ll encounter a multi-eyed giant named Seezelslak, who’s the proprietor of the planet’s local cantina. Exploring the bar, as though it’s a set from one of the films, will prove mind blowing for fans – but the initial quest that follows flubs through its unnecessarily long running time, as you battle your way through corridors filled with samey looking foes. There’s some novelty attached to physically operating authentic looking blasters, each modelled meticulously like they’re legitimate movie props, but it wears thin really fast.

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To make matters worse, you can snap weapons and items to a utility belt upon your person, which we found made the game borderline impossible to play sitting down. While you can reposition the location of the belt in the settings menu, we ultimately resorted to playing the entire campaign standing, as everything felt far too cramped while in a chair. It’s cool seeing weapons you’ve collected sitting in a holster on your belt, and it fulfils that bounty hunter power fantasy you may have had since you were a child, but it’s far too fiddly to justify its inclusion.

The same is true of the multi-tool, which you’ll use to power up certain objects or unscrew panels. This is cool at first, with unique texture added to the PSVR2 Sense Controllers to make each utility feel unique – but once you’re unsealing your umpteenth crate, with nothing but credits and a spare grenade inside, you’ll soon find yourself making a beeline to the next objective marker, as you battle with the unremarkably repetitive nature of the game design.

But it does get better! The expansion pack, Last Call, is seamlessly integrated here – and adds far more varied story missions involving Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Dok-Ondar which take you deep into Storm Trooper territory and include several set-piece moments featuring larger-than-life characters. You’ll also play through a couple of chapters where you get to wield a lightsaber – pretty much essential for a Star Wars game, we’d argue – and assume the role of the IG-88 assassin droid from the Empire Strikes Back. These make battling through the blandness of the original chapter worth your time, and demonstrate much more ambition in the game design.

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But, as alluded to above, it does make the campaign feel extremely inconsistent – almost like you’re getting the prototype and the final product bundled together, and you need to plod through the awful opening moments to get to the good stuff.

We will say that the PSVR2 hardware is used pretty well: the sound design is great across the board, utilising 3D audio effectively to allow you to pinpoint the location of blaster fire, while the headset will physically rumble when you’re damaged by incoming fire. It’s satisfyingly interactive, too: your left-hand doubles as a kind of wrist-based PDA, which you can push, prod, and poke to show objective markers, access a scanning tool, and much more. But while it does have a handful of truly breath-taking visual moments, it never really looks like a game built for the PS5, with samey corridors making up most of its level design.

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And you’ll be seeing those same locations a lot if you want to wring every last drop of content out of this campaign, as side-quests will see you returning to the same locations and dealing with respawning enemies to complete them. The game had worn out its welcome for us long before we experienced everything, but we suppose hardcore Star Wars fans may find added incentive to keep going due to the fantasy fulfilment of it all.

Conclusion

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge - Enhanced Edition starts out flat but does eventually get a bit better. You’ll need to trudge through a couple of hours of bland shooting galleries to get to the good stuff, though, and even then the title is largely let-down by repetitive encounters and some dated design decisions. The game takes decent advantage of PSVR2’s innovative features, but also underlines its Meta Quest 2 origins at times. And while there’s an unquestionable novelty to existing within George Lucas’ legendary universe, it feels like the license is doing a lot of the lifting for a mostly average adventure.

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STAR WARS: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge - Enhanced Edition (PSVR2)
STAR WARS: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge - Enhanced Edition (PSVR2)

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