The artistic intent of a video game is colored by the soil from which it grows. EA seems like a horrible place to work. The art produced from its soil is poisoned and frail. Poisoned by dark patterns of monetization that target the limited attention spans of humans, that press the limits of how much annoyance we will put up with before buying a loot box. EA games are irradiated with the dark side of The Force.
The Force connects all things, it is a metaphor for physics and god being the same. It is Jungian collective conciousness and it is the gravity holding molecules together. It is faith in god without having to believe in god.
The Force is also evil. It is both good and evil because it is all things. It is two sides of the same mountain as yin and yang are the light and the dark. The force is the grand context. The fabric of the universe. The canvas upon which the story is painted.
The canvas upon which the Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes mobile game is painted, is that of a "free to play" mobile game. If you're somehow unaware, so called free to play games can ruin people's finances worse than a trip to Vegas. They're insidious. They appear kind, they appear as a light in a tunnel if you have no money and you like Star Wars.
A funny thing happens when you actually have no money and you step into an antagonistic casino: you're not tempted to spend. None of the dark patterns work, because you can't get blood from a stone. I have no cash for you to squeeze out. I'm dry. I have a rice and beans budget and you are not in it.
I find frequent frustration with the popups: "Buy This thing! It'll cure the frustration we're trying to instill in you!" But I let the frustration flow through me and I move on, because frustration leads to the dark side. I do not need to harbor the frustration they want me to have. I will find my own way to have fun with this game. The game crashes my aging phone's operating system in some cases, but stil I play. Most the time it works, The ship battles are iffy.
The game proper, far as I can see it, is resource management. The game throws so many currencies at you, and they're all used for different things, and they throw all these energies at you, and they're all used for different things. The game of it, should you choose to play, is to stay on the difficulty curve with the limited resources the game gives to you. Build your rebel force from the scraps lying around, because that's all you got, follow your passion, follow your gut. equip who you have, train who you have, learn their strengths and weaknesses by playing them.
The gameplay alternates between running battles to equip your characters/ships and running battles to progress your tables. Enjoy the battle. Remember that you wanted to play the game, forget that you're only running the battle to advance the table so you can unlock some cool character you don't have, find the coolness in the characters/ships you do have.
The dark side's goal is to keep you drooling for the next cool shiny thing. Choose a path, and walk down it, or let the path choose for you, either way enjoy the walk, gaming is supposed to be a pleasure activity.
The reason for movies and games is that they light up our brains with pleasure. That is why stories are the best way to educate, That's why they make so much money. Humans need stories and they need interactive pleasure. If you're walking in the park, juggling rubber ducks, or playing a video game, have fun with it. That's the point right?
These mobile games don't make it easy to do that. They are purpose built to piss you off, take your money, love bomb you, piss you off, and most of all take your money.
There isn't a better Star Wars game for my phone. If someone made one it probably wouldn't run on my ancient device anyhow. I can't conveniently set up my playstation, and those games have their own problems. This is my best option to play with some digital Star Wars toys.
There are infinite options in my imagination however. The thing that fuels my love of Star Wars, the thing that keeps that love alive while the stories aren't playing. I imagine my roster of characters is my own personal rebel force. "HaHuh! You didn't expect to see a stolen tie fighter join my fleet did you Emperor?"
The unnamed dark side characters I can see as defectors or disguised spies, but I have a hard time imagining why the fuck I'm playing as Moff Tarkin other than you have to keep your dark side characters strong because they unlock lightside characters. Imagination is literally infinite so I'll find it someday.
The stated context of the game is that you're collecting holotable figures to battle in the cantina, like you'd see beautiful scoundrels play on the Milennium Falcon or the Ghost. In that context I would like the ability to simply trade away all my fascist characters for cool characters, but this is the empire's game and they say I have to play as the dark the get the light.
This disconnect between the game concept and the game itself is there because the design for profit supercedes the design for fun. Yes some perfectly human people want to play as the baddies, I don't think everyone who wants to play as Darth Vader and storm troopers is fascist, I do think it would be nice if I didn't have to, but here we are. So my current context for why I'm training and equipping bitchmade aryan poster-boy Anakin fucking Skywalker is that it's a training simulation for my troops. I have to keep upgrading the simulation because my troops are just so goddamn good they need to contantly upgrade the difficulty.
It's almost a collector's game. You collect digital playing pieces, but you can't trade away the things you don't care about for the things you want, which seems like a core element of collecting. It becomes a different experience. The collection aspect becomes, what characters do you spend your time and resources on, which has a different feel. Your collection only grows, it's only curated by which characters have the most resources dumped into them.
The game is simultaneously really bad and kinda soothing. The systems are not explained well. I have no idea how half of them work. There's a tutorial which can't possibly because there's just too much to explain. There's systems upons systems upon currencies upon energies, upon checklist tasks, upon tables. Every now and again I read a stat and I think, yeah, some text box over a year ago before I uninstalled and reinstalled and uninstalled and reinstalled this game explained what the hell that was. Mostly I just play it by feel. I can't possibly wrap my head around all the numbers. If a character has crit-chance as a feature, they're getting crit-chance mods, the best ones I got whenever I mod them out. Potency? Tenacity? I don't remember what those do but some charaters need em, so says the basic mods section, I am shrugging.
I'm building a rebellion. I get to hear a stormtrooper give a wilhelm scream or Darth Vader give his "NooOOoo" when they die. I am arming Ewoks to fight their opressors. That part feels great. When you hit the resource wall, when you don't get what you need to feed your troops, you fight battles with them.
If you auto-play the battles it becomes work. Autobattling is only for battles that are so easy you don't have to play them, so when you find yourself in a battle far below difficulty for your team you can simply press the button and let it run. If you find yourself being frustrated because autobattles aren't winning, that means the game is actually difficult enough to play and you should be trying to win with your wits and your team, It could also mean you've hit a difficulty wall at that table and you need to go elsewhere to find an enjoyable challenge. The game will tell you it's time to pony up the cash. That way does not lead to pleasure and joy but to abuse and poverty.
Engage with the gameplay. Don't simply scroll through the list of bonus ally characters and pick the one with the highest number, look at their ability and maybe adjust your team to better suit the synergy. Learn the guest character's playstyle, their strengths and weaknesses, for when you may have them in your force.
The enjoyment of the game is as much about the Star Wars aesthetic as anything. It's a sandbox. Make it what you will. The game has little to say that gets through the deluge of popups demanding your money or your crystals or your credits or your shipbuilding materials or your shards or whatever but mostly your money.
I find myself searching for a word that means enjoyable despite being not a good game. The gameplay devs clearly care. I think back to Fallout 4. There were clearly people working on that game who cared. Little secluded areas would be beautifuly designed encounters with tragic stories and interesting characters, but the game was shit. I spent countless hours wondering the wasteland, half the time in delight half the time angry I'd spent any time on it at all. I feel simlarly about SW:GoH. There's a way to make it fun despite itself. I want to say you get out of it what you put in, but that's not the way it is. You can extract a good time from it if you enjoy circumventing the abusive monetization, you spend enough time actually engaging with the battles that you aren't thinking about the infinite shit you're supposed to be grinding for, and can learn to love battling with the characters you have rather than always chasing ones you want.
I'm an old testament Star Wars fan. I like Rebels, Andor, and the Orig Trig. I respect that gen Z grew up with The Clone Wars and that instilled in them a love of the prequels, but I don't have it yet. I'm working on it. I paused my TCW marathon to watch Rebels, but when I finish Rebels I'll go back to it. I like the clones, the commentary on America's imperial military industrial complex, and I can see that the characters are far better written in the cartoon than in the prequel trilogy. I won't get into what I don't like here, but I say this to say Kylo Ren isn't even Star Wars to me.
This game is forcing me to reconcile with the parts of the Star Wars universe I normally ignore. While I'm working on loving the prequel movies. I don't think that's going to happen for the sequel movies, but if Finn and Rey are recruits that want to join my rebel force, there's a place for them. Because we need every blaster and lightsaber we can get to fight imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism.