My time with Star Wars: Hunters is fun, but bloated

I’ve felt like I have been a bit of a slump. I haven’t reviewed a game in almost a month now, and I am starting to feel the itch. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been playing anything, in fact, the opposite. There have been a couple of titles recently that have caught my eye.

The big one is Star Wars: Hunters. I have always been skeptical of free-to-play games, especially ones that come to phones. I think it’s my age. Or I’m just skeptical, that answer makes a little more sense. Every now and then, something hits me, and I jump all in. For a while, that mobile game was called Marvel Snap. The pace of play and chess-like critical thinking required spoke to me. I’m a little embarrassed to say I dropped way more money on that game than I had any right to. Also, please don’t mention this to my wife.

But I have done it again, this time with Star Wars: Hunters. And while I have spent the last few week nights playing for an hour or two, it is not without some issues. The biggest thing Hunters has going for it is its gameplay loop. It’s fast, fun, and addictive. Matches frequently take less than five minutes to finish, something that makes it perfect for mobile devices or on the Switch.

Star Wars Hunters is bloated. We are talking about a fat oil tycoon, with a giant cowboy hat  just lighting dollar bills on fire for entertainment. Remember when you would download a song on Napster only to find the next time you went to your web browser twelve different pop ups for pills that will make you as long as the Nile river? One more. Have you ever seen that sperm whale beached up, seconds before it explodes into red mist? That is Star Wars Hunters. When you get to the main menu screen you can not help but feel overwhelmed. There are a lot. It is colorful, bright, and in your face.

The entire home screen is covered with information. Current quests you are attempting to complete, your level, party, all kinds of details about items that I care very little about. Luckily, if you just want to hop right into a game, you can do that too. It becomes easy to ignore everything and come back when you have the time to collect anything you’ve earned.

And you earn plenty. You have daily quests that only take a few matches to complete, you have bigger quests to unlock new characters simply by playing the game, you have quests that give XP to each unique character you unlock. It is, again, overwhelming.

It doesn’t help that Star Wars Hunters has about 30 different styled leveling systems to it. Each one does something different, and I can do without any of them. If you ask me.his is where Hunters makes its money, piece by piece. I think I can speak for most of us who says being nickel and dimed is worse than paying a flat fee for a title.I don’t mind paying $30, maybe even $40 for Star Wars Hunters. I have had a lot of fun. I play this with both my nephew and my cousin’s husband, two very different people in terms of age, one is in his 30s, I’m not convinced my nephew knows how to tie his shoes. I picked up the battle pass, it was only $10 and the season looks to last around 50 days, I thought, why the heck not. You automatically unlock Aran Tal, the Madalorian bounty Hunter when you purchase a fun-high damaging character.

My biggest issue with Star Wars Hunters are the game modes. Some of them work better than others. The team deathmatch and 3 plots modes work excellently well in this format. The king of the hill mode is by far the weakest link of the three. The problem comes down to balance. Star Wars Hunters is meant to be quickly, not a lot of time spent standing around waiting for events to happen. Since games are quick combat reflects that ideology. Because games are so fast you need to have more options for the non damage characters. I have no issue with any of the damage classes, each style is different enough to provide enough choices to make playing any of them more than adequate. I like the ideas behind most of the support classes. Zaina, the first healer you unlock, is more fun

I know I have been doing a lot of complaining, after talking it’s my favorite hobby. But let’s disregard that for the time being. Star Wars Hunters is fun. I am having fun when I play by myself, I am having even more fun when I can manage to get someone to play this game with me.