Star Wars Galaxies Review

The editors over at the Zam Network decided to give Star Wars Galaxies a spin to see how the game has been holding up since the controversial NGE update was rolled out.

After the CU and NGE patches, SWG did become a simpler place, and while the previous incarnation may have had problems of its own, that still isn’t stopping several intrepid communities from sorting through the coding to deliver pre-CU, pre-NGE SWG to the masses via private servers. Either way, it was in this newer, simpler, more ‘WoW-like’ version of Star Wars Galaxies that I found myself poking around.

Initially, players are told to choose between several iterations of aesthetically challenged Star Wars aliens (except Twi’lek! /blush), where they are then punted over to a large, friendly 9×9 grid of Star Wars classes to choose from, each of them headlined by a famous Star Wars character, like Boba Fett for Bounty Hunters, or Han Solo for the Smuggler class. While I assume that these classes were meant to quickly draw players into the Star Wars world via celebrity parallels, I couldn’t help but feel that I was playing a game designed around a movie, rather than designed around an organic Star Wars universe. While the Jedi class (with a Luke Skywalker grinning out at me) did look interesting, I was definitely more interested in playing as a Bounty Hunter.

Upon entering the world of Star Wars, that feeling of celebrity pandering quickly came back as my Zabrakian found herself in a room on an Imperial Spaceship, awakened by… C-3PO! He ran me through my tutorial that ultimately saw me transported to a tutorial ship alongside Chewie, Han Solo and R2-D2. In a bigger effort to bludgeon me with recognizable Star Wars names, I quickly hooked up with Boba Fett on my tutorial planet, to learn the art of Bounty Hunting. As you can imagine, learning my profession quickly brought me into the combat of SWG.