The Latest Star Wars Game Feels Like Playing Overwatch At Galaxy’s Edge
“The maps are like Disneyland,” art director Dominic Estephane tells Inverse.
In Star Wars: Hunters, you can play as two Jawas in a trench coat, a precariously balanced sibling duo that slings scrap metal. It’s the kind of wacky, creative premise that should tell you all you need to know about the newest Star Wars video game — this time from gaming behemoth Take-Two (the parent company behind everything from Grand Theft Auto to NBA 2K). The new game, available now on Nintendo Switch and mobile (with cross-platform saves), combines the hero-shooter genre with the familiar locales of everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away.
“We have to make that something that is approachable to people so that it’s not too unusual where they can’t pick up and play those things,” design director Scott Warner tells Inverse. Warner cites games like Overwatch and Apex Legends as influences on Star Wars: Hunter.
The Utooni really is just two Jawas standing on each other in a trenchcoat.
Traipsing through the world of Hunters, I was struck by how similar it felt to taking a tour of Galaxy’s Edge, the immersive Star Wars attractions at Disney parks in California and Florida. I’ve shared cocktails with friends at a Star Wars cantina in real life, and now my hero was being blown to bits across nearly identical terrain.
“The maps are like Disneyland,” art director Dominic Estephane tells Inverse. “You are immersed, but then you look up and you see the crowd, and that’s something you notice. It’s a set. It’s a TV show. There was a big influence from Disneyland to make it feel like you’re in this setting.”
The team behind Hunters say they took inspiration from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
The actual gameplay doesn’t stray far from what players might expect out of a hero-based multiplayer shooter. Each of the game’s 12 characters has a collection of active and passive abilities that make them perfect for particular situations during battle.
While many of the characters have striking similarities to established heroes in games like Overwatch, adding a Star Wars twist to these abilities makes them more fun to look at. The heroes also seemed to complement each other well. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the characters based on my experience:
The Utooni: Those two Jawas standing on each other. Offers long range and tank abilities.
Sentinel: A heavy tank-type Stormtrooper armed with a minigun. The Sentinel is great for holding down chokepoints on the map and racking up eliminations as enemies charge into your barrage of (laser) bullets.
Rieve: This lightsaber-wielding lady with strong Sith-vibes is not to be reckoned with up close thanks to her quick strikes and ability to deflect blaster fire.
Diago: A blind marksman armed with a long-range blaster rifle. Perfect for picking off enemies engaging in close-quarters firefights from a safe distance.
Those eagerly awaiting Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws or more episodes of The Acolyte might be able to bide their time with some bite-sized games of Hunters. But don’t expect it to further the plot.
“We’re inspired by existing things, our characters themselves in their costume choices are inspired by characters that exist elsewhere in the universe,” says senior art director Rich Kemp. “Obviously, we can’t have anything they’ve not seen. That would be a bit weird.”
As with other live service, multiplayer, combat games, Star Wars: Hunters also has had to toe the line between its team’s abundance of ideas and a desire to avoid overwhelming new players still learning how the game works. But if the game performs well, it could see future seasons, more battle passes, modes of play, characters, and more.
“Honestly, things that haven’t made it are usually because they’re too complicated or don’t fit well in a five-minute format,” design director Scott Warner says. “When you kick a football around, everyone in the world can do that. It’s simple and fun. But to become a professional footballer, that is an order of magnitude of understanding and intuition that is beyond normal human beings. Games should do that, too.”
