Game review: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for Steam

Before I start on the review, I must tell you a scary story. This last week, my work PC just shut down without warning. I had written a new review for next week, and a new short horror story that hubby declared “good.” I also had an article for the glass magazine, so real paid work. None had been backed up yet, and I was in the process of doing so when the system went “Neeeeewwwp!” We have power problems all the time, but when I noticed neither the lights nor hubby’s computer had gone down, fear set in.

Lots of swapped cables led to nothing, so I ordered a new power supply. Nothing. Finally, I had a neighbor ride me into town to look for a technician, who listened to my tale of woe, said he’d need to charge 50 to 80 euros, and he’d send a message when he was done. One DAY later, this hero sends the message along with a proof of life photo and the charge was 50 Euros. And they say super heroes aren’t real. Any who, let’s get on with the real review

I’d heard Respawn’s take on Star Wars called a mix of the space opera franchise with Dark Souls-like combat, and given that I’ve played thousands of hours in FromSowatware’s trilogy, I knew I had to try it. I finally had the chance to do so, and I’d have to say  the reviews I read were either false advertising, or the reviewers had never played Uncharted. Because every facet of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has more in common with those Naughty Dog games, and nothing to do with Dark Souls.

By itself, this would be fine, because I liked playing Uncharted: Golden Abyss on my PS Vita. But there is a long list of problems that made Fallen Order hard to like. Before I get to them, I will say that I liked the story, and the music was very Star Warsy. The controls were mostly okay, I guess.

No, actually let me start there. Fallen Order doesn’t have a heavy and light attack mechanic. Rather it’s light attack and Force attack. It sounds interesting, except Cal Kestis has a miniscule Force meter, so only a few attacks made him incapable of anything more than weak light saber swings. Until I noticed his limitations, I just assumed I had issues with controller lag again.

Refilling that bar requires using light attack, but it only refills when hits connect, and half the enemies in the game can parry all day, which is the only time stamina comes into play. In that regard, Fallen Order shares a few bones with a different FromSoftware title, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. (Also, note how all these game love them some colons.) What that means is, very often you’re cut off from using any other button on your controller, and are reduced to alternating between parry and weak attack. If I made that sound fun, or even challenging, I apologize, because it was neither.

Instead of spending skill points on attributes like stamina, Force, strength, and dexterity, the game has a skill tree that expands on Cal’s Force skills. Only a few of these allow for expansion of his Force meter, but even after unlocking all of them and collecting “Force Memories” scattered throughout the levels, I never noticed much improvement in Cal’s combat. He always used up the same amount of force, eventually leading right back to his weak attack and parry combos.

But setting that aside, the light saber has never felt weaker. Aside from some small insects, everything else is “light saber resistant.” In the films, this is a weapon that severs limbs and cauterizes them at the same time. In a prequel film and in the game, it’s mentioned that a light saber can cut through blast doors. And yet in Cal’s hands, a light saber has trouble cutting the unarmored hides of giant frogs and slugs. (Sorry, slyyygs, because every critter on Kashyyyk had to share the same spelling convention as the planet, except for Wookies. One might assume the correct spelling is Wookyyys.)

There is a skill tree option to make saber damage higher, but once I got it, I saw that the same enemies required the same number of light swings to go down. Every upgrade is like that, and when they start requiring two and three skill points to unlock, it all feels like wasted efforts.

And really, who decided that Cal should only use a saber? Even in the game, the other Jedi picks up a gun to shoot a few Storm Troopers. It’s like the developers just loved the idea of parrying to bat laser blasts back at the enemies that they never considered the fact that EVERY Jedi in every film has used a gun at some point.

Most of the game, fights are with the local animals, punctuated occasionally with small groups of Storm Troopers. Sometimes I stumbled into a boss fight, but again, it’s stuff like a giant white spider, or an alpha version of the giant frog.

When the game did offer up a real boss, it was never a simple matter of learning patterns and finding weak spots. Instead, most were broken up with cut-scenes or chase sequences. I developed a fatigue each time a boss fight started, because I was waiting for the moment the game would push me away from what was almost fun back to sliding down slick surfaces or climbing walls or whatever.

Then I got to Dathomir (former home to one-note wonder Darth Maul) and all the mostly cute dialogue of the Storm Troopers was replaced with constant taunts and growls from the Nightbrothers. I think I made it thirty minutes before I was shouting “Just shut up already!” I can only take so much of “Fight me,” “You are weak,” and “You will not defeat me!” They would shout this crap even when they were on an inaccessible platform way above or below Cal, meaning I couldn’t shut them up if I wanted to. Lord, how I wanted to, so bad.

But I haven’t even touched on the worst aspect of the game: it looks terrible. You know how in Borderlands 2, textures in the game would look blurry for a bit before everything loaded properly? Well they never load properly in Fallen Order. They do for Cal, all the enemies, and for other characters. But no matter what quality setting I used, every world was a blurry mess. So here’s these almost realistic characters filling worlds that all look like a low-budget indie game made by one person as their first effort. But this EA and Respawn, working on a major franchise. How did it get out in this poor of a shape?

If I was basing this review solely on the story, like it was a movie review, I could give it 4 stars. The slowly expanding crew of the Mantis won me over with their banter and genuine moments of character building. Cal’s droid buddy BD-1 is absolutely adorable, and his story is also given room to grow. By the end of the game, I did want to know what happens next, so that’s two thumbs up to the writers who crafted this tale.

Unfortunately, I have to review this as a game, and even if I accept it more as a copy-cat of Uncharted instead of Dark Souls, it just doesn’t quite work for all the reasons I listed. So I have to give Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 3 stars. I thought about knocking off one more star, but there were moments when I was enjoying myself despite Cal’s limitations. Still, I could only recommend this if you love Star Wars and need another perspective that isn’t a Skywalker-level epic. Because in that regard, it definitely accomplished its goal.