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If Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
had an opening title crawl like the movies, it might go something like this:
It is a dark time for fans of SINGLE-PLAYER Star Wars games.
Since EA secured the rights in 2013, only two BATTLEFRONT games
have been produced, just one of which offered a short campaign.
Now, RESPAWN, developer of Titanfall 2, has released
STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER, a large and daring story-driven
third-person action game which is actually EXTREMELY GOOD,
restoring hope and freedom to the galaxy…
Jedi: Fallen Order pushes all the right buttons for a Star Wars action-adventure. It’s a genre remix that samples the combat and exploration of a lightened-up Dark Souls and the action and energy of Uncharted, and that works out to be a great fit for the return of the playable Jedi.
The story is a dark one, which is appropriate for a time in the series – between episodes 3 and 4, when things are at their bleakest for the Jedi and the galaxy as a whole. It’s absolutely drenched in the trauma of the aftermath of Palpatine and Vader’s purge of the Jedi Order five years earlier, with both our young ginger Jedi hero Cal Kestis and his new mentor Cere Junda defined by their survivors’ guilt and remorse over how they escaped Order 66. Cal is respectably acted by Cameron Monaghan, though he never really develops a strong personality that separates him from other generic Jedi characters. He’s a standard-issue good guy through and through, and even at his lowest he’s never remotely tempted by darkness and vengeance – he just needs a solid pep talk. Cere, on the other hand, far outshines him with an anguished performance from Debra Wilson, especially in the latter half when she relives her darkest moments and confronts the consequences of her actions with appropriate revulsion on her face. Even the main antagonist, the Imperial Inquisitor Jedi hunter known as Second Sister, has unexpected depth – a pleasant surprise after the two-dimensional villainy of similar characters in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series.
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All of that darkness means there’s less of the upbeat swashbuckling charm of the original trilogy, though a little bit of it shines through. We get a fair amount of comic relief from the four-armed captain Gris of the good ship Mantis and the ever-present, ever-adorable chicken-legged droid, BD-1 (often pronounced “Buddy”). He’s barely bigger than Luke’s binoculars, but he’s extremely useful. Not just through his hacking abilities, which serve as an extension of your own, but because he’ll hop off your back to draw your attention to things you can scan to unlock in the in-game encyclopedia, and the lights on the back of his head are used to indicate your health status without cluttering up the screen too much. The main quest sends our freckle-faced Force-user and crew on what amounts to a Star Wars version of an Indiana Jones adventure (which must make George Lucas proud) that spans across several planets. You’re thrown into not only the sterile metal corridors of Imperial facilities but also the dense jungles of the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, the angry red dust of Dathomir, and other lesser-known worlds with their own look and feel, including ancient alien tombs that you raid. Though they seem small at first, almost every world you visit is revealed to be surprisingly large, with huge sections and shortcuts locked behind barriers you’ll later learn to blast through, jump over, or otherwise overcome. Some of them are dramatically different from area to area, with the exotic Shadowlands region of Kashyyyk standing out in my mind as a surprisingly distinctive location thanks to its creepy carnivorous plants. Other areas include subterranean caverns and ancient temples, all of which stand in stark contrast to traditional Star Wars settings. The vast majority of the puzzles are simple fun – imagine if Lara Croft could momentarily freeze moving objects and push boulders with her mind – but one or two got tricky enough to make me scratch my head for a while. There’s almost never too much of it at once, though, so you’re rarely doing the same thing for long.
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Exploration is key to these maps, and both chests full of cosmetic loot and special Force echos (the Jedi equivalent of audio logs) are scattered everywhere. It gives you plenty of reason to veer left when the vague indicator on the map screen suggests you should turn right – or to make a return trip to a previously visited world – just to see what you can find after you’ve gained a new ability. On rare occasions, usually after a tough optional fight or moderately tricky puzzle, you’ll even find a chest with something that affects gameplay, such as an extra health canister or one third of a permanent increase to your health or Force capacity. It’s enough reward to keep the urge to turn over every rock going. From the opening scene on a shipbreaking world where the remains of the prequel trilogy era are being literally torn apart for scrap as the Empire builds up its new fleet, the attention to detail and obvious love for the source material shows. Say what you will about EA’s Star Wars games to date, but both Battlefront games look and sound amazing and authentic, and Jedi Fallen Order is up to that same standard. The only thing I’d call out as offensively ugly are the wookiees, due to the fact that graphics technology has yet to really nail a human head’s worth of hair much less an entire walking carpet. All of that detail isn’t free, and while it aims for 60 frames per second in performance mode on Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, it doesn’t always stay on target. Even a PC with a GTX 2080 struggles with that on ultra settings. And, like many Unreal Engine-powered games, when you’re entering a new area there tends to be a moment of chop as things load into place, though it always cleared up by the time the action started. The screen is mercifully uncluttered of minimaps or quest markers, letting the great environments shine. When you pull up the map screen, the hologram-style projection is minimalist and not all that helpful for precise navigation, but it does give you an idea of where you’ve been, how much is left to do in an area, and the direction you should head in. That’s especially useful when you’re trying to make it back to your ship after completing a story objective, since there is no fast-travel system and it’s easy to get turned around or go in circles. I also genuinely appreciated that it clearly marks where you can’t yet go because you don’t have the right abilities (so don’t waste your time until later in the story) and highlights new places you can go with your recently unlocked abilities. It’s a huge time-saver. The story doesn’t take long at all to throw Cal headlong into the first of many Uncharted-style action sequences where everything’s exploding around him but falling in the exact right position to allow him to jump off of it or use it to climb out of a hole. Jedi: Fallen Order has incorporated just about every trick in the third-person action game playbook: climbing suitably bumpy walls, shimmying along beams, sliding down slopes, swinging from ropes, wall-running, and more, and the thrill ride is at its best when it’s chaining all of these together for a sequence that requires a bit of timing to pull off. (Falling instantly respawns you at the beginning of the sequence with a small bite out of your health bar, so the stakes aren’t that high if you miss a jump a few times.) This only gets better as more Force abilities are introduced and enhanced over the entire campaign, giving it a different flavor than the similar antics of Nathan Drake and Lara Croft.
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Likewise, the lightsaber doesn’t stay hidden for long. It’s the only weapon you’ll use (Cal is apparently much more averse to “uncivilized” blasters than Luke or even Obi-Wan) so it’s a good thing using it against enemies looks and sounds completely authentic to the movies, and feels great most of the time. Combat is not straight out of a Dark Souls-style action game, but it definitely shares the emphasis on carefully timing strikes, parries, and dodges while watching the enemy for tells on when attacks will come. Playing on Jedi Master difficulty (the third of four settings), I found that just about every enemy was seriously dangerous if I let my guard down – the exception being basic Storm Troopers, who are very on-brand in that they’re laughably easy to kill with either a single blow or a timed block to reflect their own blaster bolts back at their very killable faces. Battles with bosses and other foes with lightsabers or lightsaber-like weapons are brilliantly animated with intense effects as colored blades whirl and clash and sparks fly. Every melee enemy has a block bar that must be broken before you can damage them with head-on attacks (rather than dodging and countering or following up a well-timed parry), and that can create some moments that reminded me of Luke furiously bludgeoning Vader before finally chopping off his robot hand in Return of the Jedi. Naturally it’s not just button-mashing until they break: enemies will flash red to indicate an unblockable attack is incoming, and you’ll need to quickly side-step, dodge-roll, or leap to avoid it. Going up against multiple enemies – even weaker, omnipresent ones – always feels dangerous, especially with both ranged and melee attackers coming at you at once. Nailing your part of that precise, on-the-fly choreography is always rewarding – and frequently refreshed by a surprisingly wide selection of enemy types, from dog-sized bugs to enormous space-troll things and the most recognizable Imperial military hardware.
Along the way you’ll gather a heaping pile of lightsaber parts (along with skins for BD-1, your ship, and Cal’s outfit) that allow you to individually customize the design of the emitter, the switch, the sheath, the hilt, and the material along with the blade color. There are various ornamental styles that can be mixed and matched to the point where it feels like your own creation, but none of that changes how the laser sword actually functions in combat. That is a constant (with the exception of a few upgrades on the skill tree), which means improving in combat is all on you. (Note that a small handful of these cosmetic items are exclusive to the premium edition of Jedi: Fallen Order – there are currently no other items or DLC for sale.) The main gripe I have with the lightsaber is that it doesn’t always feel as powerful as it should, and that’s down to game design and technical reasons. For one, while you often cleave small hostile animals and droids clean in half and lop off limbs from larger ones, humanoid enemies (Storm Troopers, Scout Troopers, elite Purge Trooper minibosses, and a few others) were deemed off-limits for dismemberment. That’s usually not a huge deal except for the pretty cool finishing moves that are often automatically triggered, many of which definitely look like they really should have severed a good chunk or two.
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The same thing goes for how the lightsaber interacts with the environment: basically it doesn’t, aside from leaving some temporary glowing scars or shattering pottery so fragile that it breaks if you just brush up against it. Being locked out of an area by a simple door seems a little silly when you’re holding the galaxy’s most effective blowtorch in your hand and cutting through doors is a trick we’ve specifically seen Jedi do in the movies. It’s actually fairly rare that you’ll see items around the levels that can be cleaved through, aside from occasional vines or cables blocking your way. This is, of course, a video game, and a lot of that sort of thing is to be expected, but it does unavoidably dilute the Jedi power fantasy. The Force powers Cal gradually unlocks are also surprisingly conservative relative to a lot of Star Wars games. There are only three active abilities: freeze/stun, push, and pull – no mind tricks, no super speed, no lightning from your fingertips. However, they’re all useful in multiple ways, such as combat and puzzle-solving, so it feels more diverse than that. Plus, I will never get tired of approaching a powerful enemy and simply Force-pushing them off a ledge, avoiding a dangerous fight entirely. And any flying enemies can be quickly dealt with by using Force pull to bring them within range of your lightsaber. Thematically, it’s a conflicting choice to have your Force meter recharged by scoring blows against enemies with your lightsaber – that kind of aggression isn’t really compatible with the Jedi philosophy as we know it – but again, video game! I will say that, given that this is the same year Control came out, I longed for a similar telekinetic ability to grab items from around the environment and smash the hell out of enemies with them. Remedy wins that round.
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The consequences of death in Jedi: Fallen Order are clever: Respawn (which cheekily flashes its own studio name on the screen as a prompt every time you’re struck down) has borrowed from Dark Souls and its ilk without leaning quite as hard into punishment. Jedi meditation circles are scattered throughout the maps and using one will save that location as your respawn point and give you the opportunity to spend any skill points you’ve earned. However, it also gives you the option to rest; doing so will fully restore not only your health, Force, but also healing canisters (which can restore your life even mid-fight if you can avoid being interrupted for a couple of seconds). Like the Souls games, though, restoring what needs to be restored also respawns every enemy on the map. Considering how tough some enemies are, that’s not a no-brainer decision.
And when you do die (which if you’re like me is fairly often), you lose whatever XP you’ve gathered toward skill points and have to return to face your killer to reclaim them, creating a brief sense of rivalry and stakes. But here’s where Jedi: Fallen Order gets creative: rather than expecting you to face off against an enemy who already defeated you, potentially with less health than you had the first time, the first blow you land against them fully restores your health and Force meters (along with your lost XP), letting you face them at your best. It’s a great way of getting you over a hump when you need just a little extra leg up to beat a tough enemy, and prevents you from getting stuck as often. The upgrade tree you dump those hard-won skill points into has a few must-have abilities – the lightsaber throw is unlockable in here, and you’d be crazy not to – but most are more incremental increases to health and Force capacity or specialized moves that didn’t feel essential. By the time I reached the end I’d unlocked all but a handful of skills, so I never felt the need to specialize in one area for a given playthrough. Most of the best new abilities are unlocked as part of the story, anyway. Without spoiling the ending, Jedi: Fallen Order sticks the landing with its story after around 20 hours, wrapping up its quest with a tough, climactic boss fight and thrilling finale, all without overtly setting up a specific sequel to see how this game’s conflicts will be resolved. Like a Titanic in space, we all know where things are going and where they need to be in about 13 years when A New Hope picks up: Cal was never going to be the one to defeat Darth Vader or destroy the Empire, so it’s good that it knows its place and doesn’t cross any defined lines.