Star Wars has been somewhat divisive as a franchise over the last few years, so I think it’s important to clarify where I fall on the “fan spectrum”, if you will. I’m very much on the casual end, meaning I like Star Wars as much as the next guy, but I’m not hugely invested – I’ve watched most of the mainstream movies and partaken of expanded universe content on occasion, mostly video games. I don’t have Star Wars posters or bed sheets or plastic lightsabers. Oh, and I think the Disney Star Wars movies are fucking awful – not just as Star Wars films, but films in general.
So after suffering through the recent movies, I was ambivalent to anything Star Wars-related until I saw the first gameplay trailer for Fallen Order. If there’s one thing I’ve always wanted, it’s a decent Jedi game – or, more specifically, a decent lightsaber game. To me, Jedi and lightsabers are the most interesting thing in the whole franchise. Lightsabers look cool and sound cool and make for gripping melee battle scenes, but no previous game ever got it quite right. What I wanted was a decent melee system where you could kill most enemies in one hit, lopping off limbs or heads from time to time, and a decent combat system allowing for white-knuckle engagements with the accompanying sparks, pops, and fizzes as lightsabers make contact.
Some games got close. For instance Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (recently re-released on PS4 and Switch) captured the look, feel, and sound of lightsabers – but the melee mechanics were an incomprehensible mess in which you circle-strafed and flailed wildly until someone’s head flew off with no real means to guarantee it wasn’t yours. The Force Unleashed and its sequel were also admirable attempts, also recreating the look, feel, and sound of lightsabers, but the focus in those games was on the Force powers and the melee combat wasn’t deeply developed. Also, the boss fights were a special kind of terrible. Come to think of it, the game that came closest to giving me the best version of lightsaber melee combat wasn’t even a Star Wars game – it was Soul Calibur IV. Darth Vader, Yoda, and The Apprentice guest-starring in a finely-tuned versus fighting game finally delivered the skillful saber-swinging combat complete with blocks, parries, dodges, and everything else that I’d always wanted. It was great – but you had to play the guest characters against each other to get the full effect.
After Soul Calibur IV, I figured that was as good as it would ever get. EA acquired the licence in 2013, and since then hasn’t been much interested in publishing Star Wars games without multiplayer, microtransactions, and loot boxes. So imagine my surprise when I find out EA is funding development of a new big-budget, single-player Star Wars game. Single-player games, while by no means immune to the Dark Side of microtransactions, don’t lend themselves to it as readily as competitive online games linked to grindy player profiles.
In this newly-announced game, however, you’d play as a Jedi with a lightsaber and some Force powers. Okay, getting interested despite my apprehensions. According the Wikipedia entry, the gameplay was inspired by Zelda. Okay, even more interested. And Dark Souls. Okay, now I’m super interested. But, I still can’t help but nervously glance at that EA logo. It seemed almost too good to be true and I kept waiting for the big betrayal – like a near-launch announcement that you’d be able to buy digital… holocrons, or something, containing tiered lightsaber upgrades or whatever– all while the Imperial March rose in volume and our new hopes were crushed.
But no, the game was released without incident and there’s nary a microtransaction in sight. It’s finally here and, having just finished it, I present my findings.
Fallen Order is set between the prequel trilogy and the classic trilogy. Players take on the role of Cal Kestis, a former Jedi padawan who survived the massacre of Order 66 and spent many years hiding on a junk planet working as a scrapper. An emergency forces him to reveal his Jedi powers, resulting in a pair of Imperial Inquisitors (Sith operatives who hunt down the remaining Jedi) arriving and forcing him to flee. Luckily, he’s rescued by another former Jedi, Cere Junda, and her pilot Greez, who convince him there’s a way to rebuild the Jedi Order, with his help of course. The story is compelling and, I think, much more entertaining than the Disney movies. There are no obnoxious agendas, no Death Star-sized plot holes, no “droid lives matter!”, no characters chugging blue-green milk from an ogre’s tit – none of that stupid stuff. It’s just a fun sci-fi adventure with well-written heroes and villains, exactly as Star Wars is meant to be. Cal, Cere and Greez each have their own baggage and aren’t sure they’re up to the task ahead of them, but they’re going to try. The villains are equally intriguing, especially The Second Sister of the Inquisition and the Night Sisters of Dathomir.
The general structure of the game can be loosely compared to a Zelda game, or perhaps a metroidvania mixed with Ratchet and Clank. Initially Cal has access to only one planet, and even then, only certain parts of it. As he progresses through the story, new planets and destinations become available. On each planet, there are inaccessible locations you’ll need to return to once you’ve acquired the means to bypass the obstacles, such as different Force powers, upgrades for your little explorer droid BD-1, or equipment like climbing claws. The several planets are very visually distinct and immensely detailed. They’re also huge with branching paths and hidden secret areas. I legitimately had trouble finding my way back to the ship every time I explored Zeffo – seriously that’s how big, intricate, and maze-like the planets are. And there’s great variety even within planets – the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyk is as inviting as we’ve ever seen, but eventually you get to explore a part of it called the Shadowlands, which is filled with dangerous wildlife and carnivorous plants.
Cal has his lightsaber and three basic Force Powers – push, pull and slow. The Force powers are used for solving puzzles and traversal by, say, slowing down fast moving things, pushing items to make bridges, that sort of thing. They’re also useful in combat, especially when Cal is swarmed, so he can himself some elbow room, or dispatch troublesome enemies quickly before moving on to the rest. As he gains each of these powers, he can upgrade them further with special skills as he levels up, such as upgrading the Force push to take down entire mobs of enemies, or upgrading the Force pull to bring a single enemy for an instant finish. There are also some lightsaber skills on there, like the ability to throw his lightsaber, or a special attack that can switch between the single and double lightsaber.
The lightsaber combat is the core of the game and yes, I’m going to get pedantic here. Melee combat in video games is a subject near and dear to my heart. I love it when a game demands some effort in the melee combat, and I hate overly simplistic games where you can simply level up your strength and wreck shit. Luckily, The Fallen Order is the former kind of game – imagine a melee combat system that feels a bit like Nioh and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, with a dash of dodgy-rolly Dark Souls for the bigger enemies. In the Fallen Order, both Cal and the enemies have a stamina bar which is depleted by blocking attacks. If they run out of stamina, they’re wide open for a few good hits – very much like Nioh. But even the weakest human enemies in the game won’t let Cal simply run up and hit them – no, they’ll block if they can. Hell, they’ll even try to parry, meaning you can’t simply beat on enemies until their stamina runs out. Instead, you have to pay attention in case one of your strikes is parried, and switch from offence to defence or take a hit yourself. In that respect, it feels a lot like Sekiro. And when enemies parry, they don’t always follow up the same way. Sometimes they may try a basic attack after a parry, sometimes they may try a delayed attack, and occasionally they may even bust out an unblockable attack, requiring a dodge. This keeps you on your toes and forces you to really engage with every enemy type, learning to read their movements and sharpening your reflexes so you can respond as each split second demands.
There’s a variety of different enemies to adjust to throughout the game, including dozens of different kinds of Stormtroopers, some with melee weapons, some with ranged weapons. It’s hard to concentrate on the three guys wielding shock-batons in front of you when there are two blaster-wielding arseholes up on the high ground. And then there are the Purge Troopers, black-clad Stormtroopers who are specially trained and equipped to fight Jedi, and the Haxion Brood bounty hunters – cyborgs with all kinds of toys like jetpacks, shields, and flashbangs. On each planet there’s plenty of hostile wildlife too, some small, some huge.
The game also features some boss fights, and mostly they’re pretty good but the highlights are obviously the Inquistors – The Second Sister and the Ninth Sister – who feel a lot like Sekiro bosses in that you can’t land hits easily, you have to work for them. Unfortunately, the bosses are also where my problems with the game start. Two boss fights in particular stand out, the Second Sister who you face multiple times, and a boss on the planet Dathomir which I won’t spoil. When you face the Second Sister for the last time, she gains a couple of really annoying attacks that are basically invincible – and no, I’m not talking about the inevitable unblockable ones – those I understand. No, these attacks look like normal attacks, it’s just that she can do them any time and is completely invulnerable for the duration. Add in her ridiculous amounts of health, lots of hard-to-read combos, and a despair-inducing number of quick unblockables – she’s hard enough already without this. And I don’t care who the character is, if you land a hit on her while she’s not blocking, she should flinch, damn it! This breaks all the rules you learn up to that point. The Dathomir boss has one of these attacks too – but it’s still one too many. And just like the Second Sister, he’s challenging enough without the cheap move.
My last significant gripe is that the game appears to have been a victim of the editor’s lightsaber in a some places. Such is AAA game-development, I get that, but still you can kind of see the seams in some cases. One NPC who joins near the end of the game, for example, feels like she was supposed to have a much larger role in the story, and some of the other sub-plots also seem to have been rushed to conclusion.