Fallen Order does the hard part mostly right but fumbles the easy part on the finish line.
---------------
THE GOOD
Ok combat - Decent puzzles - Deflecting lasers is fun - Mostly good cast - Mongolian throat singing
THE BAD
Glitchy climbing and movement - Poor performance - Bland story and protagonist - Forgettable music - Lacks understanding of its sources of inspiration - Comical cloth glitches
THE UGLY
85% of collectibles are pointless cosmetics
---------------
Ever since they have ventured into the franchise, EA's output regarding Star Wars videogames has been less than, well, stellar. Starting with 2011's struggling Old Republic MMO, continuing with the empty shell that was 2015's Battlefront remake and the lootbox nightmare that was its sequel, and 2021's disappointing VR-centric Squadrons, Fallen Order represents for many the high point of EA's Star Wars offering, perhaps with good reason. Despite that, we are still looking at a product that didn't try hard enough to be polished, well designed and to make proper use of its systems.
The problems start with a bland and uninteresting story, in which we assume the role of poncho-enthusiast Cal Kestis, a padawan of the Jedi order whose training was cut short by Order 66 which, in one of the most engaging moment, we see first hand in an interactive segment in which clone troopers who were friendly a moment prior turn against the Jedi in the blink of an eye. Following those events, Cal has been living in hiding for the past several years, working as a scrapper on an unpleasant junkyard planet, until imperial inquisitors show up, forcing him to leave of a galaxy-trotting adventure in search for a holocron containing a list of Force-sensitives who can repopulate the long lost Jedi order, armed with nothing but a lightsaber, a chicken droid perched on his shoulder and a damaged connection to the Force.
Not a bad premise on paper, but Cal is such a goody-two-shoes potato that it becomes really difficult to relate to him in any meaningful way. Not only will you not be able to shake the feeling of being playing as a mellowed-out store brand Anakin Skywalker due to how the main character is modeled, which is a downside in and of itself (one wonders just how mnay Star wars fans want to be reminded of Hayden Christensen), but suffice it to say that the game features a dedicated "cuddle droid" button, or how Cal mourns for the giant superpredator boss he just defended himself with, which should give you an idea of what kind of eyeroll-worthy character we're dealing with here.
The rest of the cast is better, except for an annoying "fuggeddaboutit" furry pilot, both allies and villains are well characterized, from the Jedi in hiding Cere to the evil Second Sister to the Dathomir witch Merrin and the obligatory cameo by Forest Whitaker, it is a fairly solid ensemble. It's just a shame that the writing fails to engage or convey any kind of sense of urgency, in no small measure due to the game's "we'll get around to it after this sidequest" attitude to its main storyline, which puts the pacing all over the place.
Gameplay-wise we are looking at an "Uncharted meets Dark Souls with Metroid elements" type of offering, much in the vein of what Darksiders 3 did a year before: you move from "bonfire" to bonfire, respawning there when you die with a retrieval mechanic. The souls-lite combat is generally pretty good, with the usual parries and dodges you've come to expect from the genre and cool things borrowed from previous Jedi-themed games, such as shoving enemies around with the Force and deflecting blaster bolts at them with proper timing, which is really fun.
Leveling up is present and it works like a mix of Sekiro and Bloodborne: you gain experience by killing enemies and this builds a progress bar which when completed grants you a perk point. A partial progress bars is lost upon death and has to be retrieved by landing a hit on the enemy that killed you. there are three skill trees with a number of health, force and damage upgrades and a number of optional skills like saber throw and a number of booster versions of powers unlocked throughout the story. A note is that said powers tend to come a bit too late: for instance Force push, perhaps the most basic power in Jedi canon, is acquired only halfway through the game.
While combat is decent, some of the enemies are an absolute pain to deal with, namely the purge troopers and the two boss fights against siths, all of which suffer from a bad case of blocking everything you do and leaving very few punish windows open to get the fight over with in any reasonable amount of time. If nothing else the purge troopers have terrible AI and can fairly easily be pushed off a cliff or be tricked into repeatedly being eaten by a venus flyrtrap but the Sith bosses will require an amount of practice and persistence ranging from frsutrating to absolutely inordinate before you can defeat them, which is not helped by the fact your saber swings sometimes seem to go through the enemies without effect. Not fun at all.
The Uncharted side of things consists of a few types of fairly decent puzzles involving pushing and pulling elements with the Force, slowing them down or rolling boulders around to solve clockwork rooms. They are not the best puzzles you'll ever see, but they are serviceable. Aside from that it's the usual array of climbing on clearly signposted surfaces and performing a number of brief parkour trials reminiscent of ye olde PS2 era Prince of Persia games, with wall running and vine swinging used frequently. This aspect is not problem-free either, as surface detection is far from flawless: your character will all too often glitch out and miss a ledge or zipline or fall through level geometry, plunging in shame into an abyss. The designers must have know this, since instead of sending you back to one of its (monstruously long) loading screens when this happens, they simply respawn you at the nearest safe platform losing a paltry bit of health, not unlike what Zelda has done for the past three decades and counting. That's a definite departure from the souls formula, since it entirely removes any kind of need for attention or prudence when navigating the levels.
The game also takes a wrong page from Uncharted (worse stil, in fact) in another key aspect, which is the items you find around the world. An absolutely key aspect of Dark Souls and its emulators is that they provide meaningful loot scattered around their dungeons; the harder an item is to reach the richer the rewards: a new weapon, an upgrade to the healing flask, a rare upgrade material for your gear. Fallen order does very, very little of that: there are exactly two things you can find, that is health and force upgrades (which are somewhat redundant since all the ones you need are unlockable in your skill tree) and health stim stock upgrades. These constitute about 15% or the overall collectibles the designers placed around the levels. The remaining 85% are nothing but audiologs and the worst kind of pointless cosmetics you can think of: new poncho colors and pieces for your lightsaber you will never see up close enough in game to even distinguish. There are no consumables, no upgrade materials, nothing. At least in uncharted you might find a hidden power weapon, or a cache of grenades, it's not just cosmetic items. This is a problem that Fallen Order shares with Nioh, whose collectibles were just randomized caches of procedural loot, only this game manages to be even worse in that regard.
There is nothing more disappointing than solving an optional puzzle, defeating a copy/pasted miniboss or, worst of all, traveling back to a previous planet specifically to open a chest you couldn't access before, just to be rewarded with a brown poncho you have no use for whatsoever, especially since the game's cloth physics are completely broken, making it look like there is always a strong wind blowing, even in a starship in deep space. It's comical at first, until you realize that it's permanent and it never, ever stops, which means you will likely disable the poncho as soon as possible just so you don't have to look at it spazzing out in every cutscene, de facto making all those collectibles even more pointless than they already were. If nothing else, the game has the common courtesy to clearly color code the treasure chests: white for useless cosmetics and yellow for health stim upgrades, so at least you know what you're getting. It gets to the point that halfway through the game you will likely stop opening the white boxes entirely, ignoring them just as you find them, since the animation to open them is fairly long, always the exact same, and the cosmetic boxes are dozens upon dozens in each world you visit.
Level design has highs and lows: some areas, like the cliffside halls of the Dathomir witches, are well designed, with appropriately placed shortcuts and meaningful secret areas, others, like the first area of the game proper, are a confusing and frsutrating mess of paltforms that are placed just a few inches too far apart for you to jump, belying the linear structure of areas that are only open and expansive at a glance, before revealing thelseves an an annoying maze that is gradually opened up via navigation upgrades, on paper Metroid-style, but nowhere near as well done. there is also no fast travel feature whatsoever, meaning you will have to traverse the same areas over and over again to get wheere you need to be (and usually for rewards that aren't worth the effort in any way).
Another aspect of Dark Souls the game fails at replicating is "if you can see it, you can fight it": luckily this only happens once, but they put a massive dragon on a plateau in the very first area, with a path leAding right up to it but not quite, and you will waste hours trying to reach it to do battle, only to eventually google it and find out it's only there for show and cannot be interacted with in any way. they must have known players would try to go ther, and simply did not care they were wasting everyone's time.
Sound design is mixed, with appropriate blaster noise and lightsaber buzzing and clashing but completely forgettable music that barely sticks with you for the time needed to underscore the action and them is flushed way from your memory without leaving a trace, an issue common to most recent Star Wars games and even the new batch of movies. the welcome exception to this is the use of a throat singing piece from Mongolian folk metal band The Hu, which is used as some kind of alien rock anthem and fits the purpose admirably. Voice acting is good, but oftentimes overheard conversations between enemy troopers are cut short as you are trying to listen to them: at least one time one plays over an elevator ride you have no control over and is interrupted the second the lift stops. Sloppy.
Performance is bad, aside from the aforementioned broken physics, the game suffers from frequent frame drops and even the occasional crash.
In conclusion, Fallen Order is a better effort than other recent Star Wars games, at the very least being a coherent single player experience, but it's still a flawed product that lacks vision and awareness of the industry around it, and could have been so much better with a little more understanding of the playstyles they were copying. It's not going to take the scepter away from Raven Software's Jedi Outcast as best jedi-themed action game anytime soon.
---------------
THE GOOD
Ok combat - Decent puzzles - Deflecting lasers is fun - Mostly good cast - Mongolian throat singing
THE BAD
Glitchy climbing and movement - Poor performance - Bland story and protagonist - Forgettable music - Lacks understanding of its sources of inspiration - Comical cloth glitches
THE UGLY
85% of collectibles are pointless cosmetics
---------------
Ever since they have ventured into the franchise, EA's output regarding Star Wars videogames has been less than, well, stellar. Starting with 2011's struggling Old Republic MMO, continuing with the empty shell that was 2015's Battlefront remake and the lootbox nightmare that was its sequel, and 2021's disappointing VR-centric Squadrons, Fallen Order represents for many the high point of EA's Star Wars offering, perhaps with good reason. Despite that, we are still looking at a product that didn't try hard enough to be polished, well designed and to make proper use of its systems.
The problems start with a bland and uninteresting story, in which we assume the role of poncho-enthusiast Cal Kestis, a padawan of the Jedi order whose training was cut short by Order 66 which, in one of the most engaging moment, we see first hand in an interactive segment in which clone troopers who were friendly a moment prior turn against the Jedi in the blink of an eye. Following those events, Cal has been living in hiding for the past several years, working as a scrapper on an unpleasant junkyard planet, until imperial inquisitors show up, forcing him to leave of a galaxy-trotting adventure in search for a holocron containing a list of Force-sensitives who can repopulate the long lost Jedi order, armed with nothing but a lightsaber, a chicken droid perched on his shoulder and a damaged connection to the Force.
Not a bad premise on paper, but Cal is such a goody-two-shoes potato that it becomes really difficult to relate to him in any meaningful way. Not only will you not be able to shake the feeling of being playing as a mellowed-out store brand Anakin Skywalker due to how the main character is modeled, which is a downside in and of itself (one wonders just how mnay Star wars fans want to be reminded of Hayden Christensen), but suffice it to say that the game features a dedicated "cuddle droid" button, or how Cal mourns for the giant superpredator boss he just defended himself with, which should give you an idea of what kind of eyeroll-worthy character we're dealing with here.
The rest of the cast is better, except for an annoying "fuggeddaboutit" furry pilot, both allies and villains are well characterized, from the Jedi in hiding Cere to the evil Second Sister to the Dathomir witch Merrin and the obligatory cameo by Forest Whitaker, it is a fairly solid ensemble. It's just a shame that the writing fails to engage or convey any kind of sense of urgency, in no small measure due to the game's "we'll get around to it after this sidequest" attitude to its main storyline, which puts the pacing all over the place.
Gameplay-wise we are looking at an "Uncharted meets Dark Souls with Metroid elements" type of offering, much in the vein of what Darksiders 3 did a year before: you move from "bonfire" to bonfire, respawning there when you die with a retrieval mechanic. The souls-lite combat is generally pretty good, with the usual parries and dodges you've come to expect from the genre and cool things borrowed from previous Jedi-themed games, such as shoving enemies around with the Force and deflecting blaster bolts at them with proper timing, which is really fun.
Leveling up is present and it works like a mix of Sekiro and Bloodborne: you gain experience by killing enemies and this builds a progress bar which when completed grants you a perk point. A partial progress bars is lost upon death and has to be retrieved by landing a hit on the enemy that killed you. there are three skill trees with a number of health, force and damage upgrades and a number of optional skills like saber throw and a number of booster versions of powers unlocked throughout the story. A note is that said powers tend to come a bit too late: for instance Force push, perhaps the most basic power in Jedi canon, is acquired only halfway through the game.
While combat is decent, some of the enemies are an absolute pain to deal with, namely the purge troopers and the two boss fights against siths, all of which suffer from a bad case of blocking everything you do and leaving very few punish windows open to get the fight over with in any reasonable amount of time. If nothing else the purge troopers have terrible AI and can fairly easily be pushed off a cliff or be tricked into repeatedly being eaten by a venus flyrtrap but the Sith bosses will require an amount of practice and persistence ranging from frsutrating to absolutely inordinate before you can defeat them, which is not helped by the fact your saber swings sometimes seem to go through the enemies without effect. Not fun at all.
The Uncharted side of things consists of a few types of fairly decent puzzles involving pushing and pulling elements with the Force, slowing them down or rolling boulders around to solve clockwork rooms. They are not the best puzzles you'll ever see, but they are serviceable. Aside from that it's the usual array of climbing on clearly signposted surfaces and performing a number of brief parkour trials reminiscent of ye olde PS2 era Prince of Persia games, with wall running and vine swinging used frequently. This aspect is not problem-free either, as surface detection is far from flawless: your character will all too often glitch out and miss a ledge or zipline or fall through level geometry, plunging in shame into an abyss. The designers must have know this, since instead of sending you back to one of its (monstruously long) loading screens when this happens, they simply respawn you at the nearest safe platform losing a paltry bit of health, not unlike what Zelda has done for the past three decades and counting. That's a definite departure from the souls formula, since it entirely removes any kind of need for attention or prudence when navigating the levels.
The game also takes a wrong page from Uncharted (worse stil, in fact) in another key aspect, which is the items you find around the world. An absolutely key aspect of Dark Souls and its emulators is that they provide meaningful loot scattered around their dungeons; the harder an item is to reach the richer the rewards: a new weapon, an upgrade to the healing flask, a rare upgrade material for your gear. Fallen order does very, very little of that: there are exactly two things you can find, that is health and force upgrades (which are somewhat redundant since all the ones you need are unlockable in your skill tree) and health stim stock upgrades. These constitute about 15% or the overall collectibles the designers placed around the levels. The remaining 85% are nothing but audiologs and the worst kind of pointless cosmetics you can think of: new poncho colors and pieces for your lightsaber you will never see up close enough in game to even distinguish. There are no consumables, no upgrade materials, nothing. At least in uncharted you might find a hidden power weapon, or a cache of grenades, it's not just cosmetic items. This is a problem that Fallen Order shares with Nioh, whose collectibles were just randomized caches of procedural loot, only this game manages to be even worse in that regard.
There is nothing more disappointing than solving an optional puzzle, defeating a copy/pasted miniboss or, worst of all, traveling back to a previous planet specifically to open a chest you couldn't access before, just to be rewarded with a brown poncho you have no use for whatsoever, especially since the game's cloth physics are completely broken, making it look like there is always a strong wind blowing, even in a starship in deep space. It's comical at first, until you realize that it's permanent and it never, ever stops, which means you will likely disable the poncho as soon as possible just so you don't have to look at it spazzing out in every cutscene, de facto making all those collectibles even more pointless than they already were. If nothing else, the game has the common courtesy to clearly color code the treasure chests: white for useless cosmetics and yellow for health stim upgrades, so at least you know what you're getting. It gets to the point that halfway through the game you will likely stop opening the white boxes entirely, ignoring them just as you find them, since the animation to open them is fairly long, always the exact same, and the cosmetic boxes are dozens upon dozens in each world you visit.
Level design has highs and lows: some areas, like the cliffside halls of the Dathomir witches, are well designed, with appropriately placed shortcuts and meaningful secret areas, others, like the first area of the game proper, are a confusing and frsutrating mess of paltforms that are placed just a few inches too far apart for you to jump, belying the linear structure of areas that are only open and expansive at a glance, before revealing thelseves an an annoying maze that is gradually opened up via navigation upgrades, on paper Metroid-style, but nowhere near as well done. there is also no fast travel feature whatsoever, meaning you will have to traverse the same areas over and over again to get wheere you need to be (and usually for rewards that aren't worth the effort in any way).
Another aspect of Dark Souls the game fails at replicating is "if you can see it, you can fight it": luckily this only happens once, but they put a massive dragon on a plateau in the very first area, with a path leAding right up to it but not quite, and you will waste hours trying to reach it to do battle, only to eventually google it and find out it's only there for show and cannot be interacted with in any way. they must have known players would try to go ther, and simply did not care they were wasting everyone's time.
Sound design is mixed, with appropriate blaster noise and lightsaber buzzing and clashing but completely forgettable music that barely sticks with you for the time needed to underscore the action and them is flushed way from your memory without leaving a trace, an issue common to most recent Star Wars games and even the new batch of movies. the welcome exception to this is the use of a throat singing piece from Mongolian folk metal band The Hu, which is used as some kind of alien rock anthem and fits the purpose admirably. Voice acting is good, but oftentimes overheard conversations between enemy troopers are cut short as you are trying to listen to them: at least one time one plays over an elevator ride you have no control over and is interrupted the second the lift stops. Sloppy.
Performance is bad, aside from the aforementioned broken physics, the game suffers from frequent frame drops and even the occasional crash.
In conclusion, Fallen Order is a better effort than other recent Star Wars games, at the very least being a coherent single player experience, but it's still a flawed product that lacks vision and awareness of the industry around it, and could have been so much better with a little more understanding of the playstyles they were copying. It's not going to take the scepter away from Raven Software's Jedi Outcast as best jedi-themed action game anytime soon.