January 17th, 2020
There hasn’t been a good Star Wars game for about a decade, and it’s come to a point that people start to trick themselves into thinking that a bad game is better than it is. Lots of people will tell you that EA’s Battlefront 2 is good now, but it still suffers from the same initial problems on release, just with more content attached. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, on the other hand, does manage to be a good Star Wars game, but unfortunately it draws too many parallels between itself and better games to be truly considered great.
To be perfectly honest, the story was the first thing that threw me off about Fallen Order. Set several years after Revenge of the Sith, we were told that the premise would be playing a Jedi that managed to survive the Purge and is now in hiding. Considering the last two good Jedi action games (Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy) mixed lightsaber and blaster combat, I was expecting a game that was less about hitting stormtroopers with your lightsaber and more a regular Uncharted-esque third person shooter with occasional lightsaber battles. Sort of what Star Wars 1313 looked like before it was canceled, albeit with the occasional Force push thrown in for good measure. Instead we have a game about a former Padawan, Cal Kestis, who has not only carried a lightsaber ON HIS PERSON for years but also waves it around every chance that he gets. Undercover indeed.
So I wasn’t quite onboard with the way the gameplay meshed in the world, and the plot itself didn’t really grab me either. It revolves around fighting several Sith Inquisitors, Jedi captured and tortured into Darth Vader’s service similar to the Star Wars EU’s Emperor’s Hands, and searching for a holocron that has the recorded locations of every Force sensitive child in the galaxy. The motivation here is to use this crystal to find these children and rebuild the Jedi Order, but since there wasn’t a whole army of Jedi running around during Episode IV I think everyone can just assume right out of the gate they don’t rebuild the Order. So much like the many Star Wars comics and books that follows a group of people trying to kill Darth Vader, we have another inconsequential Star Wars story that doesn’t impact the main line in any meaningful way. That’s not to say I didn’t end up liking Cal by the end, but the story handles his acceptance of the quest and his decisions so unevenly as we run through it so that it makes it very hard to like the twists and turns of the story at all.
Words cannot adequately describe how much I loved Sekiro when it came out last March, so the fact that Fallen Order has very similar gameplay is one of its biggest strengths but also one of its biggest problems. You see, Sekiro’s combat worked because everything was incredibly precise and responsive, and it had to be. Everything followed the rules that were laid out before you, and almost everything responded perfectly down to the last possible second. Fallen Order does not have the same level of precision, nor the same internal rules, but since it follows the same gameplay formula of guard strength and precision blocks it means that it lends itself to these unfavorable comparisons.
We’ll start with the basics: blocking and stamina. Almost every single fight in Sekiro runs on the same core design: enemies have a stamina bar that you can damage with attacks or parries, and if you manage to get the bar down to zero then the enemy becomes vulnerable to a finishing move. These moves either kill them outright or if it’s a boss/miniboss it destroys their remaining health bar and sends them into their next phase. This is a matter of consistency, and since it was a core strategy of the game you could parry almost any attack you wanted, assuming you could press the block button fast enough.
Fallen Order unfortunately lacks much of this consistency. At the start of the game you’ll find that scout and purge troopers (plus one or two other enemy types later) are the only ones with stamina, and while reducing that stamina does lead to a finishing move, you’ll soon discover that scout troopers are the ONLY enemy where this applies. Instead stamina reduction just makes enemies vulnerable to free hit for slightly higher damage, and while that’s certainly useful it also means that parries aren’t the bedrock of the game. You also can’t consistently perfect parry every attack in a combo (or try to parry in the middle of a combo) because the game’s responsiveness is too sluggish to register you lowering and raising your block during a combo. So instead of parries the easiest way to win in Fallen Order is to wait for an enemy to do an unblockable attack, dodge around it (unlike Sekiro there is no “how should you avoid this and counterattack” system), and then hit them when they’re wide open after they miss. This is, of course, unless you’re fighting the giant spiders, as they’re one of the few enemies where a perfect parry (just one, mind you) leads to a one hit kill…but they have no stamina bar. Again, this is a question of readability and consistency, a question that Fallen Order fails. It’s also worth noting that combat flows a lot worse in Fallen Order because while most games have the option to have your lock-on jump other enemies after you beat their friends in combat, Fallen Order limits this to just enemies you can see. This leads to a lot of wildly spinning the camera to find the enemies trying to stab you in the back rather than just allowing the combat rhythm to continue.
Continuing the discussion of consistency, there is a problem with Fallen Order’s strategic elements as well. Sekiro has a “tool for every situation” philosophy for its special abilities, where the throwing stars can knock enemies out of the air, the axe can destroy shields, etc. Fallen Order tries to do something similar, where some enemies are weak to certain Force abilities, but their reliability is rarely worth the hassle. The biggest offender is Force push, which will sometimes throw grenades or rockets back at enemies and at other times will do nothing at all, generally leading to you getting a rocket in the face. If you’ve played a From Software game in the last decade you won’t find getting a rocket in the face to be that much of a problem, but the real detriment is your limited Force powers. Fallen Order’s Force energy is a resource that only regenerates through hitting and killing enemies (so much for “knowledge and defense, never attack”), so when you’re having trouble landing hits on whatever you’re fighting it gets even more frustrating to waste all your Force energy on bricked Force pushes.
Limiting Force usage in combat was no doubt put in for balance, but balance wouldn’t be needed if the Force powers weren’t all essentially crutches. This is where the review will shift gears from comparing Fallen Order to Sekiro and instead we’ll start comparing Fallen Order to Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, the two previous Jedi games that I would argue present the “Jedi fantasy” to a better degree. For starters your Force powers in Outcast and Academy weren’t easy mode buttons that you could press when the going got hard, instead they were essentially just things you could use to style on weaker enemies that got in your way on the path to fighting stronger foes. This was because the stronger enemies in Outcast and Academy were other Force users, so they could push, pull, choke, jump, and do most everything else you could do to counteract your Force powers. Fallen Order’s enemies have almost no defense against your abilities, and as I said before your Force powers in Fallen Order are used as an “easy button” rather than just a natural part of combat. The first damn ability that you unlock is Force Stasis (famously seen in use by Kylo Ren but used before in other games like KOTOR), and any supposedly difficult game that gives you a “freeze any enemy in place for three seconds” ability needs to rethink its classification.
Another thing that Outcast and Academy did better than Fallen Order is making the fights actually FEEL like the ones you see in the movies and cartoon. Part of this is probably because you don’t fight as many lightsaber enemies in Fallen Order as you do in its predecessors but there’s also the lack of enemy movement options to consider. Most fights in Fallen Order take place in flat open areas or flat hallways, with any elevation reserved exclusively for stormtroopers to pelt shots at you while you fight their friends. In the last eight mainline Star Wars movies we have seen mobile lightsaber combat, with fights either moving through areas, through elevations, or both, and Fallen Order does none of this. Academy and Outcast’s combat allowed these situations to create themselves organically, as you could leap away from enemies and they would follow you up onto platforms or across pits to continue these fights in new areas, which felt a hell of a lot like Star Wars. Fallen Order just feels like a slower Sekiro where your Padawan can’t even fight three scout troopers with shiny sticks at a time.
So that’s everything that Fallen Order does worse than the games that came before, but what does it do that’s better? The only edge Fallen Order has over Sekiro (unless you want to count things that make the game easier, which I do not) is the map system. Sekiro really suffered from not having a map on its first playthrough, which of course is another thing that you’ll find in From Software games but as their maps get more and more layered on themselves it just gets more frustrating. Fallen Order’s map system is very nice, but since it’s a Metroidvania it would pretty much have to be. It shows you the location of save points and things that you’ve found but aren’t able to use yet, due to the lack of droid modification or Force power. It’s definitely a useful thing to have, though I wish it would show you locked crates that you haven’t opened yet, since it’s hard to keep track of a half dozen crate locations spread across five planets. One could also argue that Fallen Order edges out Sekiro when it comes to combat variety, since unlocking the double-bladed lightsaber technically gives Cal a “second weapon” while Sekiro only had one move set throughout the game. But I don’t really consider this a benefit considering how poorly the double-blade works compared to Cal’s single blade, with weak damage output and a much worse power attack.
Admittedly Fallen Order does have better combat than Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast, but both those games had combat where the ability to block was more of a suggestion than a rule so it’s not hard to have better combat than they did. There’s also something to be said about the customization options that Fallen Order has, where you can change the look of Cal’s clothes, robot, lightsaber, and ship with crates found throughout the game. The customization is held back a little by the fact that Fallen Order needs to be “canon” and thus you’re not allowed to have a red lightsaber, but there are other colors to choose from after a point and a lot of other options to make the weapon actually feel like your own. I’m not as big of a fan of the clothing options (ponchos are really big in the post-Clone Wars era, I guess) but all that really meant is that I was routinely disappointed with the special items I unlocked for beating mini-bosses. “Alright I found this optional boss and beat him clearly well before I was supposed to, I can’t wait to see what I unlo-” and then it’s a bright pink poncho.
There’s also a number of visual issues that can feel a little jarring. Several cutscenes have the voice lines out of sync with the mouth movements, to the point where the voice lines continue for at least half a second after the character’s talking animations have ceased, but that’s the least offensive of the bunch. At several key moments in the story you watch fight scenes happen that are beyond your control, and they’re so poorly choreographed that at times it looks like one character is hitting thin air and the other characters are just falling down. During one particular point I even saw one character run into the room alongside another that they were supposed to be fighting, almost as though they were doing a third-grade play and one of them missed their cue. The worst of all is when you eventually learn how to swim and discover unlockable crates underwater, because while your droid friend will jump into crates and make them shake if you’re above ground, they neglected to add that animation while you’re underwater. So the crate will open, close, shake around, and then reopen exactly like if your droid had jumped inside of it…only your cute little friend will still be firmly attached to your shoulder the whole time. Mysterious are the ways of the Force.
Fallen Order might be one of the best Star Wars games of all time, but it’s low on that list because it doesn’t go all the way with its premise unlike the previous Jedi games. A Sekiro combat system is probably the best thing for Jedi games going forward, but it needs to take the harness off when it comes to Force powers and it REALLY needs to add fighting lightsaber-wielding enemies a little more regularly. Jedi games should be about lightsaber fights and using your Force powers, not beating up under-trained soldiers and needing to lie down after three Force pushes. Play if you’re desperate for more Star Wars content but don’t want to play/replay Jedi Academy or Jedi Outcast again, but if you’re only in it for the gameplay then just play Sekiro.
