2/5. While interesting in concept, EA’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has many core design issues that negatively affect the experience. My name is Xander, I am in grade 12 and this is my review.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order sees Cal Kestis, a Jedi padawan who has become the target of the Galactic Empire. Cal is hunted throughout the galaxy by Imperial Inquisitors while attempting to recall and master his Jedi powers, reconcile with his traumatic past, and rebuild the fallen Jedi Order. The story is very simple and does not try to challenge the player, but it provides a path for the game to follow.
The game’s mechanics and gameplay have elements that make it seem interesting and somewhat fun at the beginning. As the game progresses, Jedi: Fallen Order quickly becomes a slog to play. Basic abilities like jumping and wall running look and feel stiff, and are only marginally improved with late-game upgrades. Other abilities also lack the speed and finesse that you would expect from lightsaber combat. On top of all this, the game just feels unbalanced. The planets you explore never seem to ramp up in difficulty, while the bosses are uneven and often just frustrating instead of fun or challenging. Despite all of this, nothing compares to Jedi: Fallen Order’s most glaring flaw: the leashing of the enemies to specific areas.
Jedi: Fallen Order has a similar system to games such as Dark Souls where, if an enemy kills you, that enemy will hold all of your experience points until you defeat it. This isn’t unusual for the genre, but the execution of this is where the game's flaws start to show. The developers, I presume to stop enemies from running off edges and the player from losing all their experience points forever, decided that the enemies should not be able to leave the rooms they are found in. This makes enemies very easy to exploit. I found you could activate an enemy and then simply go back to the last room, or cross some invisible line on the level, and the leashed enemy would stop chasing me and go back to its idle state, allowing me to attack it again with ease. This makes the combat scenarios mostly a no-risk situation, making them seem dull and not encouraging you to become better at combat. It wasn’t until late in the game that they started throwing me into smaller rooms with numerous enemies that weren’t restrained and the combat began to feel a little more satisfying.
It’s a shame that I could not say something more positive about this game, I am both a fan of Star Wars and Respawn Entertainment's previous works, and I was looking forward to playing this game for the longest time. If you are a fan of Star Wars or just have an interest in seeing this game, it’s passable enough to just mindlessly go through, but do not expect an enjoyable experience.