Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order:
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order: Return of the Cliche
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order: Exploring Six Planets in the Galaxy
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order: Murdering Wildlife with A Wifflesaber
Star
Wars Jedi Fallen Order: Even the Force Can't Hold the Plot Together
Time to Beat: 25 Hours
Star Wars released its first video game in 1982. Since then the franchise has averaged four new games a year. Most of those were bantha poodoo, with a handful of kyber crystals mixed in. With roughly three decades worth of gaming, it's almost impossible to avoid Star Wars games. I've played my fair share. Despite the three new episodes, Disney had failed to produce a Star Wars video game hit. Until 2019, when Respawn Entertainment released Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Despite merely “generally favorable reviews”, Respawn repeatedly trumpeted high profile acclimation from major publications, such as IGN, to achieve economic success.
I admit, I, a Star Wars fan, bought into the propaganda.
It's strange reviewing a game by Respawn. Last year their battle royale Apex Legends, won best game of Awkward Mixture. And here I am, about to wreck their first foray into a galaxy far far away, like Luke Skywalker wrecks Jabba's luxury barge.
I purchased Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order on the Epic Store. It saved a few dollars, but came with a headache. To play Fallen Order, the player needs to run EA's Sith inspired Origin platform; user name, login, everything (this also may be true of Fallen Order on Steam, can not confirm).
After that waste of time, the player chooses the difficulty of Fallen Order. The choices include; Story, Jedi Knight, Jedi Master, or Jedi Grand Master. As per my usual, I selected the moderate difficulty, Jedi Master (this can be changed at any time).
After the requisite flyover, Fallen Order introduces
Cal, a young, red haired man working as a scavenger for the Empire on
the junkyard planet of Bracca. This scene introduces the key
mechanic, not combat as one might expect, but acrobatics. Cal and a
coworker need to investigate a particular section, but become separated.
To reach the destination Cal completes a series of absurdly
dangerous, bordering on impossible, acrobatics. No one could
reasonably expect a human to perform these tasks. He's not even a
Jedi... is what I thought. But after twenty minutes, an obvious
dream sequence, and deceptions by the developer, Cal is revealed as a
lightsaber wielding, post-padawan Jedi who survived the purge (Who
didn't?!?). He is also, unbelievably, an engineer, acrobat, and
droid expert. 
The developers build Cal's backstory out of trite, clichéd material; taken as a youth to the Jedi temple,
trained by a master who dies during the purge, escapes into hiding.
Fallen Order offers no details of Cal's life before his
initiation into the Order. Nor does it flesh out his decade or two
of hiding. The developers fail to invest in Cal, and therefore fail
to persuade the player of his relevance. One can't feel his suffering or his
anger, despite his resting face, which emanates repressed irritation.
Even when Cal dives into icy water, and surfaces in a
cavern of crystal and ice, shivering in the cold, I couldn't connect
with him. Cal doesn't face the perfunctory internal conflict of
light vs dark. Fallen Order avoids the unavoidable,
which is better because the game is already too stuffed with
Star Wars cliches. Cal's most convincing feeling is
his survivor's guilt. Unfortunately Cal is a shallow character
devoid of character development. He ends Fallen Order
as he enters, learning nothing from his experience.The only unique feature
of Cal is his ability, Force Echo. When he touches an object
he can see a shadow of its past. Unfortunately this mechanic is
criminally underused, as will be explained later.
In the dude words of Cal, “You ok, Prauf?” This is funny (?) because at the time I heard, “You ok, bro?”
Though many reviewers described Fallen Order as a Dark Souls style game, it is packed with influences from Prince of Persia, Arkham Asylum, and Uncharted series. Cal embodies elements of Indiana Jones, exploring six planets of various sizes, for information, clues, and relics. Cal scales crumbling ruins, imperial fortresses, wild jungles, and ice caves to reach his objective. But each of these influences are corrupted by poor design.
To facilitate climbing and
wall running the developers inserted an absurd number of crevasses,
cliffs, and cascades. These same obstacles are used to artificially
prohibit movement. At the very beginning of Fallen Order
the player can jump off the platform into open space. Whenever this
happens, Cal is returned to the location of his leap, with a small
sliver of health sliced off. This mechanic is supposed to avoid the
serious punishment favored by other games, where the character dies
if they fall off a cliff. Instead, it feels obtuse. One wicked
feature of Nioh and Dark Souls was the ability
to see a massive obstacle in the distance (castle, valley, temple,
cave), and know they'd eventually reach the location. The player
could try jumping off a cliff as a shortcut, but the fall damage
would kill them. Just because the player sees something cool in
Fallen Order, doesn't guarantee they'll ever visit.
Even those places the player will eventually reach are protected from
early entry by a strange force. Jumping from a high location to a
lower location, that the player isn't supposed to visit yet, has the
same effect as leaping off a cliff into open air; it returns the
player to their jumping spot with a small loss of health. The absurd
twist: there is no fall damage if the player is allowed to land on a
surface. Fallen
Order actively
prevents creative exploration, and this is not the only example.
Most of the climbing requires zero skill, yet Cal spends a significant amount of game time with three points of contact. Most of the exploring is a managed scenic adventure. When the climbing doesn't overlook majestic vistas, Cal squeezes through narrow clefts, as a camera closes in for a shot of the back of his head. Why does the developer include at least a dozen, or two, of these darkened passageways? The real skill revolves around determining what is actually a climbable object. That isn't quite true. The answer is so obvious, so lacking in creativity, in player solutions, that I kept trying things that visually looked like they should be climbable (pipes, rocks, and ledges) but that Fallen Order didn't want the player to ascend. There were areas I could have literally jumped over the obstacles trying to box me in, but an invisible force field prevented me from escaping the artificial cage. This limitation became even more absurd once Cal acquired the double jump ability.
Wall running has the same issue. It's only allowed in limited, prepared areas. Now, obviously this is true, because as a video game the location must be programmed to allow a specific maneuver, but every wall was so obvious as to whether it was runnable or not, that it seemed trite. It's pathetic because it was so easy, so performative. The climbing isn't any better, formulaic and unimaginative. In an odd design decision, climbing up the side of a wall requires pressing a button, even though holding onto ledges doesn't. And this same button also triggers Force Pull. Why would the developer assign the same button for two disparate actions? But the best illustration for the errors of design, is the visual effect when Cal tries to climb an unscalable surface. His arms and legs windmill wildly, searching for non-existent handholds. He paws at the air, looking like he is swimming the doggy paddle in thin air. Swimming is unbelievably bad as well. It is entirely pointless; the developer couldn't think of anything for the player to do underwater. There is no combat and no navigation. It's another scenic effect that shows the developers would rather have directed their own movie than make a video game. And why, while swimming, does up on the joystick count as both down and forward at the same time?!?
If you're eager for more fear, anger, hate, and suffering, look for the next part of the review of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
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