Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Developer Respawn Entertainment Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now
PC, PS4, Xbox One
So then, Star Wars: Prepare To Die Edition? Or – apologies in advance – Darth Souls? Not quite. Sure, the FromSoft DNA runs deep in Fallen Order’s veins. It’s there in the meditation spots, the brief save havens where you can rest, unlock new skills and restore your stock of healing items, respawning local enemies in the process. It’s there in the level design, where complex corkscrews of maps become a little simpler to navigate using shortcuts. And it’s in the combat, where enemies hit hard, patience and persistence win the day and receiving a fatal blow means dropping your recent winnings. But it’s not FromSoftware’s 2011 classic that most comes to mind as we work through Fallen Order. Rather, it’s its sequel. While it is not without its moments of majestic beauty, for much of its runtime Fallen Order is a flatly lit, blandly textured game with character models that would have looked out of date a decade ago. And we can’t remember the last time we played a game with so many lengthy lift rides, our hero standing stock-still for 30 seconds or more while the next area loads in. Wait, we can. It was Dark Souls II.
Combat is, in fairness, more Sekiro than Souls; indeed, the similarities are remarkable given the relative lack of time between FromSoft’s ninja epic and this. While your ultimate aim is to empty an enemy’s health bar, you’ve got to break their guard first, either by blocking or parrying their attacks or by forcing them to guard one too many of your own. Rank-and-file stormtroopers go down simply enough, but tougher variants that need a little more effort soon show up, with the opening that follows each successful guard break only draining a chunk of their health. And, as in Sekiro, enemies have unblockable attacks, though these are rather easier to read: rather than obscure the action with a Sekiro- style alert, the enemy’s entire body glows red to signal it’s time to dodge.
Despite the apparent focus on parries – the timing window is a defining element of the four difficulty levels on offer – Fallen Order’s evasion mechanics should not be overlooked. Tilt the stick and tap a face button for a quick sidestep; double-tap it for a longer dodge-roll – this is genre-standard stuff, and essential for creating space or avoiding unblockables. Leave the stick in neutral, however, and protagonist Cal Kestis will perform God Hand- style bobs and weaves. This, despite all the lightsabers and acrobatics, is as pure an expression of the Jedi power fantasy as we’ve seen throughout EA’s time with the Star Wars licence, of powerful, elegant control distilled into a single, delicious button press. Time it perfectly and time will briefly slow, the resulting window of opportunity a few vital frames longer than if you’d blocked or parried the incoming attack. It’s a great feeling, one only rivalled by the perfect parry that returns a stormtrooper’s phaser bolt for a one-shot kill.
Combat is where Fallen Order shines the brightest, particularly later on once you’ve unlocked most of the skill tree, the story has doled out a couple of lightsaber upgrades, and an early game where too much of your time is spent fighting outsized bugs has given way to a far more engaging running battle with the Empire. Enemy types are smartly mixed, demanding, as in From’s work, a constant, careful act of battlefield triage. Yes, you might have a security droid, a purge trooper and a couple of grunts closing in on you, but the rifleman hanging out at the back of the room should be dealt with first. And once you learn to incorporate the Jedi powers you steadily acquire through the campaign – Force Slow, Push and Pull – into your arsenal, and are able to redesign each combat puzzle on your own terms, Fallen Order steps out of the shadow of the games on which its battle system so blatantly draws, and displays a certain identity of its own.
While said powers are only an optional tool during fights, they form the building blocks of Fallen Order’s
level design. While at first the game presents itself as a product of the school of Uncharted – of clambering and battling to to the next set-piece or checkpoint – its five planets are more akin to Metroid levels or a Zelda
dungeon: you fight your way in using your existing tools, find some new ability or doodad, then use it to access new routes. The planets are surprisingly large: sprawling, multi-storey constructions with shortcuts all over and, in theory, plenty to go back and mop up once the credits have rolled. There are large single-room puzzles that are often so obtuse they wouldn’t have been out of place in an early Tomb Raider. Exploration is typically rewarded with a loot chest containing a new cosmetic skin for your lightsaber, clothing or robot companion, and a chunk of XP. Sometimes, however, you’ll find a powerful named miniboss or a bespoke puzzle yielding a useful reward, such as an extra stim canister for healing mid-fight.
The larger the level, however, the more frustrating it is. A couple of planets are simply too big, particularly given the game’s insistence that, after you’ve worked your way through the level and completed your main objective, you must then schlep all the way back to your ship on foot. In the right hands, this is a fine device: we will never forget the abject terror upon realising that, after inching our way through the depths of Dark Souls’
poison-filled Blighttown and finally defeating the boss, we then had to fight our way back to the surface. But Blighttown had its waterwheel, its bonfire tunnel, its ominous, rickety town; it had landmarks, and you’d died enough on the way down to know how to get back up. Fallen Order’s levels, for all their sprawl, lack character, and are too cluttered with routes for any of
Enemy types are smartly mixed, demanding, as in From’s work, a constant, careful act of battlefield triage
them to stick in the memory. And so, with your objective complete, you might spend an hour or more retracing your steps, increasingly wearily, until you happen across the required path. There’s a map – a 3D holographic effort – but it’s an absolute disaster on the larger planets, making it all but impossible to ascertain the way to a distant objective. On you trudge, looping back round to the same identikit cave or corridor, trying to remember if you went left, right, or straight ahead last time. Left? Oh, look, this bit again. Surely somewhere in Star Wars lore Respawn could have found narrative justification for a fast-travel mechanic. At the very least, a waypoint system.
Not only do these environments lack character; many are positively ugly on Xbox One X. Broadly speaking, the bigger the planet, the worse it looks, the logical assumption being that, with an immovable ship deadline looming, Respawn has had to scale back on detail to ensure the game runs in stable fashion. While Kestis himself largely escapes the fidelity cull – indeed, at times it seems as if half the available processing power is managing his hair physics – some of the character models are absolutely miserable. The wookiees look so ragged and unthreatening that we’d quite happily say it to their faces. And despite all this, the game still falls apart at the seams sometimes. It drops frames like a clumsy glazier, it stutters and hitches between rooms, and you’ll often arrive in a new area 30 seconds or more before the skybox and scenery. One late-game cutscene, meanwhile, is rather robbed of its intended drama by virtue of the audio being two seconds out of sync.
It’s a bit of a mess, really, yet even in its weaker moments we find it hard to put Fallen Order down.
While the story is bog-standard genre stuff, it’s smartly crafted around planet-hopping, even if its central thesis – Kestis is following instructions left by a dead Jedi that will eventually lead him to a secret list of Forcesensitive children – is essentially a 25-hour shopping list of MacGuffins. And if those dodgy character models prevent us from taking most of the central cast with the seriousness Respawn would like us to, there’s no faulting the clear star of the show. Your robot companion BD-1 is a delight, its puppyish gait and cutesy head-tilts affording this hunk of virtual metal more charm and personality than you’ll find anywhere else in the game. It’s a work of real Star Wars pedigree, too, its voice crafted by legendary audio designer Ben Burtt. Also notable is Greez, your ship’s captain, cook and complainer-in-chief, an inveterate gambler with a thick, withering New York accent. Beyond that, pickings are slim.
It’s a strange old thing, all told. It’s the sort of thing we didn’t think got made any more – a loveably shonky licensed game – that doesn’t care that it’s supposed to be a romp. It’s a game with more massmarket appeal than anything else released this year that is perfectly happy to have you banging your head against a boss fight or opaque puzzle chamber for several evenings on the trot. There’s a sad sort of irony in the wanton leaden-footedness of a game that’s so clearly been rushed out of the door, yes. But as uneven and unpolished as it is, Fallen Order is still the best game to emerge from EA’s stewardship of the Star Wars licence, even if that’s to damn it with faint praise.