Is this where the fun begins?
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a mess of ambition -- kinda like its own title.
It tries to be a Dark Souls, for one thing: meditation circles (bonfires) are where you heal, respawn, and allocate skill points; you can heal inbetween these with a limited-but-rechargeable store of stim canisters (estus flasks); your special abilities use a slowly-recharging Force meter (stamina), and most enemies have a stamina/guard meter to deplete before you can deal HP damage.
It even has surprise ambush bullshit like Dark Souls, enemies hiding behind corners (or burrowed underground) which you'd have absolutely no way of anticipating before they hit you in the back. Between that, and the meditation circles being placed very inconsistently - sometimes they're separated by less than a minute, sometimes by half an hour - Fallen Order certainly channels the aggravating and inconvenient parts of a Souls game.
Does it measure up to the "good" aspects of Souls games? Well, I don't like Souls games, so honestly I don't know what the "good" aspects are -- but Fallen Order has no customizable classes or character stats, and no collectible loot, so something certainly seems missing.
But wait, there's more: Fallen Order is also trying to be a Metroid, maybe more specifically a Metroid Prime. It has labyrinthine, interconnected world maps, and routes that are blocked until you find the ability that can un-block them. Each map area feels like a distinct environment with its own local wildlife, and its own mysterious history.
(Even the dead-and-gone Force-sensitive race of Zeffo sometimes seems like a re-brand of Metroid's Chozo.)
The problem is... Fallen Order's world isn't interconnected enough to meet the critical Metroid bar of spontaneous, undirected exploration. Each of Fallen Order's maps is a "planet," and you can only get from one to another using the Mantis ship, which is at a fixed location on each map. That is to say, this is no Dracula's castle; it's just a half-dozen branches off of a central hub (the ship).
So finding a secret off-map route never leads to jaw-dropping results like glimpsing a totally different part of the game -- just a shortcut in the current area. Deeply exploring a planet's map is discouraged by way of, well, when you're done you still need to walk all the way back to the ship. And while there are a couple of times the game "lets" you go to a planet earlier than its story sequence, you'll be unable to do much there until you've unlocked more abilities.
Those ability unlocks are mostly Force powers like slow, push, and pull. Cal Kestis was a padawan who learned these Force powers as a child, and then ... forgot them? suppressed them? as he survived Order 66, but is able to remember them through flashback sequences. To put this another way: sections of the game are unreachable until Cal remembers his training. This somehow feels worse than that time Samus had to wait for permission to unlock her suit powers.
These powers are useful in combat, too, although ... this is an aspect of Fallen Order that I wish was more blatantly influenced by other games. Force-pushing enemies off cliffs is a thrill; and parrying blaster fire back at Stormtroopers is super-satisfying. But when it comes to close-quarters lightsabering, the game's core mechanics of block, parry, evade, and strike get over-stressed in most encounters -- especially against multiple enemies.
The visual language of enemy attacks isn't very consistent: a red glow means "parry won't work" but then what? Sometimes you need to dodge, sometimes you need to run, sometimes you need to strike back and interrupt! When an enemy is blocking your attacks, does that mean they need to be stunned, or that you should just keep attacking until they're exhausted? Each enemy's patterns are a bit different, and the only way to learn them is by failing a few times.
(That's where I wish Fallen Order had cribbed more from, say, Batman in how enemies telegraph themselves.)
But even when you know what to do, the combat engine won't always allow it, for reasons that I still don't fully understand. I was almost never able to parry two Scout Troopers when they came at me together, and dodge-rolling to disengage from melee was really a crapshoot.
At least on Jedi Knight (normal) difficulty, the combat is rarely "hard," in the sense that you'll probably have enough health and stim-packs to survive anyway. But I had a lot more fun when I turned the difficulty down to Story mode, just to reduce the impact of all those frustrations. (Like the fact that enemies can interrupt your stim pack. Really, game?)
Okay, there's one more feature-set of Fallen Order to cover: the Uncharted parts! Yes, Cal also clambers up vines and sprints across walls and shimmies over cliff-faces and swings through chasms like a parkour adventurer. He's ... not that great at it, though.
What I mean is, the game's collision detection and the level design's precision requirements are not in line with each other. I fell to many, many deaths at the end of a wall-run because I didn't hit the wall at the right height; or on a rope-jump because I wasn't swinging far enough (or was swinging too far!); or on a slide because I wasn't turning at exactly the right angle. This is some Super Mario 64 flashback shit, and not in a good way.
Of all the different things that Fallen Order tried to do, I think this is where it came closest to greatness: Uncharted Star Wars, traipsing through exotic environments while hopping across the galaxy on a hunt for ancient treasure. Throw in some Nate-and-Sully-esque banter, and that formula could really work.
Oh yeah, I didn't mention Fallen Order's characters or story -- there's a reason for that. Though it ends on a high note (where
The core problem is that its characters just have no personality: I never cared about Cere, or Greez, or even Cal, because they so rarely displayed any compelling motivation or passion. (Honestly, BD-1 - who is a robot - showed more charisma than the lot of them.)
But a sequel could inject some personality into them, and if it focuses up on polishing a smaller feature-set - instead of doing a mediocre job of imitating four different genres - I could absolutely see Respawn delivering a Jedi iteration that's truly exciting from start to finish.
I actually didn't expect they'd get the chance to try, until a trailer appeared yesterday. We'll just have to see if Survivor has the wisdom to focus its powers.
Better than: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Wii), Tomb Raider (2013), Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
I'm not sure if the Metroid Prime games have aged well: but in my head, Fallen Order falls short of Metroid Prime.
Progress: finished on Story difficulty.