Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

⭐ 7.0/10

(Originally written by Tim)

I love Star Wars, and since the only other friend review of this is a 10/10 I had to give it a try. I did enjoy this game, but by the end of its short run time I was ready to move on. The combat, which is great, began to feel repetitive, and the lack of enemy variation made it a bit tiring. The Star Wars environments and music are awesome, but there are only a handful of maps here.

The maps are actually my least favourite part of this game, or rather traversing the maps. The actual map that you can use is fine, but I had to constantly open it to see what way to go (ever heard of minimaps?). They were so frustrating to re-traverse when you come back to explore the world, basically discouraging me from 100%'ing this one. There are short cuts you can open up, but that didn't prevent me from being frustrating trying to get to the spots on the map that clearly had a treasure chest. And then you finally get there and you get a new poncho that you aren't going to wear anyways. Sweet.

The main draw here is the lightsaber + force fighting, which is pretty intuitive and satisfying. I could have used more boss fights to really put this to the test, but it is never not satisfying hearing the sound of a swinging lightsaber. The game looks pretty great too, really showing off these epic worlds. The difficulty level was good too, especially early on, where it felt like I needed skill to survive and had to build it up. But even once I was good I would take a bunch of hits from low level enemies that could jump behind me. The lock on system is garbage, and there is not any sort of strafing.

In terms of story, it felt a bit bland. The motion-capture facial expressions (or whatever they were using) felt stiff and I never felt fully immersed. This is probably because I had just played Red Dead Redemption 2, the most immersive game of all time, but still. I like interacting with NPCs, but they are all standing still, so if I want to interact I have to sit there and listen to them talk. Boring. And even in the big moments I thought the dialog was kind of cheesy.

There are a couple really awesome cinematics, but there were also a couple fights that could have been sweet, but instead were cinematics where I had to hit X a couple times. Shoutout to the Order 66 flashback, which was the best combination of cinematic moment with actual gameplay.

Overall I enjoyed this one, but it offers me no replay value and no incentive to remain in that world. I beat the game, and then did not even revisit old worlds or explore for a bit, just turned it off, which is probably my first time doing that ever. I think I actually just love Star Wars and not this game.