Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Despite some graphical oddities and questionable traversal choices, Respawn's game offers gripping narrative, intense lightsaber combat and wonderful worlds to explore. It's an adventure worthy of George Lucas' galaxy far, far away -- a new hope for the single player Star Wars gaming tradition.

When I reached the end of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, I didn't feel like I'd had a rewarding experience. I was relieved it was over. With some side-meandering, it took around 30 hours, and I didn't enjoy a lot of them. I'll admit crunching a Souls-like in less than four days is an unnatural and gruelling experience: I imagine if I'd played Fallen Order over several months, I would have been less frustrated, but probably still bored. It's such a shame, as Fallen Order has an incredible gameplay experience at its core, with fantastic environments and well-directed action sequences. Yet it's unable to sustain this thanks to some fundamental design problems.

That Fallen Order is a very straightforward and unremarkable, albeit pleasing, sci-fi adventure makes it feel slight after years of disappointing Battlefront revivals and tantalizing canceled projects. But the fact that it adopts, and mainstreams, one of the most idiosyncratic and influential schools of game design of the decade⁠—the third-person, exploration-based action of games like Dark Souls— feels radical. Taken as a whole, Jedi: Fallen Order brings a very familiar concept to the world of Star Wars video games: balance.

Star Wars as a whole has a long history of under-delivering when it comes to video games, but that's definitely not the case here. Yes there are frustrations. But more than that, there are lightsabers and Stormtroopers and wild displays of Force power. Fallen Order is a Star Wars game I didn't even know I wanted, but it's here now and I'm so glad it's real.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a flawed, sometimes messy game, but it’s a Star Wars experience I didn’t know I wanted. And after finishing it, I definitely want more.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order feels like a throwback for Electronic Arts, a nod to a time when the publisher let its studios simply make and sell honest videogames...While it's deeply flawed in several aspects, Fallen Order is pretty fun, and it's nice to finally see a mainstream story-driven Star Wars game. Shame about the glitches and the frequent annoyances, but when it's good, it's really quite good.

Given the state of of Star Wars games over the past decade or so, a good-but-not-amazing single-player adventure is something of a miracle. Those issues I mentioned can be frustrating, but they’re also worth putting up with given how much Fallen Order gets right: the intense and open lightsaber combat, the clever puzzles, the intricate level design, a universe just dripping with history and intrigue. This is what I want from a Star Wars game — and Fallen Order gives me just enough to satiate that long-ignored need.

Fallen Order is also blissfully free of microtransactions. EA’s previous Star Wars game, Battlefront II, made headlines and angered lawmakers by selling seemingly egregious loot boxes in-game. Fallen Order has no loot boxes, it’s just a straightforward single player experience with no outside pressure to spend more cash after you’ve already paid for the game.

It’s fun, and I liked it, but it’s disappointing to see Star Wars shrink its video game horizons as its film and television series widens the franchise’s scope. Fallen Order feels great in the context of what Star Wars games have become. Enjoying it feels like settling. For me, Star Wars was always about the video games. The movies were something my parents enjoyed, the books and comics something my friends told me about.