I played Star Wars: Fallen Order because I wanted a globe trotting single player
game where I got to hit people with shiny sticks, and this game didn’t disappoint!
It’s got a good feel to it- it’s a seamless adventure where you travel everywhere on foot.
Each planet is a single, massive sprawling map with only infrequent
squeezy bits which it uses to sneakily load the next area.
And you even experience jumping between planets in real time, as you watch your ship take off,
enter warp speed and then arrive at the next location, again, after a sneaky bit of loading.
Being seamless, however, it means that there’s quite a lot of backtracking to your adventure.
Don’t expect to teleport back to your ship once your mission is over! You need to get back there
on foot. The paths you take often provide up new shortcuts to make the process quicker and easier,
but even with these, getting back to your ship requires a bit of route planning, and then up
to about 5 minutes of backtracking, made longer by the groups of enemies you have to fight as you go.
So there are pros and cons to the seamless adventure this game takes you on, which I
found myself loving one minute then hating the next. But having now finished it, I’m pleased
to say that I eventually decided that I loved it for this continuity, which makes getting…
anywhere alive feel like a triumph, and it fleshes out the environments you visit as being real
places to be respected and feared, no matter how great a jedi you might become. Or in my case, not.
And it’s the same thing with the combat in this game. I know it’s overused,
but this game borrows heavily from DARK SOULS, which like the adventuring,
I frequently jumped between loving and hating as I progressed further through this game.
When an enemy hurts you, it hurts a lot! Blocking has a delay before it kicks in,
so you’ll often get hit by something you really feel like you should have successfully blocked.
And if you dodge an enemy, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll dodge it! And it likes to put a boss
battle just after a lengthy platforming segment, meaning you have to redo that
every time you die. Which adds insult to injury. So this game never made me feel as powerful as I
have done in other Star Wars games. But that’s fitting, cos you play a rubbish Jedi who would
get utterly destroyed by most of the characters you’d see in the movies. AND I LIKE THAT! It
gives me more respect for the movies when I see a lightsaber duel between two masters, now I know
that if I was one of them I’d have pressed the wrong button and fallen off a platform to my
death within 20 seconds of the duel starting. I am perfectly content being a low-level pleb jedi.
All I can say is: with combat in this game, be aware of your surroundings. And if in doubt,
be defensive. …unless you’re up against a group of enemies, in which case you should panic and
swing wildly in the hope you hit something. It is a tough game. I should have known when
I died several times during the tutorial that this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park-
new enemies WILL be punishing until you master their attack patterns. And even now I’ve ‘beaten’
the game, a lot of the time I still feel more of a fumbling mess than an elegant jedi. But it rewards
you for learning! And the next checkpoint isn’t ever too far away, which restores your health,
your supply of medic kits… and brings enemy on the level back to life again.
And thank goodness falling to your death only results in you teleporting back up to where
you fell again, but with slightly less health. Because the number of times this happened to me,
if I was forced to replay from a checkpoint every time, I would have been a very sad boy indeed.
Especially with the sliding and rope jump segments requiring such precise positioning.
Also, well done to the game for offering you an optional trip to a high-level area
so early on in the story. I went there, got rekt by the first enemy I encountered,
then spent a lot of my playthrough fearing the moment I’d have to go there again for real.
Which again, adds character to the game! I love it when this game punishes me. Because it feels like
such a triumph when those places eventually become your playground, or even a home away from home.
So those are the surprises that made Fallen Order NOT the game I thought it would be.
It feels a lot like a modern Tomb Raider game, but with bigger trees and scarier looking moons.
And this game also has physics puzzles to break up the action.
Although they never reached the complexity of the ones seen in Tomb Raider, I still managed to get
stuck on a few for much longer than I should have done. Some of them felt a bit Zelda-y,
but if I try to explain why then it’ll spoil stuff so I’ll leave it at that.
Believe it or not, I don’t like the Star Wars movies. The old movies were boring,
the prequels had good fights but boring stories about trade and sand, and were filled with cringe
CGI, and the new trilogy started promisingly, but the second movie was terrible and the third
managed to be SO convoluted that I actually didn’t finish it. Like, what were they thinking? How did
they manage to ruin something this big? Did they switch directors every 5 minutes or something?
I don’t even care any more. I’m not mad, just disappointed. But that’s okay- because this isn’t
a movie. This is a Star Wars game, and I’ve always quite liked those. I don’t know why I told you
that, but I just thought you should know, because it means I rate a Star Wars game by a different
metric from Star Wars fans. I couldn’t care less if Chewbacca’s face looks like a welcome mat,
while I could care less if the gameplay is bad. For similar reasons, I respect they chose to
mimic the musical scores heard in the movies, but personally I tire of the constant over-use
of dramatic themes, interrupted by the occasional childish-sounding,
plinky plonky comedy break ones. It isn’t for me, but it is Star Wars, so I will respect that while
I’m in its territory. But it isn’t for me. I don’t care for stories in most games,
so I certainly don’t care about the one in a Star Wars game as much as you will. I spent most of my
time in the cut-scenes comparing texture quality, distracted by how your protagonist’s face is lower
res than everybody else’s on the ship. But once I managed to look past that, I discovered that most
of the characters you meet are quite likeable, but Nightsister Merrin was my favourite BY FAR. Her
facial expressions just seemed to be a tier above the rest and she made every cutscene with her in a
joy to watch. AND NOT JUST COS SHE’S REALLY FIT. I’m here for the gameplay, and I’m sad
to say that there isn’t a lot of replayability once you’re done with it.
By the time you’ve finished the campaign, you’ve already been forced to replay stuff quite a lot,
because throughout the whole game you’re learning new abilities which open up more places further
back, and there will be times where you’re making good progress through a planet, only to be forced
back because you haven’t unlocked the ability to go up ropes yet or something else equally silly.
If you’re a perfectionist who likes to raid every room and to 100% beat every segment before moving
on, this game is going to continually disappoint you. It’s even worse than Spyro 3 for this.
But I’m most disappointed by the crates scattered about the world. A crate should be
exciting to unlock! Especially ones which take several seconds to open every time. And sure,
the yellow ones permanently up your medic kit count, which is literally a life-saver.
It’s just a shame there are so few of these to unlock. But beyond that, all of the other crates
give you superficial things like new light saber handles and ponchos. How disappointing
is that? You risk life and limb for some of these things, and their contents never fail to
disappoint! Once I had fully kitted my character out in pink stuff I had everything I needed.
At least you’ll gain XP from collecting stuff and fighting enemies, which can be used to unlock
new force, lightsaber and general abilities. And there are ways of permanently buffing your damage,
force and health bars. So you definitely end the game a lot more powerful than when you started,
even if you keep telling yourself it’s all because you’ve got better at the game.
As far as PC ports go, they got the difficult bits right, but then epically failed with the basics.
The world map is horrible to control and doesn’t respond like you’d expect it to.
It should be more like google earth, or the one in Doom or something!
And rather embarrassingly, I couldn’t find a way of changing the mouse sensitivity,
until I discovered a very short and helpful video online that showed me
you can actually scroll down this page. Which I insist isn’t intuitive at all.
Once you finish the game you get to replay it with all your learned abilities, and get access
to stage-based arena fights, which I think have shown me just how bad I am at this game’s combat,
and how quickly I get frustrated enough to literally spit all over my really nice HDR screen.
It’s so annoying to be repeatedly knocked down by the same enemy doing the same trick,
or when 2 enemies complement each others’ attacks nicely and there’s no way you can deal with one
without the other stabbing you in the back. I think it’s a bit like Doom Eternal where if
you invest enough time into it then you’ll get good enough to rarely take any damage,
and you’ll end up feeling really proud of your abilities. But I’m not at that stage-
I finished the game in 20 hours, I’m still terrible, and I’m ready to move on.
I commend Fallen Order for being tougher than you would expect from a Star Wars game. No offense. It
has all been made to a high quality. And while the game was actually longer than I expected it
to be when I was still playing through it, it shrinks every time you travel across it,
and when I think back to its levels now, all I remember are some beautiful landscapes. Because
there’s so little else to do in these levels once you’ve tired of killing everything on them.
But I can’t fault the first play-through I had of it. And that’s the most important one.
I enjoyed the journey, I enjoyed the lessons in pain and suffering that it gave me.
And through a lot of hard work, and quite a lot of backtracking, it’s left me with an
experience that as a whole, feels like a good old single player adventure. Thanks, Star Wars.
And thanks to Comacchio for recommending it to me. Check out his Youtube channel here.