Jedi Fallen Order: Dark Souls Lite
EA’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order brings Dark Souls combat to the masses.
After years without good single player Star Wars experience, Jedi: Fallen Order quenches the thirst of any Star Wars fan. EA had long insisted that no one wanted single player experiences and that it was microtransaction riddled multi-player experiences that the gaming public clamored for.
Jedi: Fallen Order is made by Respawn; the team responsible for Titanfall 1, 2 and Apex Legends. When it was announced that the studio was taking the helm of a single player Star Wars game, people were very excited. Then the screenshots came out and people were REALLY excited. This has to be the first Star Wars game in a very long time that has lived up to the hype.
The character models used in this game are phenomenal and a couple of characters looked like they were green screened into the game. It helps that they did use real actors for the character models, but the uncanny valley is harder to notice in this game.
The cut scenes are almost like a movie. Almost.
In Jedi: Fallen Order you play as secretive Jedi Knight Cal Kestis who survived Order 66 which aimed to exterminate all the Jedi at the end of Episode 3. The story takes place sometime between Episode 3 and 4 which is arguably the sweet spot for the current Star Wars cannon to expand. See Rogue One and how well that was received.
But what’s really surprising about Jedi: Fallen Order to most people is the game play. Most Jedi games before it were hack and slash adventures. I mean, who could really stop a lightsaber? Games like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast had to limit the use of the lightsaber for the first half of the game.
In Jedi: Fallen Order, Cal has a lightsaber throughout the game but the game is balanced for it. Almost every enemy in the game has a counter for the lightsaber and even some can move faster without being force sensitive. It makes for great gameplay, but as a Star Wars fan it is a bit off-putting. Why am I getting my but kicked by a vomiting slug but can take down an AT-ST with ease?
Jedi: Fallen Order paces the difficulty without holding your hand
One thing that Jedi: Fallen Order has done is adopted the same gameplay formula that games like Dark Souls and Sekiro :Shadows Die Twice have used to gain notoriety as supremely difficult games. In Jedi Fallen Order you gain experience to earn skill points. If you are killed by an enemy you loose all the experience and start from the last rest point. Striking the enemy that killed you earns the XP back, but if you’re killed by another enemy before you reach that point, all XP is gone for good. This can be incredibly frustrating especially if you died at a mini boss, but then got tripped up by a basic mob.
Most of the enemies in Jedi: Fallen Order give Cal a run for his money.
Another element that is borrowed from Dark Souls and Sekiro are meditation points. Here you can rest and replenish your health and stim packs. But by doing so, it respawns all enemies that have previously been killed. But unlike From Software’s games, most of the time the meditation points are in a place where you don’t have to back track.
And finally Jedi: Fallen Order uses a combat system that really punishes those who are impatient. In this game you must parry, block and dodge attacks in order to land successful blows on your enemies. As the game progresses you can expand your skills and the game becomes a bit less frustrating because stormtroopers take less than 2 hits to strike down.
Jedi : Fallen Order is good but has some flaws.
One thing that can be a setback for Jedi: Fallen Order is the inconsistency in difficulty. Maybe it’s because I’m not that patient, but there are enemies like stormtroopers that gave me issues, and then an AT-ST is taken down with ease.
There are also plenty of sections that will allow you to bypass enemies by just force pushing them off the edge. It could be construed as a flaw, but sometimes after battling your way through the same mobs over and over again, pushing the elite surge troopers off a ledge before they have a chance of spouting their dialog is very satisfying.
Personally I think that the game could have used a couple more chapters. The game’s story is pretty captivating and just ends making me wish that there were a couple more planets to explore before the showdown with the final boss.
Jedi: Fallen Order, despite its flaws, is a good Star Wars game and given the drought between the last good Star Wars single player game, this is really a step in the right direction.
