Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Video Game Review (About In Description)
1Prepare to Maclunky.
If Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had an opening title crawl like the movies, it might go something like this:
It is a dark time for fans of SINGLE-PLAYER Star Wars games. Since EA secured the rights in 2013, only two BATTLEFRONT games have been produced, just one of which offered a short campaign.
Now, RESPAWN, developer of Titanfall 2, has released STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER, a large and daring story-driven third-person action game which is actually EXTREMELY GOOD, restoring hope and freedom to the galaxy...
Jedi: Fallen Order pushes all the right buttons for a Star Wars action-adventure. It’s a genre remix that samples the combat and exploration of a lightened-up Dark Souls and the action and energy of Uncharted, and that works out to be a great fit for the return of the playable Jedi.
The story is a dark one, which is appropriate for a time in the series – between episodes 3 and 4, when things are at their bleakest for the Jedi and the galaxy as a whole. It’s absolutely drenched in the trauma of the aftermath of Palpatine and Vader’s purge of the Jedi Order five years earlier, with both our young ginger Jedi hero Cal Kestis and his new mentor Cere Junda defined by their survivors’ guilt and remorse over how they escaped Order 66.
Cal is respectably acted by Cameron Monaghan, though he never really develops a strong personality that separates him from other generic Jedi characters. He’s a standard-issue good guy through and through, and even at his lowest he’s never remotely tempted by darkness and vengeance – he just needs a solid pep talk. Cere, on the other hand, far outshines him with an anguished performance from Debra Wilson, especially in the latter half when she relives her darkest moments and confronts the consequences of her actions with appropriate revulsion on her face. Even the main antagonist, the Imperial Inquisitor Jedi hunter known as Second Sister, has unexpected depth – a pleasant surprise after the two-dimensional villainy of similar characters in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series.
Cere outshines Cal with an anguished performance from Debra Wilson.
All of that darkness means there’s less of the upbeat swashbuckling charm of the original trilogy, though a little bit of it shines through. We get a fair amount of comic relief from the four-armed captain Gris of the good ship Mantis and the ever-present, ever-adorable chicken-legged droid, BD-1 (often pronounced “Buddy”). He’s barely bigger than Luke’s binoculars, but he’s extremely useful. Not just through his hacking abilities, which serve as an extension of your own, but because he’ll hop off your back to draw your attention to things you can scan to unlock in the in-game encyclopedia, and the lights on the back of his head are used to indicate your health status without cluttering up the screen too much.
The main quest sends our freckle-faced Force-user and crew on what amounts to a Star Wars version of an Indiana Jones adventure (which must make George Lucas proud) that spans across several planets. You’re thrown into not only the sterile metal corridors of Imperial facilities but also the dense jungles of the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, the angry red dust of Dathomir, and other lesser-known worlds with their own look and feel, including ancient alien tombs that you raid.
Though they seem small at first, almost every world you visit is revealed to be surprisingly large, with huge sections and shortcuts locked behind barriers you’ll later learn to blast through, jump over, or otherwise overcome. Some of them are dramatically different from area to area, with the exotic Shadowlands region of Kashyyyk standing out in my mind as a surprisingly distinctive location thanks to its creepy carnivorous plants. Other areas include subterranean caverns and ancient temples, all of which stand in stark contrast to traditional Star Wars settings. The vast majority of the puzzles are simple fun – imagine if Lara Croft could momentarily freeze moving objects and push boulders with her mind – but one or two got tricky enough to make me scratch my head for a while. There’s almost never too much of it at once, though, so you’re rarely doing the same thing for long.
Respawn's attention to detail and obvious love for the source material shows.
Exploration is key to these maps, and both chests full of cosmetic loot and special Force echos (the Jedi equivalent of audio logs) are scattered everywhere. It gives you plenty of reason to veer left when the vague indicator on the map screen suggests you should turn right – or to make a return trip to a previously visited world – just to see what you can find after you’ve gained a new ability. On rare occasions, usually after a tough