‘Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’ Borrows the Force of Many Popular Games to Make a Satisfying Blend
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a love letter. To Star Wars, yes. But, just as much, to the prevailing trends that have shaped the last decade-and-a-half of AAA video games.
If we “meets/meets/meets” this one, we’ll be here all day, but here goes. It shares a whole lot of DNA with developer Respawn’s last single-player game, the possibly perfect Titanfall 2. You’ll platform your way across a variety of colorful planets with the help of double jumps and wall-running. It borrows heavily from God of War, which is fitting since Stig Asmussen directed GOW 3 before heading over to Respawn to helm Fallen Order. You’ll climb plenty of corrugated steel walls, textured cliff sides and rippled ice sheets as a camera follows you from a remove that suggests the Kratos of last generation (or the one before) more than the current one.
But Respawn has also drawn inspiration from outside the studio, too. Fallen Order is like Metroid Prime, in that you explore lonely alien worlds, scan machinery and unlock tools and abilities that allow you to access new areas as you progress. It’s like Super Mario Galaxy, in that you hop between planets with different themes and spend a lot of time sliding around on your butt and jumping on plants that function like naturally occurring trampolines. It’s like Uncharted but the ancient civilization whose tombs you ransack is alien instead of human. It’s like Dark Souls except the challenge here comes from trying to consistently remember where to stick that colon in the title.
All that to say, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not, by any stretch, an original game. It borrows from everything and contributes almost nothing that hasn’t been done before. It doesn’t do combat as well as Sekiro or platforming as well as Titanfall. Its protagonist is pretty boring and it’s certainly buggy. But, it is easily the most fun I’ve had with any game this year.
As a Star Wars fan, it’s difficult to separate my love for the game from my love for the greater franchise. This is a game that knows how to leverage the series’ iconography, music, even its PowerPoint slide scene transitions to great effect. If Rogue One was an addendum to the original Star Wars — a movie-length clarification of a puzzling plot detail — then Fallen Order is a game-length explication of Revenge of the Sith’s most genuinely emotional moment: Order 66, the culling of the Jedi, executed by the troops under their command. (And yes, I realize that acknowledging anything from the prequels as “genuinely emotional” marks me as a certain type of Star Wars fan).
As Cal Kestis, you are a survivor of that traumatic event, a Jedi apprentice hiding out as a scrapyard worker on Bracca, a mid-rim planet where Imperial starships go to die. Cal has cut himself off from the Force, until a friend’s near-death experience pushes him to reflexively tap into its power. This alerts the Empire to the presence of a Jedi on Bracca, and forces Cal to flee in order to survive. The resulting sequence is a thrillingly cinematic train ride that highlights the game’s Uncharted-style chops as a linear action game. The entire opening hour — complete with evocative shots of a ruined Star Destroyer and John Williams’ familiar orchestral swells — is excellent. I was immediately sold that a) I was in the Star Wars universe and b) I was about to embark on a Star Wars-ass adventure.
As that adventure begins in earnest, the game shifts gears somewhat. Cal is rescued from the Empire’s clutches by Cere Junda, a fallen Jedi who still believes in the power of the Order, and Greez Dritus, a four-armed ship captain with a Jersey accent and a fondness for saying “grab some seat” (an invitation which stands provided, that is, you won’t get oil all over the upholstery). The newly formed crew’s first stop is Bogano, a temperate planet where Cal meets BD-1, a tiny droid with a puppy dog personality, who will be his close companion throughout the adventure — chucking stim packs on command, opening crates and locked doors and generally being a great addition to the Star Wars canon of helpful, likable robots. On Bogano, what began as an on-rails action thrill ride opens up to include side routes, optional bosses and a whole mess of loot crates to hunt down containing new skins for your lightsaber, poncho, BD-1 and your hub ship, the Mantis.
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the game is called Fallen Order and your main quest has to do with finding a MacGuffin that will help get the Order unfallen. The actual what of the story is less interesting, though, than the who, where and why. As we get to know Cal and Cere, Fallen Order slowly reveals the pain that both characters are still dealing with; the trauma that’s still raw and red. It’s a breezy, exciting game, most of the time, but it’s also palpably sad. Star Wars has a habit of distancing itself from the series’ big events. The Empire fell just 30 years before The Force Awakens, and yet the actions that the Resistance took have already faded into legend; a new big bad evil fascist government has already arisen to take the old one’s place. But, in Fallen Order, the past feels near. Cal and Cere are still grieving and Respawn allows that pain room to breathe. Some of the game’s best moments, draw from this well, mining emotional resonance from the simple act of taking the series’ lore seriously.
All of that darkness, though, is contextualized within the framework of a breezy action-adventure game composed of equal parts exploration and combat. Both have flaws, to be sure. The lack of fast travel makes it difficult to get where you need to go quickly, and the 3-D map isn’t always easy to parse. Combat, likewise, is sometimes frustrating. The Souls-like system becomes increasingly satisfying as you unlock new skills and GIFs on Twitter have highlighted how flexible and expressive it can be. But some of the basics, like parrying, never feel quite snappy enough — and I suspect this will be doubly true for folks who have recently deflected their way through Sekiro’s gauntlet. This is true in traversal, as well. While wall-running is fun, Cal’s jumps feel slightly sluggish. It almost feels as though Cal’s movement in the early game was nerfed to make late game upgrades feel more useful. If that’s the case, it worked. I was ecstatic when I finally unlocked the double jump.
That may sound like a lot of problems, but Fallen Order’s biggest strength is its effortless variety. I never got tired of the combat, despite its flaws, because Respawn was shuffling me along to a gorgeous new environment to explore, a brain-teasing puzzle to crack, an emotional character moment to take in. Jedi: Fallen Order doesn’t do anything perfectly, but it does everything well.
Everything, that is, except for technical optimization.The bugs I encountered in my playthrough were not serious and were few and far between. I hit a few hard crashes, which, honestly, might be an issue with my PC, not the game. I got stuck in the level geometry, once. And, Cal’s body occasionally would glitch through walls or the floor in ways that were ugly, but not game-breaking. However, from what I can tell from my Twitter feed, my playthrough seems to be the outlier. Console players, seem to have the worst of it, but PC players have also encountered bugginess. I can’t speak to that — again, the game mostly worked well for me — but this will undoubtedly be an issue for many players. I like this game a lot, but you may want to wait to check it out until a patch or two has smoothed over the technical shortcomings.
That said, this game is good. While plenty will ding it for being derivative in its parts, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, in its gestalt, is something we don’t see often in games: a mixtape labeled “Good Star Wars Game.” Why play this game when Bloodborne exists? Because this game lets Bloodborne and Mario sit next to each other on a setlist. Now That’s What I Call Music 4 wasn’t original, sure. But, it DID put the Backstreet Boys, Eiffel 65 and Blink-182 on the same album. If you like the individual songs, this makes for a fantastic, Star Wars-as-all-hell playlist.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order review code on PC provided by the author.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
