Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order is a Soulslike Metriodvania action game. You play as Kal Kestis, a former Padawan (Jedi apprentice) who has been in hiding from the despotic Galactic Empire for years. When he is forced to use his psychic Force powers to save the life of a coworker, he is pursued by the Imperial Inquisitors, only to be rescued by a couple of rebels with the goal of resurrecting the Jedi Order. To do so, they must acquire a Jedi holocron, a device that contains a list of Force-sensitive children who could be recruited and trained into Jedi. But before they can forge a new future, the remnants of the Jedi order must first face the past.
The plot of this game is nicely self-contained, but also suffers from a significant flaw - this game is set between the prequels and the original trilogy, so anyone who has seen the movies knows that they will fail in their quest to resurrect the Jedi Order. Worse, the game itself deliberately turns itself into a shaggy dog story in many ways, with a character who joins your crew later in the game outright stating that if the characters hadn't even bothered trying with their main quest that things arguably would have gone better, and it is hard to disagree with them, at least as far as their main objective goes.
That said, the characters themselves do undergo some development, most notably the two Jedi, both of whom are still dealing with the trauma of the destruction of the Jedi Order and their personal guilt in not being able to protect those closest to them. Sadly, two of the other cast members don't really undergo much meaningful development – one simply opening up a little bit, but not really getting a ton of development beyond “he used to gamble but he’s better now” – while the last one only shows up very near to the end.
The game takes place in the present, but thanks to Kal’s ability to read “force echoes” – basically, psychic object reading, where he looks at the past of an object or area and experiences what came before – you get to see some backstory. This is combined with some flashbacks, as Kal’s “new powers” are actually all powers he had learned previously as a Padawan and repressed, with each flashback showing him training with his master and learning the “new” skill. This is a cute little conceit, and it works well enough; rather than finding logs all over the place, the connection to the force gives a nice excuse for the standard “finding tape recordings of random significant events from the past.”
Likewise, BD1, your cute little droid companion, also has a series of recordings made by a previous Jedi master, whose footsteps you are following in an attempt to acquire the holocron. You experience his story out of order, learning about the various worlds and the part they played in his journey, and it works well as well.
The plot, thus, is something of a mixed bag. It is all executed pretty well, but it suffers from the fact that the main cast of characters are fairly mediocre and only some get significant development, and the plot having a foregone conclusion, as we know that they aren’t going to end the game by re-establishing the Jedi Order, because no such order shows up in the movies.
Gameplay wise, the core combat works quite well. Kal has a reasonable set of telekinetic and combat-based Force powers that expand over time, and while they are rather simple they work well enough in the Metroidvania style and are mostly satisfying to use on enemies. Slowing down enemies, grabbing them with your Force powers, shoving them off ledges, making fancy attacks with your lightsaber – these all are fairly standard, but they work well enough, and you can pull or push environmental objects or slow down rapidly moving things to enable traversal.
Ironically, the game's biggest letdown is the lightsaber itself. While there is some nice variety in the swings and the animations are solid, the actual fighting with it feels wimpy. In the movies, these are deadly weapons, but in the game, it is basically just a normal video game sword. The hits with it don't really give that deadly destructive feel, and the death animations greatly downplay the whole "chopping people up" aspect (though the kills on some animals do feature bifurcation and similar). Most enemies can take multiple shots, and while the whole beam ricochet thing remains, a lot of the actual attacks with it feel lackluster. It also doesn’t do the cool sort of environmental destruction that you see in the movies, like using it to cut through or melt doors – while the swipes will inconsistently leave molten material on the walls in the place of standard “cuts”, there’s no environmental destruction, and your lightsaber will periodically clip through objects and do nothing.
That said, it does work well enough from a mechanical point of view, at least at first.
This gets into the other problem with the game: repetition.
You go to almost all of the planets you visit at least twice due to backtracking during the plot, and probably three times to collect everything and explore some of the areas you couldn’t get to before. The planets are neat enough the first time, but they often don’t have as much new to show you the second time through, and the Imperial troops that show up everywhere, while having some diversity (there’s 16 imperial enemy types, though some are just stronger versions of weaker ones), do end up being a bit repetitive by the end, as the game doesn’t really have enough tricks to throw at you.
The same applies to the terrain – while it looks different outwardly, it ends up following a small number of tropes over and over, making the exploration feel a bit less exciting once you realize it is mostly the same thing, albeit with attractive skins. The first few worlds feel fairly fresh, but by the time you get to the Wookie planet of Kashyyyk, you’ve seen almost all of what the game has to show you. It doesn’t help that most of the Metroidvania-esque upgrades aren’t particularly interesting environmentally outside of a small number of simple puzzle rooms.
It doesn’t help that there is no fast travel within a planet in this game; if you need to go back and find something you missed, or go to an area you couldn’t reach before because you lacked, say, the ability to double jump, you will have to walk all the way back through the area – and while you do unlock some shortcuts on the way back, in some places, it can still be quite a long walk.
The boss fights are infrequent but do a reasonable enough job of throwing in a bit of extra combat variety. Unfortunately, the small number of them does hurt a bit, as there aren't enough really flashy fights, and a lot of them are against fellow light saber users and often, the same ones, as your fights frequently end inconclusively.
Where the game shines most is visually. The worlds are very Star Wars and there are lots of pretty views. The game does a good job of capturing the look of Star Wars. The music is solid too, and all the voice acting is pretty good.
While I have gone over a lot of drawbacks here, I will note that I did enjoy the game overall. The game mostly delivered on its promise of making you feel like a Jedi, apart from the lightsaber being a bit wimpy, and while the plot couldn’t really go anywhere, it did at least try to make it feel like there were real stakes, even if we knew it couldn’t ultimately deliver on them.
But at the same time, I was left feeling like the game was decent rather than amazing, especially when the game got past the first few planets and started involving more backtracking.
If you are in the market for a Star Wars game where you play as a Jedi, this is likely something you’ll enjoy. If you like the idea of a Soulslike combat game but don't like high difficulty, this will also likely satisfy you; even on the second highest difficulty, it wasn’t particularly difficult, and you can toggle the difficulty at any time. On the other hand, if backtracking is one of your pet peeves, this game is likely to bother you.
3.0