Star Wars Fallen Order: A Review

-- Feelings dump ahoy


My one sentence review of Star Wars Fallen Order -- how did a game with this many flaws get so many high ratings?

Notice I didn't say how did a game 'this bad' get such high ratings. SWFO isn't necessarily bad. It has a lot of quality traits, which you'd expect given this was called by multiple outlets the best Star Wars game of all-time, and a frequent nominee for game of the year. But my word did I collect a list of complaints about this game which touched me so deeply I feel no choice but to spout them into the internet with vigor. As I prepare to dump, I confess this will not be well written (not that any of my stuff is, but saying this out loud helps encourage me to just fly through this without too much hemming and hawing over style. In fact, a review of a game with this many errors should be error filled itself, don't you think?)

We can start anywhere. Do you care how games look? Oh you do! Then let's start with graphics. So ... what in the name of Hoth is up with the Wookies? Why would you include a character model in your game if they look distracting-ly worse than what debuted 5 years ago in Star Wars Battlefront? Why do the eyes of the main sidekick look like they're being pulled out of her head with a plunger? Why are enemies apparating into and out of the screen like the Weasley twins?

I fell into a liquid once and there was no animation for the splash. No splash captain!



On the comical side, I highly enjoyed the graphical error when one enemy's sword glitched out of his hand and moved straight to his crotch, making it appear that he had a 72 inch erection.

Overall the graphics were just confusing. That's because some stuff looked great. Some didn't. The ponchos for the main character were detailed, but the landscapes were not. Some character models looked natural while others looked like aliens. I mean, not Star Wars aliens, but just stuff that didn't look right. Out of proportion, out of focus.

How about the stuff that just doesn't make sense, and yes I admit I'm talking about a video game -- even the greatest of which require the suspension of reality to be taken seriously. But SWFO went so far in the bogus direction. For example, you find new colors for your ship in random crates scattered throughout the galaxy. Why would there be treasure chests with custom paint jobs for your ship in them? Why not just put money in the chests so you can 'buy' a new ship color scheme? You find the dual lightsaber on a workbench at the top of a Wookie super tree. Why why why? Why would a lightsaber be sitting on a workbench in the ultimate Wookie penthouse? There are a thousand other ways you could've introduced this weapon into the story. Speaking of the story, the hologram scavenger hunt element -- besides being wonky -- felt too much like it was ripping off God of War for my taste.

As far as playing the game goes, you have to press L2 to climb. WHAT? WHY? Such a control choice is against nature. Ohhhhh -- shivers -- I just remembered the spawn reload times. How, with a clean conscience, could you design a game where you die this much and include a respawn screen that requires 4 minutes to load? While I'm at it could you have refined the camera, EA? And who decided that saving your progress in the game should follow the pre-historic standard set by Resident Evil 1?

Here's another gripe. Throughout the game you unlock cool lightsaber crystals and hilts -- from the same treasure chests that have your ships paint jobs stored in them, lol -- which allow for fun customization options throughout the game. But whenever you go to your inventory to see what you unlocked there's no indicator as to what is new. You have to either memorize the name of the weird metal you just unlocked or circle through every option until you recognize something different. Then you have to ask yourself, huh, did I just unlock that? Or did I have it before and I just didn't like it?

Who directed the music in this game? You had one job. Take the existing Star Wars score and implement it at the right times. You did this sometimes well. Other times the music would flair up before I entered a battle, or disappear while I was in the middle of one. This provided me the unsatisfying feeling of watching a show where the sound of the character dialogue is half a second ahead of their mouth movements.

But putting all other complaints aside, gameplay is the determining factor for any production and what absolutely killed this game was the fighting wasn't fun. And I'm bummed about it. A huge part of this is due to the varying difficulty of opponents. For some reason, killing hordes of elite empire soldiers is a breeze. Meanwhile killing any animal, no matter how lowly or limb-less or lame-looking, is like fighting ten Count Dookus.

Also, I thought the following was a strange direction to take the game in. Who decided, in a game where you play the part of a Jedi, it was a good idea to make it feel like you're not a Jedi as much as possible? What is cool about being a Jedi? Using force powers and wielding a lightsaber like a boss. Well, in this game the force powers only seem to work about 50% of the time, and after you've used them twice you're out of force juice. Wonderful. Also in this game if you string together two hits in a row with your lightsaber you get automatically slapped by your enemy. Excellent.

Another thought on not feeling like a Jedi. Do you recall Obi Wan and Luke rolling around non-stop during the movies to avoid enemies? Cause I sure did a whole lot of that in this game. The parry system is so punishing that blocking is useless. You have to somersault around like you're playing Smash Brothers to have a hope of survival. And critically, the game is so glitchy that there were many times I believe I hit the parry at the right time, but the game froze, or skipped a beat, and I was punished instead of protected.

This is also the only game I've played where in the progress tree I felt required to bypass fighting upgrades because

1) they seemed lame and required force power which I already was perennially out of and

2) I felt like I had to upgrade my health just to have a chance at survival.

Thanks game, you guided me towards choices that are less fun! Just what I like.

And can I say it one more time for the people in the back? Why are slugs more powerful than empire troops? Was it vermin that nearly extincted the Jedi?

Fighting was simply not rewarding. It was not fun to get automatically clobbered if you got a combo of more than 2 hits going; it was not fun getting clowned by creatures that looked like elk dipped in chemical stew; it was not fun rolling circles around Darth Vader.

A last complaint. Maybe. I hate games that let you run into enemies 10 times stronger than you at the beginning of the game if you choose to go in the wrong direction. I spent one full night dangling my nuts in the face of Dathomir like a punching bag, not knowing that I wasn't supposed to come to this planet until basically the very end of the game. I was furious. Tell me that! Give me a hint! I like the freedom of choice but not when one choice is the only viable option and the other is meant to be uncovered 20 hours later.

Wow.

Alrighty, time for the good. And yes there was good. There was enough good that I finished this game, that I discussed it at length with my nephew, enough good that I could see myself being suckered into a sequel in the future. (What is dead may never die)

The robot is excellent. Superbly designed, surprisingly charming, and totally functional in the story. The board designs were so well thought out. I hated the backtracking, but I could live with it because of the great use of shortcuts and call backs. There were some excellent puzzles and the platforming with the wall running was mostly fun. I did have a hiccup with one jumping scene that I needed YouTube to guide me on, where I found I was on the correct path, I was just failing because I was hitting the jump button a fraction of a second too soon. It was fun to be reminded of what games used to be like in the late 1990s -- the perfectly choreographed jumping requirements of Tomb Raider come to mind -- but I don't want that in 2020. I don't have time.

The way you rediscover your force powers is clever. I loved the flashbacks, and that part of the story resonated with me! I was all in on the final flashback, sucked up in the characters and the story.

I liked the random bounty hunter encounters and really liked the part of the story where you're in the Gladiator pit. It was a great change of pace.

And those are my feelings, spilled out with minor thought given to structure, repeated words, or desire to impress the writers at Grantland (RIP). I normally wouldn't write so much on a game like this but I found SWFO so curiously convoluted that I wanted to record some thoughts (and honestly I needed a break from BYU recaps). Some parts of this game seemed so polished and were so well executed and other parts were video game's version of the Butt Fumble. I don't know that I've ever played any game like it.

I leave you with this.

Jedi Power Battles was better.