It’s amazing how far a name can carry a game—in this case, the Star Wars IP. As industry buzz bubbled up in the weeks prior to the release of Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order, I gave into the hype and bought the game on launch day. Having beaten it over a month and some four updates later, I can say this game is a broken mess with a thinly veiled Star Wars veneer over 2/3 of its adventure. It is only in the final 1/3 of the game that this game clicks into what could have been the greatest Star Wars game ever made (even if it couldn’t resist falling into the same temptation as many other Star Wars stories in its plot).
The quest at the center of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a simple one—the player’s Cal Kestis is tasked with trying to find a list of force-sensitive children alongside his trusty robot sidekick, BD-1, and his awesome crew (or so the game told me). The quest takes Cal to several large planets where exploration is the name of the game, even if the environments rarely jumped out as anything special.
As mentioned in the intro, the first 2/3 of this game are not good—I spent most of the time annoyed (but not challenged) by space-bugs, code-bugs, frogs, and elk. Several big moments that were clearly supposed to be exciting revelations of deeper Star Wars lore felt more like knock-off science fiction that had somehow been baptized with the SW license. Eventually, the game became so monotonous that I turned the difficulty all the way down just to bowl through the game and get to what I was hearing was a great ending... What I heard was mostly true, but I will get to that later.
The technical problems with this game are immense, and I cannot excuse them even if I was just a “sucker” for buying the game on day one. Throughout the game, the transition from cutscene to gameplay was horrendous—the scene would play, glitch back to gameplay camera, then show the black screen indicating I had resumed control. I watched my thrown lightsaber travel through enemies more often than I watched it deal damage. I fell through pipes I was clearly meant to climb on and was rejected by wall-running walls several times. Then, as if all these things weren’t enough, the game actually stopped right in the middle of gameplay as the environment turned into the murky water-color of and un-rendered world... The game actually lost its instance and de-rendered the world! I then waited 45 seconds for the world to render back in... I eagerly waited for these annoying problems to be fixed only to discover that each update was addressing one-instance game-breaking bugs I had luckily not encountered.
Finally, I can talk about the final 1/3 of the game when the game started to feel perfectly right for a Star Wars game! Cal finally settles into his role as Jedi, clicking with all his force powers and taking ownership of his lightsaber; the game presents Star Wars characters and villains who are distinctly Star Wars (unlike the “counterfeit” villains I mentioned earlier); the plot includes all the perfect, cheesy, beat-you-over-the-head, moral-of-the-story dialogue we Star Wars fans have come to love; and the environments of the final planets rise above the meager environments of the earlier worlds. Ultimately, the story is unsatisfying and falls into tropes that disappoint, but it is still magic in the end.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was quite an experience—I’ve never played such a buggy game all the way through. However, even I could not forsake the experience of a Star Wars story for bad and buggy gameplay. If you have time and persistence to bear with a less-than-stellar game just because of the Star Wars phenomenon, go ahead and pick up this game, but I would recommend waiting for it to be much cheaper and clear your backlog of games that function properly AND tell compelling, self-sustained stories.
The quest at the center of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a simple one—the player’s Cal Kestis is tasked with trying to find a list of force-sensitive children alongside his trusty robot sidekick, BD-1, and his awesome crew (or so the game told me). The quest takes Cal to several large planets where exploration is the name of the game, even if the environments rarely jumped out as anything special.
As mentioned in the intro, the first 2/3 of this game are not good—I spent most of the time annoyed (but not challenged) by space-bugs, code-bugs, frogs, and elk. Several big moments that were clearly supposed to be exciting revelations of deeper Star Wars lore felt more like knock-off science fiction that had somehow been baptized with the SW license. Eventually, the game became so monotonous that I turned the difficulty all the way down just to bowl through the game and get to what I was hearing was a great ending... What I heard was mostly true, but I will get to that later.
The technical problems with this game are immense, and I cannot excuse them even if I was just a “sucker” for buying the game on day one. Throughout the game, the transition from cutscene to gameplay was horrendous—the scene would play, glitch back to gameplay camera, then show the black screen indicating I had resumed control. I watched my thrown lightsaber travel through enemies more often than I watched it deal damage. I fell through pipes I was clearly meant to climb on and was rejected by wall-running walls several times. Then, as if all these things weren’t enough, the game actually stopped right in the middle of gameplay as the environment turned into the murky water-color of and un-rendered world... The game actually lost its instance and de-rendered the world! I then waited 45 seconds for the world to render back in... I eagerly waited for these annoying problems to be fixed only to discover that each update was addressing one-instance game-breaking bugs I had luckily not encountered.
Finally, I can talk about the final 1/3 of the game when the game started to feel perfectly right for a Star Wars game! Cal finally settles into his role as Jedi, clicking with all his force powers and taking ownership of his lightsaber; the game presents Star Wars characters and villains who are distinctly Star Wars (unlike the “counterfeit” villains I mentioned earlier); the plot includes all the perfect, cheesy, beat-you-over-the-head, moral-of-the-story dialogue we Star Wars fans have come to love; and the environments of the final planets rise above the meager environments of the earlier worlds. Ultimately, the story is unsatisfying and falls into tropes that disappoint, but it is still magic in the end.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was quite an experience—I’ve never played such a buggy game all the way through. However, even I could not forsake the experience of a Star Wars story for bad and buggy gameplay. If you have time and persistence to bear with a less-than-stellar game just because of the Star Wars phenomenon, go ahead and pick up this game, but I would recommend waiting for it to be much cheaper and clear your backlog of games that function properly AND tell compelling, self-sustained stories.