Good game trapped in a mid game. Basically every attempt to copy Souls design was poor gameplay/combat design. It would've been a much better game with a standard action autosave system. Without the ability to travel between bonfires, backtracking through levels is a slog. The combat is worse Sekiro, which is still REALLY good, but there's a lot of things they don't understand that makes a lot of fighting against certain enemies really frustrating and tedious. For example, in Sekiro, you can always cancel a light attack into a dodge or parry, and in general your animations are faster. If you try to play this game quickly on a harder difficulty, you're constantly getting interrupted and hit out of your attacks. You instead have to play patiently and slowly, which is honestly just a lot less fun and interesting than setting it to easy and going wild with longer combos more often.

The characters are better than I was expecting, but not amazing. Plot is serviceable, has some cool moments. The exploration is at times pretty satisfying, but hampered by the Souls checkpoint system and the inability to fast travel. By the end of the game if there was a collectible I could now access from a new ability, if it was out of the way I just wouldn't bother. Who cares? I'm not spending 20 minutes trekking through this winding level to get a force echo or whatever.

If they can clean up the sluggishness of the combat, fix the level design / checkpoint contradiction, and kick up the plot and characters a bit in the sequel, we could be looking at a genuinely good game. As it stands, Fallen Order is a mid game, but it's one of the better mid games I've played.