I’m a Star Wars nerd. I’ve loved the Star Wars games since the 90’s. Mysteries of the Sith was my introduction to the Star Wars Universe. I followed Kyle Katarn (the protagonist of the Dark Forces and Jedi Knight games) religiously till he was replaced by Star Killer (Galen Marek of Force unleashed fame) who was an overpowered but superbly fun protagonist.

Post the Disney acquisition of Lucas Films and in turn LucasArts all we saw was repurposed Battlefield games as Star Wars games with microtransactions and expansions that provided nothing till Respawn Entertainment of TitanFall fame stepped up to the plate to make Jedi: Fallen Order. Since they haven’t been ruined by EA yet, let’s see if they’ve made a good game.

Story:

The story follows Jedi Cal Kestis and his journey after the fall of the Jedi order in an attempt to rebuild the order. This takes him to different worlds following a trail left by Jedi Master Eno Cordova to recover a Holocron containing force sensitive children.

The story is somewhere between decent to above average and there are some heart-warming moments between a Jedi and his droid. The flashbacks and interactions between characters provide a history to the game characters and they do a really good job of telling the player about the world and characters they are supposed to be invested in.

In the end what the story is trying to do is show that the Jedi Order were in fact peace keepers and too self-controlled in their own way. They wanted peace and they had set rules and traditions about how to achieve it but were those the right decisions? They refused to join the Dark Side, they rejected love but were those the correct choices? They could have been something more but they kept away from it.

Graphics:

The graphics are unbelievably good but what  else did you expect from the child of a AAA publisher, which has an unnecessarily large budget. The world is frightfully beautiful, the grass shakes, the wind currents move, the ice has little drops running off it. The world is just spectacular, even the little interactable markers in the world are bloody impressive. It really shows when the camera zooms out and you get to see a lot at once. To top it off each planet has its colour and style so you can tell which planet you’re on just from the style.

The characters are beyond belief too, the attention to detail on the main character is spot on, you can even see Cal’s freckles. Each character you see, talk to, or fight are highly detailed. The monsters too are highly detailed and I have no clue why since I don’t really stare them down unless I’m writing a review, but the attention to detail is highly appreciated.

Each world looks unique and one of the things that caught my eye is the way characters stand on non-flat surfaces.  It seems they used the Euphoria engine or some variant of it to make the characters bend in accordance to their surface.

Gameplay:

The gameplay can be summed to being a Tomb Raider type with a lightsaber. The default controls on a keyboard are good and work well.

The game can be divided into puzzles and combat so we will go over each but before we do, I would like to point out there is an RPG element to the game where you get health packs from exploration or combat abilities from abilities. The abilities are earned from both the story leveling up by killing opponents so the more you fight, the more you can upgrade.

The puzzles or world traversal grows slowly, it starts off being simple jumps but progresses to being pulling wines with the force,  wall running, double jumping and so on. You get the abilities slowly through the story so it makes sense traveling back to previous worlds each time you get a new ability to see if you can find something new. The back tracking makes this a bit of a Metroidvania since there is actually something new to discover and you can create shortcuts on the off chance you die. The good thing is that all these abilities are well done so you don’t really worry about them and they just add to the gameplay.

Jedi are supposed to be able to take out tons of troops but Fallen order makes you strive for it. In the initial stage troops are actually a pain point till you get used to returning their shots which is really well done by tapping the block button at the right time. Once you learn Force Pull and Push, fighting the common enemies become child’s play. The main problem is with the boss fights who have no significant markers of if they took damage or not, the only marker is their health bar which is annoying so you need to focus on the screen and the bar. Thankfully, you can work off the skills to take on bosses and it is all good. Do note: All these complaints are considering the Jedi Master Difficulty.

Two things with combat that I would like to point out which I see as flaws but might be seen as positive to some are:

• The Quick Time events which to me were annoying since they were on strange keys
• If you get killed by a certain enemy you lose all your skill points since the last upgrade but can gain them and full health back by injuring that enemy. This is fine for boss fights but annoying as hell when dealing with lots of small troops

Conclusion:

In Conclusion I do think Jedi: Fall Order is a good game at around $40 (or equivalent for first world countries) or around $30 at the worst for developing countries like India. I paid $9 for it so I got a good deal.

Play on the higher difficulties to get the most out and of the game and don’t really worry about getting more than the base edition because at the time of writing it adds no additional gameplay and just a few skins.

Pros	Cons
Gorgeous to look at	Pushes GPUs for no reason
Beautiful world	Can get lost in the world easily
Easy To learn	Too much hidden off initially
Great combat	Not easy to read bosses
Great game	Bad Pricing

Recommended Purchase price: $20 or ₹2000

Final Score: 8/10