After booting up this game for the first time and experiencing 5 minutes of almost nothing but parkour, climbing, and having the camera control taken from me randomly for what felt like absolutely no good reason I had a thought. That thought was, "I hope the whole game isn't like this."
Unfortunately after about 5 more minutes I realised that the whole game was going to be like that and that's when I sighed and shook my head.
Had I purchased the game recently I would have refunded it, but unfortunately I picked it up a long time ago and only decided to install and try the game this week. I will not be buying its sequel because I have a feeling that it's just going to be more of the same. (Edit: I just did a quick search and the sequel, Jedi Survivor, is actually more of the same - as in there's even more of the same "traversal" gameplay that plagues Fallen Order.)
This is a "cinematic" gaming experience meaning that its focus is not on gameplay but on graphics, and there's not much more than that going on here. It's just parkour, parkour, and more parkour. Climbing and jumping, sliding and jumping, squeezing through narrow spaces, lots of falling and "dying" which means just re-setting with slightly lower health and it keeps happening because of poor kb/mouse controls (they recommend a controller and it's obvious they didn't really care about the kb/mouse user experience) and bad (and very silly) level design. Boring "puzzles" (the wind and ball puzzle was about as dull as puzzle can be) abound, and they often rely on unlocking a new power before you can complete them. The game is designed in such a way that you often have go to back to previously visited locations with "new" force powers that are drip fed to you. This seems to have been done just to pad out the game's play time because they spent too much time trying to make the game look good instead of giving the players fun things to do and more places to visit. Returning to previous locations doesn't really add anything good to the game, it's mostly just tediously re-treading ground you have already covered to get a new macguffin.
Level design... it's pretty bad, and silly. Anyone trying to traverse the bases and mines and other locations would have to be an acrobat, a daredevil, and a free climbing expert and yet Stormtroopers show up everywhere and there's no explanation of how they get to some of these places since your Jedi character who can use "the force" struggles to get to some of the locations in each level. It's mind bogglingly dumb. When the AT-ST showed up I shook my head because there was no reasonable explanation for it showing up where it did when it did and with zero warning from my "team mates" who were sitting in a ship right next to where it showed up.
Pitfall on the Atari 2600 did rope swinging better than this game does, and unfortunately that's kind of what this game is. Pitfall. You're constantly swinging on ropes and vines, climbing things, and jumping over instant death pits. If it was just one or two sections in the game it would probably be tolerable but it's nearly non-stop.
The game looks pretty good, the animations are mostly okay except for some extremely goofy running and hand over hand climbing (along pipes) animations that look like they let a day one intern make them.
The camera is sometimes a problem. It's far too close when in your ship and the game takes camera control from you randomly and often when you still want to be able to look around. It's annoying at best.
Combat is meh. Other Jedi games have done light saber combat well, this one really doesn't. There's far too much reliance on the "slow" ability.
I blame a lot of this game's problems on the choice to make it a "souls-like." Having respawning enemies in a Star Wars game doesn't make any sense. Having to medidtate to replenish health stims makes no sense. You can improve by simply grinding and re-setting enemies by meditating in a single area. There's no in game explanation for this, it just happens, and it's both extremely immerson breaking and silly.
If you value gameplay then you would be far better off playing an older game like Jedi Academy. That game's graphics are dated but at least the people who made it understand what a game should be - fun. This one's team simply doesn't get that, they focused on making it look good and forgot that a game's substance is more important than its style.
