STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order™

Fun world, easy gameplay, and interesting combat and puzzles.

wow

Very Mediocre. I recently finished God Of War & God Of War Ragnorok, so I was looking for a franchise to play which scratched the same itch of semi open world, strong narrative, complex combat, and fun interactive puzzles. On paper this game seems to check every box, however when playing that is not the case. The combat feels clunky when fighting any more than one enemy at a time. Hitting a perfect parry doesnt stun the surrounding enemies, so you go for your counter just for it to be interrupted and you end up in this hold block and hit every now and then until it dies, which is very tedious & boring. Speaking of tedious, I'll now mention the puzzles & exploration - there's no real sense of direction so you either end up flicking on and off the map every 10 seconds, or trial and error with random turns and potentially end up in the wrong place and have to walk all the way back. This issue is even more amplified since there's no autosaving through levels, and it relies on meditation checkpoints instead. If you happen to slip up and die, but you haven't found a checkpoint in a while, you'll be sent straight back to the last one to mess around with the map for another 15 minutes before you get back to where you were. Traversing the areas also gets extremely tiresome. The game relies on dragged out tight passages and long lift shafts to act as loading screens, but they're so long it doesn't help to keep the immersion. When dealing with the previous mentioned frustrating exploration & combat issues just to end up in a 2 minute long lift, in the dark, with no dialogue to break the silence, it's the cherry on top for the overall tedious feel of the game. To give this game the benefit of the doubt, I was playing looking for a similar gameplay loop to god of war, which is an extremely high bar to reach, but even with that in mind I just couldn't enjoy the gameplay. It's a shame really as Jedi Survivor seems to have much better flushed out gameplay and quality of life improvements, but i'll likely never play it for myself since I couldn't sit through Fallen Order.