After the gargantuan behemoth that was Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, it was a decided breath of fresh air to be able to finish Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order inside of two weeks. This is despite Fallen Order being a bit of an open-world game, insofar as there is an amount of exploring and backtracking you can do, though honestly, that splash of open world might just be more of a hamper than a help.
Fallen Order is an action-adventure game in the vein of Uncharted or Tomb Raider: You run about different places, fight bad guys, explore stuff, find stuff. It’s not the most polished game; the controls are a little loose, combat’s not quite as responsive as I keep expecting it to be, and it can bit of a buggy mess at times. It’s still a lot of fun and, let’s be honest, I’m a sucker for Star Wars, so that’s a plus right there for me.
So the open-ish world.
Gameplay in Fallen Order follows a straightforward rhythm. You arrive on a planet, look for a thing, find the thing, make your way back to your ship, and repeat. As you progress, you unlock new abilities and such that open up new paths and new places to explore, and thus, new places for the plot to send you. It sounds pretty great on paper, but in actuality it ends up feeling like a lot of backtracking and retreading. Part of the problem here is that compared to more open world games, there’s not really a whole lot of exploring to be done. There’s is part of a wrecked Venator-class Star Destroyer you can go spelunking in on one planet, but there’s not much else beyond that.
This isn’t a bad thing! Most of the time the Uncharted games (which I adore) are a fairly straightforward affair, with there being little diversion from the main path. And when Fallen Order really leans into its Uncharted inspirations the game is really good! You get these frantic sequences where you’re running about as chaos unfolds around you, or you’re running for your life from a squad of Stormtroopers. There are those epic set pieces that are exhilarating to play; you get to be in a Star Wars movie!
And then you go through those same areas again, but without the narrative urgency, because you missed a few collectibles and now the magic is kinda gone. This isn’t just a case of doing the same thing again, like replaying Uncharted, this is more a case where the level plays out the same, just without the chasing Stormtroopers or Inquisitors that made it so exciting the first go round. It’s a little awkward, truth be told, but it’s a necessary awkwardness if you’re double checking for secrets you missed the first time (like I did).
Perhaps this is a problem of Fallen Order wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to have a narrative-driven adventure like Uncharted, while still encouraging backtracking and open exploration. But the world isn’t quite as expansive as that in Tomb Raider; exploration in Fallen Order is limited to small diversions off the main route. Again; this is fine, but the process feels lacking and is somehow both too long and too short for it to really be worthwhile.
I suppose when it comes down to it I wish the game had chosen one direction and stuck with it. There are hints at times of an epic, bespoke adventure, and at other times of a bigger world to explore, but the game comes down in the middle and it’s… fine.
This frustrates me because there are elements to the game that are so so good and I feel like sometimes Fallen Order tries to be a game it’s not — to its detriment. Perhaps the lesson here is to know what you’re about and be confident in that. But in the meantime, I still had a lot of fun; when Fallen Order got out of its own way I was a Jedi with a double sided lightsaber fighting the Empire. And really, that’s what I wanted.
Essays, Not Rants! 