After playing the game for about 24 hours and finishing the main story, here are my thoughts about Star wars jedi: fallen order:
Pros:
- It has good visuals and really good soundtrack.
- The story is really cool even for someone like me who doesn't know much about star wars exept for seeing the movies.
- The combat-system has a very high focus on parrys, similar to sekiro. Parrying itself does feel very satisfying and is not to hard to get used to.
- The force abilities are integrated nicely and can not only be used for solving puzzles but also in combat, which makes the fights much deeper.
- The bosses are fun and do not feel unfair.
- The game has a few parcour sections that i personally really enjoyed.
- Since the game has different difficulties while still mostly playing like other soulslikes, i can imagine that it might serve as a good entry point if you want to try a more casual game of the genre.
Cons (don't be suprised by how much i wrote here, i just wanted to be very clear on what in my opinion could have been better.):
- The enemy variety isn't very high. Most planets have about 4 different regular enemies + imperial soldiers and the imperial soldiers on the final planet are literally still the same ones as in the tutorial. On top of that, the standart enemies usually only have about 2 different attacks, which makes the gameplay repetitive. They also don't have mini bosses and especially towards the end, just throw hordes of regular enemies instead, which doesn't make much sense in a game where timing is very important and you have to focus on each foe individually.
- All Planets are designed to be labyrinths but they made them so confusing that it becomes very hard to navigate and you get lost all the time. There is a map but it's still sometimes unclear, which parts of the map are connected and which aren't. This whole point is being made worse by the fact that there is no warp, so you can't just easily fast travel to a location where you for example missed a collectible but have to run there for 10+ minutes and then run back to the ship for another 10+ minutes, exept if you get lost, than it can take much longer and this will definitly happen. It is outrageous and unfair.
- (I played on the second hardest difficulty setting out of 4)
The game wasn't very challenging compared to other soulslikes and i beat most bosses within the first 3 tries, but there is one specific boss, who you fight multiple times thruought the story that is always much harder than everything else. I don't think that the boss is to hard on it's own but i do not like the inconsistency in difficulty, since that way the game doesn't prepare you for it. The hardest part however was finding the path you are souposed to take to get from A to B.
- There is almost no side content. While there are a lot of collectibles, almost all of them only give you experience or skins that have no effect on gameplay, which basicly removes the incentive to explore beyond the main path. The skins themselves don't even look cool and are just mere recoulors of your standart outfit.
- You can't upgrade your stats by using experience and instead there is a skill tree. That might not sound to bad at first, until you notice that most of the (later) skill have almost no noticable effect. Since there is also no functional equipment at all, that means there is basically zero build variety.
Conclusion:
In my opinion Star wars jedi: fallen order is a game with hights and lows. Sometimes i had a lot of fun when i understood what to do, but on the other hand it sometimes was very frustrating when i got lost in the confusing world. Overall, i do think it is a good game, but it could have been much better whith just a few improvements. If you like star wars and/or playing soulslikes, you might also like this game. The Complete edition usually costs 50€ which isn't worth it in my opinion but it's reduced quite often and i was able to buy it for only 5€ and for that price i can easily recomend it.
my overall Rating: 6.7 / 10
