Jedi: Fallen Order

[Olinser]

So, has anybody else gotten this?

I picked it up this week, and it's far from a perfect game, but overall I enjoyed it quite a lot, but it is definitely a flawed game.

The good:

-Despite being made by EA, NO MICROTRANSACTIONS. I know it's setting the bar low when 'good' means 'not trying to wring every last dollar out of somebody', but after the Battlefront travesty it was refreshing to NOT be directed to the store every few minutes.

-Environments look great and while pretty stock idea-wise (Imperial base, Ice Planet, Forest Planet, Swamp Planet, Wasteland Planet), the execution is pretty good. A number of areas are pretty distinct from each other on the same planet.

-Varied enemies have a lot of different behaviors and looks, and are pretty distinct from each other. It's definitely not 'faceless swarms of identical stormtroopers' from Force Unleashed or anything like that.

-Combat is decent but a little stale after a while. It's not BAD, but I think the issue is that they're trying to have Dark Souls like gameplay without any of the actual customization of your character and combat style. So there's no equipment or weapon change to give you faster/stronger attacks, or a speed/defense tradeoff. There's no option for customization, you have the same abilities and same saber moves regardless. It's not BAD, but it means that 90% of the enemies are 'parry, attack, dodge red unblockable, attack, parry, attack'. Later enemies really aren't particularly tougher, they just have more HP and do more damage. I'd still classify it as generally good, but there's some significant shortcomings and once you learn enemies attacks they are just not a challenge even on Jedi Master setting.

-MC is not stupid overpowered and actually struggles against normal enemies, even in cutscenes. Other than the borderline anime-esque sequence with the giant bat boss, everything is pretty well grounded in reality (well, Star Wars reality).

Spoiler: Final fight

Show

The final 'fight' against Vader isn't even a fight. It's a desperate struggle to just survive and get away. There is zero implication that Cal is anywhere near strong enough to challenge Vader, and he barely escapes alive.

-Story is decent, not spectacular but serviceable. Characters have distinct personalities and are interesting, although there are only a small handful of developed characters they are all meaningful and distinct from each other. Major plus that they resisted the urge to totally rewrite canon. No secret Vader apprentice here that just happened to inspire the Rebellion. Just a story about a Padawan trying to come to grips with the new reality after the Empire and trying to make a small difference.

-Decent Metroidvania style with some pretty clear obstacles that require specific abilities to unlock, it's generally pretty obvious that you don't have a required ability to get to places/chests.



The bad:
-A decent amount of small stuff seems.... unpolished. It really looks like they cut development short a couple months to make a deadline, and it really shows in some of the dumb glitches and visuals (LIKE THE WOOKIEES ) that could definitely have used some more time and polish before release.

-Way too short. I played on Jedi Master from the start so did have a spent a lot of time hunting around for chests and plan to get 100% for achievements, when I went to finish the game the first time I had about 85-95% of all planets explored/chests collected, and I still only spent about 15-20 hours. I'm guessing a straight run through the story on Story mode with no side tracking for exploration or backtracking at upgrades would probably only run about 5 hours max. I estimate that my 100% achievement collecting is going to take no more than 25 hours max. That's pretty short for a single player only game. There's only 4 REAL worlds that you can actually explore (story ice world doesn't even count as a real world, you're railroaded in a very linear path and I cleared 100% exploration chests secrets on my first run through without a guide in under 2 hours).

-Game felt honestly pretty easy. I played on Jedi Master the entire game, and other than a few punkass cheap enemies that basically just stunlocked you if you got hit once, after a couple stim and health upgrades enemies were pretty breezy. Combat is simply too shallow to provide a meaningful challenge. All enemy attacks are quite telegraphed and if you are even halfway good at parrying your average enemy will simply not hurt you. The basic lightsaber is the best weapon, the double-bladed 'upgrade' is pretty crap because it does less damage and has much longer animations (causing it to be a lot more likely to get hit), and the split-saber 'upgrade' takes a huge amount of Force for a single hit, making it prohibitive to use against anything other than a staggered boss or large enemy where you're already guaranteed a hit.

-Faces are... not good (Cere's eyes in particular are RIDICULOUS). Seriously I don't understand why companies persist in this mocap face crap, it looks worse than animated faces from a decade ago and the eyes always look horrible because they can't mocap them. It's not Andromeda level bad, and the main character isn't too bad, but any scene that had the faces front and center made me cringe a bit.

-Unless hunting achievements, there's no incentive to hunt and check for anything other than gold chests (stim upgrades), or Force Essence force senses, and both of those are very visually obvious from quite a distance away. When you can literally see whether the chest on the ledge has a cosmetic upgrade or an actual upgrade, there's no reason to spend 5 minutes going to get a cosmetic chest. Ability upgrades are 100% story locked, so exploration gets you basically nothing but pointless cosmetic crap. Who cares what paint job the Mantis has when you spend 98% of the game not in an area you can see it? Why would anybody not achievement hunting CARE about getting 15 different Mantis paint jobs? OK you got a new switch panel for your lightsaber..... that you can't even really see anyway. The main cosmetic thing most people actually care about - lightsaber blade color - is only unlocked with a story event, and it auto unlocks all colors at once anyway.

-During exploration the collision detection with certain pieces of platforming terrain is horrendous (and WHY exactly do I need to hit L2 every time to grab onto walls that are hanging over bottomless pits?). I have literally flown right through vines (and at one point jumped off a ledge HOLDING a vine and fell into a pit because the vine just didn't trigger), BOUNCED OFF balance beams that you're supposed to auto grab, and jumped straight through ziplines. Sliding slopes are also very terrible because of the bad controls and the bad collision detection causing you to have a tendency to catapult off in random directions when you try to jump straight, but it seems like it 'corrects' you to target pieces of terrain that are kind of in the area but that you cannot make a jump to. Of particular disrepute is any section that tries to make you jump onto a vine off a sliding slope. This is at least mitigated somewhat when you get Pull, which at least lets you grab any vine you're vaguely near. The only thing that makes this bearable is that a fall doesn't kill you or checkpoint reset you, it just saps a bit of health and respawns you before the jump. If this game had actual Dark Souls deaths for falling in pits, it would be straight up unplayable.

-The above issue causes a lot of frustration with certain 'puzzles' where it's 100% obvious what you're supposed to be doing, but the poor controls and collision detection make it difficult to actually do it. One great example is to get one chest on Bogano, you climb up to the top, grab a vine, and to get the chest you turn around on the vine and instead of jumping off the vine back onto the top, you jump off lower into an opening that has a fan you have to freeze with force slow mid-jump. THIS IS HORRIBLE. It constantly tries to 'correct' you onto the top ledge even though you jumped at a point you can't make it, causing you to fall. Or you make the right jump, but it never actually picked up the target of the fan, so you hit the fan and bounce off (or in one case, hit the fan, drop onto the ledge in the fan, then sit there for 20 seconds while it slowly grinds you to death and you can hit literally nothing and it doesn't knock you off the ledge). I think it took me 5 minutes and like 4 full stim packs of jumping and missing before I finally got it. The recurring theme of these jumps is poor collision detection coupled with it trying to 'help' you onto the wrong platform, and causing you to miss completely.

-Lack of replayability. You can't actually change your combat style through any customization, the order you get exploration upgrades is 100% locked in sequence in the story, and there's no ending/achievement for actually beating it on a higher difficulty. Zero incentive for a 2nd play through.


The ugly:
-They totally phoned it in on the Wookiees. I mean my god they look TERRIBLE. If you're going to put wookiees in you have to put a LITTLE effort into them so they don't look like a model with vines hanging off them instead of fur.

-MAJOR clothing glitch that popped up immediately and never went away. This is apparently pretty common, basically it never turned off the 'speeding train wind' effect after the opening sequence, so unless you forcibly externally closed the game (exiting to menu or reloading would not fix it) Cal's poncho and any other bit of clothing on every character flapped around constantly and ridiculously no matter the environment. This was INCREDIBLY distracting in story sequences while active. I'm sorry Second Sister, it makes it really hard for me to listen to your evil speech when your cape is BLOWING AROUND THROUGH YOUR MODEL despite standing still in quiet room.

-Couple MAJOR glitches at launch, but generally revolving around the same theme of once you hit an autosave point or mediation point, there is NO WAY to spawn anywhere other than that point. If you accidentally triggered a couple things (like the fact that you could actually make a jump on Dathomir that you weren't SUPPOSED to be able to get across without a double jump) and then jumped on the slope that was right past it, there was no way to proceed or get back. Your only option was a full game restart. They really, REALLY needed to add a 'reset to previous checkpoint' or 'return to Mantis' option.



So overall pretty decent game, but I really wished they'd delayed launch about 2 months to iron out a lot of the glitches and give it more polish. Definitely worth picking up, I'd give it a 7.5 out of 10, if they fixed a lot of the collision detection and glitches it would be an 8.5 out of 10 easily. Other thoughts?

[warty goblin]

I've played some of it, and I find there's basically nothing wrong with the game, but there's also pretty much nothing that gets me excited about it either. If I want to put up with Souls mechanics, Surge 2 has way more interesting melee combat, which is much better integrated into the game's other mechanics. The platforming is fine, but every single one of the Tomb Raider reboots has done the same thing, with larger movesets and smoother animations. So it's basically a mostly fine game with lightsabers and Stormtroopers. Maybe if I had very strong feelings about Star Wars this would elevate it, but I find I don't actually care all that much.

Also, who the frick maps interact to pressing the right stick? That's just weird.

[Olinser]

I've played some of it, and I find there's basically nothing wrong with the game, but there's also pretty much nothing that gets me excited about it either. If I want to put up with Souls mechanics, Surge 2 has way more interesting melee combat, which is much better integrated into the game's other mechanics. The platforming is fine, but every single one of the Tomb Raider reboots has done the same thing, with larger movesets and smoother animations. So it's basically a mostly fine game with lightsabers and Stormtroopers. Maybe if I had very strong feelings about Star Wars this would elevate it, but I find I don't actually care all that much.

Also, who the frick maps interact to pressing the right stick? That's just weird.

Yeah that's why I said it seemed unpolished. It felt like if they gave it 2-3 more months of development it would have been able to get to the next level, possibly more fleshed out combat combos, skills and upgrades, and actual meaningful upgrades in chests and whatnot.

[warty goblin]

I'm not sure I'd describe it as a lack of polish so much as a lack of a discernible overarching design philosophy or goal. The exploration is kinda fun, but doesn't really tie into anything else because you mostly find really boring cosmetics. The combat is ok, but exists quite separately from the platforming gameplay. Some of this is by necessity, since it would be very hard to integrate platforming with melee combat, since videogame melee combat doesn't work very well unless you're on a flat surface, so you can't really use your movement abilities to get an advantageous position like you can in the new Tomb Raiders. And some of it is because of the actually bad hybridized save system between the platforming checkpoints and the Dark Souls save spots. Dying to a fight and having to repeat a lot of platforming is bad design, but because combat deaths force you to respawn at the last meditation point, you can't have hybrid spaces where you switch repeatedly between combat and platforming challenges.

I really liked the opening section, because it was free to mix up gameplay elements, and use its rigid linearity to up the spectacle. The exploration-based sections however I find really uninspiring. It's a pity, because the environments themselves are drop dead gorgeous, but after getting through the first planet and a good portion of the second, I'm very short of motivation to go back.