Jedi Fallen Order (By Respawn Entertainment)

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order hands-on: Tried, true, and tough

The first big Star Wars single-player campaign in years focuses on the familiar.

arstechnica.com

Once you're on a planet, the structure is quite similar to that of Dark Souls. You discover secret passages, unlock doors that allow easier backtracking, and explore interlocking sections of a pseudo-open area with scattered save points. You do it all while fighting varied enemies in the paths between.

The death, saving, and progression systems borrow from Souls as well. You accumulate XP (though in this case it converts to skill points, which you spend on an ability tree instead of base stats) as you defeat enemies. But dying, unfortunately, causes you to lose all the XP you gained since you overtook your last skill point.

When you reach a save point, you can sit at it to save your game or spend ability points. But to recover your health and refill your stims (basically health potions), you have to meditate. Meditate does those things, but it also respawns all the enemies in the area. In other words, it's a softened version of the Souls design.

On numerous occasions, I came out victorious in a battle but decided I had lost too much health to safely proceed without major risk of losing XP progress. So I backtracked to a save point to meditate and then tried to fight the enemies again, hopefully losing less health this time around. Sometimes I did this a half-dozen times on the same fight.


I was surprised at how challenging Fallen Order was. While it is certainly not as difficult as Bloodborne or Sekiro, it combines an unusually unforgiving saving and death system with combat that is rooted in difficult enemy patterns. Precise timings are also a thing. It was very clear to me during my three hours with the game that its designers explicitly sought out to soften some of the Soulslike genre's harshest inclinations while retaining the spirit of what some people like about those games. I wasn't expecting this because I imagined Disney and EA would try to make this game as broadly appealing as possible.

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When you select a planet to travel to, your shipmates begin a conversation as the outside of the ship animates the jump to hyperspace. During the trip, your character participates in the conversation, and you can go to a workbench to customize your light saber in transit, among other things. The game is loading in the background, but you wouldn't know it. Next thing you know, you're walking out onto the planet surface.

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