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I was never a Star Wars fan, but luckily Fallen Order doesn’t require you to be one.

In 2010 then-president of EA said something about single-player games being “finished”. Here we are now with EA publishing one of the best and most successful single-player titles of 2019 under its wing.
Fallen Order tells an original story of Cal Kestis, an apprentice jedi hiding on a scrapyard planet called Bracca. Once he gets found by the Empire hunting the jedi and rescued by some strangers, he learns that the goal of his saviours is to restore the fallen Jedi Order. Having really no other place to go to, Cal agrees to help and embarks on a journey full of danger and failures, but also with a lot of soul-searching and new friends.
The main advantage of the story is its characters. The main cast is not only always there for Cal, either just to chat about everyday things on the ship or to actually listen to his problems and be a genuine support on the journey, but they also impact the events of the game in a not-so direct way. Greez is being hunted by space gangsters which give you a hard time later, Cere is the former master of the main antagonist of the game .
Probably the most important character though, is our companion who is always there for us. Although the little droid, BD-1 doesn’t really say words, he communicates really well with Cal. The “dialogues” between the two form a very cool dynamic and really bond us with the two characters.
Generally the writing of this game is amazing. The quieter moments with the crew members feel genuine and immersive. It’s this kind of absorbing story in which instead of saying “oh it’s a trap, nice”, you say “DAMN IT CAL IT’S AN OBVIOUS FU.CKING TRAP DON’T GO IN THERE PLEASE”
Also, The Hot Goth Alien Cult Mommy.
In terms of gameplay, I'd say this is a softcore souls-like. An enemy that kills you takes your current xp and sends you back to your last meditation circle. To recover your xp you have to reach him again and hit him. Now it’s a cool attempt to make you more careful not to die and lose stuff, but it’s not really working. I was playing on second to hardest difficulty and honestly, I either did not care about the lost xp (it’s really easy and fast to farm back) or I just went and hit the guy that killed me not even because I wanted my experience back, but because he was just in the way.
The combat is sweet. You can do parries and precision dodges or just roll around if you don’t feel comfortable with your timing. Low on health? Call out to BD to toss you a stim right into your hand. Fighting with your lightsaber lets you do a variety of moves such as throwing it at enemies or literally teleporting to them to close in on them faster. Your fancy glowstick also has a two-sided mode – it exceeds at fighting groups of enemies. It also has an attack in which you dual wield the glowstick and many players wish that this was a permanent mode.
You can also use The Force. In combat you can slow enemies down, pull them towards you or (my personal favorite, classic move) yeet them off a cliff (as a side note - many games have cocky enemies talking sh.it, and then get their asses floored seconds later, but hearing a clone yell “YOU ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO ME, JEDI" while falling down the abyss after getting yeeted off a cliff face is something else). Powers have many versions; a charged push can throw away multiple clones or even a big troll-thing.
The Force is also used to solve many different environmental puzzles either to progress or to unlock a secret. Outside of combat you explore several places in the galaxy. You move around by climbing some plants, wall running, swinging on some vines, etc. Cal runs and jumps (man, hopping around was just so cool to me) around in a very intuitive way and it’s all incredibly animated. What I must say though, is that swimming overall feels very off and has some really bizarre animations.
At first visit to some places the exploration feels really natural and immersive. I hardly ever got lost anywhere, even in the more open areas, and if I was ever in trouble, I could always use the map to see unexplored paths I had left.
Unfortunately, backtracking to certain locations to get the leftover secrets and chests is an absolute disaster. Dathomir is a great planet, it’s a challenging, beautiful wasteland with cool lore and story. Going back to it and trying to reach the swamp area again is just a sh.itshow though. It’s so unnecessarily convoluted. It even seems like in this one place, past the bridge in the village should be an opening to just let you through. Instead, it’s blocked by this little wooden wall that you can’t jump over, so you must go around the whole location. It’s a serious flaw that is not only easily fixable, but just feels like somebody just forgot to put something there.
The game looks very good and has some amazing landscapes. It also has a photo mode to play with. Regarding animation – most of them are amazing and very creative (BD tossing you heals is just so good). Besides swimming, the only complaint would be the lack of finisher animations. Some foes only have one and others get repetitive after a while.
Now the sound design – maaan, this is THE science fiction game. The space crafts flying around, blasters shooting, things exploding, funny glowsticks swinging around. They’re not only high quality and very characteristic, but they all just have the oompff you know? The soundtrack amazingly complements the vibe. It’s very movie-like. What blew my mind is that if you listen to the OST album of this game on Spotify PC, it replaces the player bar with an extending lightsaber. How cool is that?
I didn’t really encounter any technical issues, but what’s funny is that there is an infinite jumping glitch in the game that they did not patch. It’s not really that useful though, because you skip many invisible triggers while using it and it screws up the collision and map loading. It is funi.
I was never a Star Wars fan. This is probably my first encounter with this franchise since Republic Commando on Xbox Classic or randomly seeing The Clone Wars on TV. Nothing wrong with the universe itself, I just never really got hooked by it.
I was never a Star Wars fan, but luckily Fallen Order doesn’t require you to be one. It’s a wonderful adventure by itself. Maybe even a good starting point into the SW universe for a newbie like myself – and don’t get me wrong, I’m in no position to say that this is a good piece of the Star Wars media not knowing the rest of it. Nonetheless, from my experience with it, I can say that it’s enough to get you hooked on.