Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – A Review (Sort Of)

This one’s a game I liked very much despite the fact that parts of it clearly exist to test my patience, my sense of direction, and my willingness to jog back through the same cave for the third time.

Jedi: Fallen Order is not perfect. Its combat often feels like it wandered in from a different video game wearing someone else’s boots, and some of its design choices seem specifically engineered to annoy people who enjoy convenience.

But when it works, it really does. It’s exciting, cinematic, weirdly earnest, packed with fantastic platforming, and so drenched in Star Wars atmosphere that you can practically smell the cold metal of a Star Destroyer hallway.

This is not the second coming of Jedi Outcast. It is not The Force Unleashed 3 in disguise. It is its own peculiar stew: one part Uncharted, one part Metroidvania, one part Soulslike, and several generous scoops of “what if we let you run around mossy ancient ruins while a sad orchestra tells you you’re a Jedi.”

Cal Kestis and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Empire

The game puts you in the boots of Cal Kestis, a former Padawan who survived Order 66 and now spends his days lying low on Bracca, cutting apart old ships for scrap and doing his best not to look like a man with an illegal laser sword and a couple Force tricks up his sleeve. Naturally, this arrangement lasts about twelve minutes before the plot dropkicks him into an epic space adventure.

A workplace accident forces Cal to use the Force to save his friend, which is nice of him, but a terrible idea from a self-preservation standpoint. The Empire notices. The Inquisitors show up. Things explode. Soon, Cal is off on a galaxy-hopping quest involving lost Jedi knowledge, spiritual ruins, sinister Imperials, and one holocron full of Force-sensitive names that absolutely cannot fall into the wrong hands.

Unless we want the galaxy to become even more miserable than it already is.

It’s a strong setup, and unmistakably Star Wars. Hidden hero? Check. Evil Empire? Check. Ancient mystery? Check. Emotional damage? Oh yes, loads of that.

But Fallen Order sells it through sheer sincerity. Cal works because he isn’t introduced as some swaggering chosen one. He’s a traumatized young survivor who’s trying, failing, learning, and occasionally getting thrown off cliffs by things with too many teeth. That’s a solid base for a Star Wars protagonist.

The supporting cast helps, too. Cere and Greez are good company, BD-1 is an immediate all-timer in the long tradition of tiny Star Wars companions who would absolutely die for you after knowing you for five minutes, and the villains do a decent job of radiating that particular mix of menace and melodrama the franchise thrives on.

This game is Star Wars to the extreme

What really makes Fallen Order sing is not just the story, but the texture of the whole thing. This game understands Star Wars at a deep, deep level. Not in the “look, a lightsaber!” sense, but in the visual language of the universe. The grubby industrial machinery. The eerie ancient temples. The brutalist Imperial architecture. The weird, lonely edges of forgotten planets. The sense that history is everywhere, buried under vines and rust and fascism.

Bogano feels like a place where old Force secrets might genuinely be lying around under a rock. Dathomir is a hostile nightmare in the best possible way. Kashyyyk looks fantastic, all towering trees and Imperial desecration. Zeffo has that proper “ancient civilisation with deeply concerning weather” vibe. Everywhere you go feels designed by people who get why Star Wars worlds are fun to inhabit in the first place (OK, not really).

And then there’s the music.

Gordy Haab and Stephen Barton absolutely cooked here. The score is magnificent. Not “pretty good for a licensed game,” not “close enough to the films,” but genuinely magnificent.

It captures the grandeur, mystery, melancholy, and momentum of Star Wars without feeling like a karaoke version of John Williams. There are stretches of Fallen Order where the environment, the pacing, and the music all lock together so well that the game briefly stops being “very good licensed action-adventure” and becomes something properly transportive.

In less dramatic terms: it whips.

(Side note: I just couldn’t help but feel that this score sounds like Jurassic Park. Like, a lot. There’s even a whole sequence which feels like it’s been straight up lifted from the T-Rex car chase scene. Give Gordy a JP scoring gig, I tell ya!)

This is, like, the best platformer ever

My favorite thing in Fallen Order is not the lightsaber combat, the story, or even the Star Wars-ness of it all. It’s the platforming. I absolutely adore the platforming here.

Running along walls, scrambling up surfaces, leaping across ridiculous gaps, sliding down muddy death-chutes, grabbing ropes, climbing wreckage, hopping across ancient mechanisms like an especially acrobatic goblin, etc. — this stuff is superb.

The movement feels cinematic without turning into a glorified quick-time event, and the game has a real knack for creating traversal sequences that are both readable and exciting.

Oddly enough, it reminded me of Heart of Darkness, which remains one of my all-time favorite games. Not because Fallen Order plays like it, exactly, but because it captures that same feeling of navigating hostile, dangerous spaces where movement itself is the challenge and the thrill.

The environment is not just scenery. It is the thing you’re wrestling with.

And yes, Uncharted 4 did this well. Yes, the Tomb Raider Survivor trilogy did this well too. But I think Fallen Order may actually beat both of them for me when it comes to pure traversal pleasure. There’s something wonderfully tactile about the way it strings together jumps, climbs, and movement puzzles. It feels good to move through this game, and that matters more than people sometimes admit.

Give me the Origin Tree on Kashyyyk and a series of irresponsible jumps over a fatal drop, and I’m happy.

Exploration: now with 40 percent more ponchos

The other big joy of Fallen Order is exploration.

This is where the Metroidvania side of the game really earns its keep.

You poke around a planet, find blocked-off routes, unlock new abilities, come back later, and discover new paths you couldn’t access before.

It’s a great loop, especially because the environments are designed so well. There are shortcuts to uncover, secret alcoves to squeeze into, and just enough twisting overlap in the level layouts to make revisiting areas feel rewarding rather than purely obligatory.

And yes, a lot of what you find is cosmetic junk. New poncho. New paint job. New lightsaber hilt. New outfit color that says, “I am still emotionally processing the fall of the Jedi Order, but in a tasteful blue.” None of it changes the gameplay much, and yet I still loved hunting it down.

That’s because the act of exploring is rewarding even when the loot is functionally silly. Opening a chest and getting a new cosmetic item shouldn’t be that satisfying, and yet in Fallen Order it often is. Partly because the worlds are so good to roam around, and partly because Star Wars has always understood the appeal of little bits of tactile nonsense. A weird crate in an ancient ruin that contains some obscure customization piece? Sure. Why not?

The combat and I are not on speaking terms

Now for the grumbling.

I am not, to put it mildly, in love with the combat in Jedi: Fallen Order.

I understand what it’s doing. It wants deliberate timing, stamina management, parries, caution, and tactical reads. It wants to make every duel feel dangerous. It wants lightsaber fights to be tense rather than power-fantasy breezy. I get it. I respect the intent. I still don’t really enjoy it.

To me, the combat feels sluggish. Not weighty in a satisfying way. Sluggish. There’s a difference. I never quite shook the sense that Cal should be more agile, more expressive, more fun to control in a fight. Instead, too many encounters feel like careful, stop-start scraps where you’re nudging against the game’s systems rather than flowing through them.

And the Force powers, while useful, just don’t hit the way I want them to. You’re a Jedi, but often not in the “gleeful space wizard” sense that games like Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, or The Force Unleashed allowed. Those games let you do dumb, wonderful, overpowered nonsense. In Fallen Order, the Force often feels restrained, almost timid. Practical. Respectable. Mildly disappointing.

There were moments when I genuinely didn’t feel like a Jedi so much as a young man with a plasma baton and a very stressful work schedule.

No fast travel? In this economy?

Two other design choices continue to irritate me.

First: no fast travel. This is annoying. I don’t care if it’s immersive. I don’t care if the level design loops in clever ways. Sometimes I have done the thing, found the secret, opened the box, murdered the giant mutant frog, and would now like to head back to the Mantis. Fallen Order often responds to this reasonable request by making you trudge back through an obstacle course of old routes, enemies, and map confusion like you’re being punished for wanting supper.

Second: enemies respawn when you meditate to heal. Yes, yes, I know. It’s the bonfire thing. It’s the Souls thing. It’s the “risk and reward” thing. I understand the design logic. I simply do not think Fallen Order needed to copy it this faithfully. Sometimes I want to top up my health and continue exploring without repopulating the local area with every angry beast and stormtrooper I’ve just finished dealing with. Sometimes a game can simply let me have a nice time.

A very good game that I occasionally want to yell at

So where does that leave Jedi: Fallen Order?

As a very solid game. Flawed, slightly awkward in some design choices, but still very solid.

Its combat never fully clicked for me, and I don’t think its Soulslike habits improve the experience as much as the developers probably hoped.

Cal can feel oddly underpowered for a Jedi. Backtracking is sometimes tiresome. Lack of fast travel straight up sucks.

But then the game sends you wall-running through a crumbling ruin. Or lets you explore another beautifully designed planet. Or drops in one of Haab and Barton’s incredible musical cues. Or simply gives you ten straight minutes of immaculate Star Wars vibes. And suddenly you remember why you put up with the nonsense.

Fallen Order is at its best when it’s blending platforming, exploration, set-piece spectacle, and pure Star Wars atmosphere into one big, confident adventure. And at its best, it’s really, really good.

If you’re like me and the combat doesn’t do much for you, there’s an easy fix: lower the difficulty a bit, stop trying to prove anything to anyone, and treat the fights as the bits between all the excellent traversal, exploration, and scenery-chewing galactic melodrama.

That way lies peace.

Or at least fewer annoying deaths on Dathomir.

Now, onto Jedi: Survivor!

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Release Date: November 15, 2019

Genres: Action-adventure, Platform, Metroidvania, Souls-like

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