The critics have given their final verdicts on EA’s long-awaited Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which arrives in the shops today.
Revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June 2018, Fallen Order is single-player adventure that puts gamers in the shoes of Cal Kestis – a “budding Jedi” who’s on the run from the Imperial army, PCGamer reports.
Developed by EA-backed studio Respawn Entertainment, the company behind the hugely popular Apex Legends game, Fallen Order is a story-driven title designed to be played solo, as opposed to the recent crop of online-only Star Wars games.
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The game also serves as a warm-up to this year’s movie. With Fallen Order launching today, there’s just one month before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits cinemas.
Here’s everything we know so far about Fallen Order - and what the critics have to say:
Reviews
“It’s been ages since we got a great single-player Star Wars action game,” says IGN, “but Jedi: Fallen Order makes up for a lot of lost time.”
The gaming site is full of praise the game’s cast, naming Debra Wilson, who voices Kestis’s mentor Cere Junda, for an outstanding performance. Her role is especially impressive in the latter half of the game, when Junda “relives her darkest moments and confronts the consequences of her actions with appropriate revulsion on her face.”
In a similar vein to Tomb Raider and Uncharted, Fallen Order’s levels are “complex, multilayered and hard to navigate,” The Guardian notes. More areas will be unlocked as the game progresses, giving gamers an excuse to revisit old worlds and collect new items.
The combat, meanwhile, is heavily influenced by the 2018 hit God of War and Dark Souls, the newspaper says. It means that each swipe of Kestis’s lightsabre feels “weighty and dangerous,” while enemies can be defeated in a different ways.
It’s not perfect, though. Ars Technica claims that backtracking to old planets “feels annoying”, as the items available for gamers to collect are “mostly worthless”. The site also argues that the story “feels rote and utterly disposable in the Star Wars universe” and loses its “logical train of thought along the way.”
Despite its imperfections, GamesRadar says Fallen Order is the first Star Wars game in years “that comes closest to capturing the magic of the series.”
“It’s in the glimpses of strange worlds and cultures we want to learn more about, it’s enjoying the ragtag groups who slowly learn to trust each other, and it’s the fact that lightsabers are really great fun”, the site concludes.
Where to order
Gamers can order the game on Amazon. Prices for the regular version start at £49.99, while the Deluxe Edition, which includes unique outfits and a behind-the-scenes look at how the game was made, comes in at £62.99.
When does Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order take place?
Fallen Order takes place shortly after the events of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
The game’s protagonist, Cal Kestis, is a young force user who survives Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66 call, which resulted in the eradication of the Jedi, says Gamespot. In Fallen Order, Kestis is on the run from the rising Imperial army as it scours the galaxy to wipe out the remaining Jedi.
Speaking to the gaming site, Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm, said Fallen Order’s position in the Star Wars timeline has allowed developers to create a story that’s “a little bit darker, a little bit more mysterious” and “a little bit more threatening” than other games set in the sci-fi world.
Does it feature microtransactions?
No. The official EA Star Wars Twitter account confirmed on earlier this year that the game will have “no microtransactions”, where players spend real-world money to unlock in-game features.
The account also said that there won’t be any “loot boxes”, a controversial system where players can spend real money on virtual item packs that contain random rewards.
“And no, we won’t be adding them”, EA confirmed.
The move comes in the wake of the bumpy release of EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II in 2017, which was heavily criticised over its reliance on in-game purchases.
With the company seemingly turning its back on microtrasactions, Forbes claims Fallen Order will act as an “antithesis” to the Battlefront franchise.
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