Inquisitors

Developer: Respawn Entertainment Publisher: Electronic Arts Starring: Cameron Monaghan Director: Stig Asmussen Release Date: November 15th 2019 Review – Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) Going back to review Jedi: Fallen Order, brought me back to how I felt when I first finished the game; I remember feeling profoundly confused. Not because of some complex twist or story revelation, but because on paper by all rights, I should have loved every minute of this game. You take the parkour movement and sense of adventure from a game like Uncharted and you give it to a Jedi, who we follow during some of the darkest days in the Star Wars lore and what do you get? Apparently you get something that doesn’t feel anything like Star Wars. I have a fair number of problems with this game, so I’m going to go ahead and list them and explain why they bothered me so much during my experience playing through Fallen Order. First of all, when this game dropped and did pretty well commercially and critically. EA were commended in the games media for having the guts to release a single-player, story based Star Wars game with no online play. When the reviews dropped just before the game’s release and this news was revealed, it got me really hyped as I have never been much for online gaming and much prefer story based games over anything else. Now whilst EA did give us a single-player, offline Star Wars story, they did so in such a sloppy, janky, half-finished fashion. I lost count of the amount of times that I had to restart my game because of loading errors or game breaking bugs. Almost every time I would enter a new area the characters would initially appear in a T-pose position and remain that way for a good few seconds until I approached them. Onscreen prompts would often fail to appear making the game’s already confusing exploration methods even more unclear. I have not seen this much pop-in in a videogame since the launch version of No Man’s Sky. Almost every area was covered in murky textures upon initially entering them, with some entire structures and areas failing to render. During a few boss fights, the AI character would fail to attack me and would just stand still and no matter how many blows I would land on them, their health bar would not budge until I fully reloaded the level. This sort of thing was present during every one of my play sessions and at a few points the game became almost unplayable due to it’s glaring technical glitches. Also, I got this game as a Christmas gift and played it at the start of 2020, so it had been out for a decent amount of time by then. A game of this calibre, that had been out for months at the time I played it, from a major studio like Respawn and a publisher like EA, not to mention being from a major franchise like Star Wars, – the fact that it is in the current broken state that it’s in is frankly unacceptable. The next issue I want to highlight and something that really stood out to me when replying Jedi: Fallen Order for review was the story and characters in the game. The game’s protagonist Cal, is an unsympathetic, whiny bitch of a character that got on my nerves every time he opened his mouth. The rest of the crew were also pretty bland, unendearing and lacking in much personality. I grew up loving the Star Wars universe, yet I found myself trying in vain to skip almost every cutscene and really not giving a crap what happens to any one of the characters. The villains were unengaging and the other side characters like Cal’s master and the old dude that left holograms for Cal to find got increasingly annoying every time they appeared. The only character I found engaging throughout the whole game was Sister Merrin. I always thought Jedi Knights were supposed to be extremely capable, powerful warriors, yet at no point in this game do you ever feel powerful in any significant way. The whole time, you feel on par with the non descript enemies that you are fighting. While I agree that the last major AAA single-player Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed was too easy, at least you felt powerful while playing as that character. The combat never feels as satisfying as it should due to the lack of dismemberment. The decision not to allow the player to chop off limbs makes it feels more like you are hitting enemy shaped piñatas with a big stick, rather than welding a laser sword of pure, raw energy. I also felt that there was a lack of variation in the combos and moves-set and found myself watching the same animations over and again no matter what combination of buttons I was mashing. Every fight in this game is hard and not in a fun,challenging way, but instead in a grinding, irritating way. The ridiculously long loading times also made dying even more frustrating. If you are going to design a game where the player is going to die frequently, you HAVE TO have a snappy respawn system in place à la Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami. (Especially when your goddamn studio is called RESPAWN, but I digress.) They were clearly going for a more defensive, methodical approach to the combat system, which is fine, but they should have given you a choice between that and a more aggressive, offensive skill tree, meaning that more play styles could be catered to. Another majorly annoying thing was the way that the game justified unlocking new skills for Cal, with him having out-of-the-blue flashbacks at seemingly random points in the story where he would suddenly remember that he could wall-run or double-jump. I hate when games do this, it feels extremely lazy and unjustified within the context of the