The expectations thrust onto Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order are absolutely unfair. It’s EA’s first big Star Wars game since the disastrous and borderline illegal Battlefront II. It’s Respawn’s first single-player campaign since the masterful Titanfall 2 and the team’s other project for this year after the smash hit Apex Legends. And alongside The Rise of Skywalker in theaters and The Mandalorian on Disney+, it comes at a time when perhaps folks are finally ready to be finished with Star Wars.
But then I heard a Yaddle joke during my demo and thought to myself, “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is going to be just fine.”
Despite moving from Titanfall’s Source Engine to Unreal Engine 4, Fallen Order is still immediately a beautiful digital recreation of the Star Wars galaxy in the tumultuous period of the Empire’s ascent. While customizing your poncho for the hilariously dull playable Padawan Cal Kestis might sound like a joke, they’re slick looking ponchos. Don’t worry, you can customize lightsabers, too. And just walking around your ship The Mantis, talking to alien crewmates and Debra Wilson, totally has that “used future” vibe the franchise has pioneered. It may not be quite as stunning as Battlefront II’s visuals, but that campaign was also stiff in how it retrofitted a first-person shooter into a third-person action-adventure.
Fallen Order is far more playable as a character action game. When you first set foot on whichever planet you’ve chosen to go to, and you do have choices, you’re free to explore with all the abilities available to you. Before even encountering enemies just getting around the landscape was a challenge in and of itself. Run along walls, freeze spinning platforms with the Force, illuminate dark caves with your lightsaber, slide down ice tubes, jump across ropes.
Early demos had us fearing these sequences would all be very painfully scripted, like the barely interactive Uncharted. But while there is some slight funneling, you’ll soon discover each planet is actually a densely constructed and almost nonlinear maze. Often times completing a platforming sequence just opens up a meditation spot to heal (and respawn enemies) or a shortcut to reduce backtracking. Backtracking, in a Star Wars game.
It might be a stretch to call Fallen Order a Metroidvania and an open-world game, but the intricacy of the early level design is at least as satisfyingly multilayered, complex, and brain-teasing as the new Tomb Raider games. Between this and Gears 5 and Doom 2016, it’s nice to see AAA single-player game campaigns that do something beyond one-track cinematic spectacle. There’s even a wireframe map straight out of Metroid Prime.
And these are just the opening bits. Soon I found myself deep inside an ancient Jedi Temple that is essentially a Zelda dungeon. There are puzzles with a shared theme, in this case manipulating metal balls with the wind. There are secrets to find that upgrade your health, like heart containers. And there’s even a new ability that changes the way you consider the whole space.
As Cal overcomes his trauma he remembers his Jedi abilities like just shoving stuff with Force push. While the pacing of the two games are very different, the creative use of Force abilities in your environment has a lot of Titanfall 2 (or Half-Life 2 before it) energy. Slam your way through walls or freeze a sphere in place and push it in another direction. The developers, PR rep, and I actually got stumped during one of these puzzles, if you’re still worried about the game being too linear.
Force powers also come in handy during combat, the other major part of the game. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is trying to thread a really tricky needle. How do you make lightsaber combat meaningful without nerfing its power? The designers figured out an interesting solution, but you can feel the tension of the design straining against this bind. Fallen Order has a kind of Dark Souls-lite melee fighting system (like the new Assassin’s Creed games) focused on blocking and parrying and breaking stances of Stormtroopers that all happen to have anti-Jedi electric sticks. Once you’ve made an opening then lightsabers kill in one hit. But you have to make that opening.
It’s tough! I got hit a lot even while doing cool stuff like reflecting back laser blaster bolts. The wild swings between “I don’t feel like I’m even doing any damage” to “Oh I killed him” were kind of jarring. Like I said, Force powers also mix things up. I pushed a bazooka missile back at a frozen guy to make a previously mouthy foe just not exist anymore. You also level up skill points to unlock new moves like dashing strikes and higher stamina. But you have to kill enough enemies with the fundamental swordplay to earn experience as well as recharge the Force. And the whole time I never quite got a handle on whether I was supposed to be more methodical or more swashbuckling in my approach, which I guess is a classic Jedi dilemma. We’ll see for sure in the final game.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order releases November 15 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. For more on Star Wars learn how the dream of Star Wars and Game Thrones fell apart and check out these Star Wars Adidas sneakers.
from Geek.com https://ift.tt/321Cgzx
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment