Gaming Star Wars: Jedi (Fallen Order, Survivor) [Mod Approved]

Dammit. I need to get off my lazy ass and actually record when I do it because I just had a no damage + no stim run of Inquisitor Fortress where I cheesed very little. It would have been so good if I was recording

If you want an opinion from me, the fact that his attacks happen so fast mean that you don't actually have to watch for when they're about to hit(he goes from setting up the attack to the actual hit almost instantly so I doubt you could react anyway). The moment he makes a move, you know the attack is coming almost right away so that can work to your advantage when you try to precision evade(hit the button or roll away immediately lol).

What I think is a load of bull**** is the attacks where they practically teleport to hit you, so you can't "watch" for when they're about to hit. It's like you have to know what kind of attack it is beforehand if you want to precision evade. Trilla's heavy ground slam is an excellent example. She goes from being midair to being on the ground pretty much instantly, so you have no way to precision evade unless you know what's gonna happen.

This is the unfortunate reality of a video game where you play as a Jedi. You don't have their precognition or superhuman reactions at all because the player himself is a normal human that needs time to react.

 

Or, your mind would have known you were recording and undone you.

 

Yah the combat I go from moments of greatness to wanting to throw the controller at the screen. Evading attacks in the boss fights sometimes seems impossible, oddly most of the times I won I threw caution to the wind and just went on a crazy offensive. Never put the difficulty down to story mode though despite dozens of continue screens basically mocking me and telling me to do so.

 

And Al's post illustrates why I remain hesitant to buy this.

 

So, it finally became cheap enough as a disc title for me to take a punt on Jedi: Fallen Order.

Done the first intro level, first hour and.... It's all right. If anything the review I ended up recalling was SkillUp's where his take was that it's brilliant Star Wars but not quite as good as a game and that, to me, feels accurate.

The first level, set in a ship-breaking yard, five years into the Empire's reign, is, in terms of Star Wars, a brilliant idea. Oh and it's above a Sarlacc too. Why? Dunno, but it's a cool idea.

The first bit is an intro to climbing and the aesthetic for it all looks right, with some really neat details - as Cal is inching through a narrow space, a load of rats run through a broken pipe. Later he has a dream where he ends up walking around an Imperial base that looks exactly as you expect and the question it begs is: Why did it take so long for someone to do this?

Now onto the weaker aspects, the gameplay. Let's deal with the biggest issue - you do not use a lightsaber. Oh, it looks like one, it sounds like one, but it doesn't cut like one. This is where gameplay runs up against story, although there is a way to deal with it - only a fraction of the fanbase would pick up on it, but just have the Empire using cortosis, a metal that screws over lightsabers. Sadly, in the absence of that, what you practically have is a glowing baseball bat.

The game's signposting can be pretty weak too, there were times where I just couldn't see where to go and the game wanted to give no hints. I would love to kill the L3 sprint control - it's unreliable, fiddly and just a pain in the arse. Not unique to this game, but still a pain. Not seeing the benefit of the manual climb / grab L2 button over auto-enabling either. Not impressed by the lack of a manual save too - but the meditation circles have been pretty generous so far.

I can't say that first boss fight was particularly good. I certainly didn't expect to win it and I was right. The other gameplay weakness and something I can well see cropping up in the future is the slide sections. Yeah, those..... Not good.

I have no idea how far I'll get before I opt for the '**** it, I'm playing something else' and Ghost of Tsuschima will be calling me back anyway, but have already exploited the meditation system to nab an upgrade by just killing a nearby enemy again and again. I'm pretty certain the Jedi would look badly on resurrecting enemies only to kill them for the XP.

Graphically, it's amazing and the story's well done.

 

I'm glad they realized what the best part is and gave us an arena to play in and fight whatever swarm of baddies we want

Just wish Tapal was actually fightable, but he's a good distraction if you're suicidal enough to take on all the saber bosses at once

 

@Jedi Ben Fair criticisms all around. It doesn't really work as an immersive SW sim or an rpg, so the ability for the player to really interact with the world is pretty limited. And the platforming/movement is not awful, but not really excellent either. In terms of combat, the souls games provide more interesting challenges.

What carried me through it was how the Star Wars-iness makes up for its shortcomings. Maybe the lightsaber doesn't cut like one, but it sure sounds like one! I would highly recommend playing till at least the first planet after Bogano, as that's where the game's story takes off.

 

Oh, I'm not abandoning it - it's simply that Ghost is better!

 

I managed to unlock a trophy about perfect dodging because I tried to fight Cal's master in the arena and couldn't do any damage on him, just dodged. I don't think I did a dodge/counterkick move the entire game, though.

 

It's a lot of fun, especially since you can upgrade it to give you Force meter when you Perfect Dodge (I think?) and has a very satisfying sound effect

I also think you can perfect dodge before getting the perk, where the perk just gives you more incentive to use it...?

 

Yep. Ghost is very much like a SW game in concept too. A lone, last of his kind sword wielding warrior taking on huge odds.

 

Fine, now I'm abandoning it.

.... ..... .... Yeah, I'm done - Jedi: Fallen Order - go **** yourself.

Its use of the SW aesthetic and some of the design is pretty but this is not a SW game. It is not a SW game because though you have something that looks and sounds like a lightsaber, it isn't one. And nigh-on every single enemy is lightsaber resistant! It gets to a point where I can see Cal's Jedi Master going from the Force: Cal, use a ****ing blaster! Of course, if he did, everything in the game would be blaster resistant. This becomes particularly apparent once the game amps up the stamina / block meter on enemies and combat is just this wild, unsatisfying mess of bashing a stormtrooper, to bash their block meter down, to then magically, bloodlessly slice them - no limbs go flying, it's all very safe. It becomes impossible to block the thought: These guys shouldn't be able to block a lightsaber.

Oh and I made damn sure to avoid Oggdo Boggdo after the first fight with a normal Oggdo.

Now, I'm willing to grant that rendering a saber, as a saber, presents significant gameplay challenges, but I can't buy that those same challenges would be insurmountable. Getting web-swinging right is the condition for a Spider-Man game; for a Jedi game, it's lightsabers and this **** in this game isn't it.

Still, I can manage it on easy, right? Well, no, because in one fight Respawn thought it clearly be great to have instant death cliff around it, a pair of enemies on a rock, one with a bazooka - and here bazookas are not only precision weapons, the bazooka trooper knows where you will be before you go there. And no, you can't throw them back. So you try to take them out by moving fast, cue bazooka to the face, fall to death. As far as I can tell? After Cal fell, those two troopers jumped after him because they didn't respawn.

Ultimately, though given time the combat would have killed it - if this is an accurate impression of it, I don't really see the appeal of Souls-style combat then it looks like cheap ****. The blocking? Never feels right, especially when compared to Ghost of Tsuschima - it was the platforming that did it in. The whole slow-force platforming bits? ****ing awful - impaired vision, impaired directions, even when I worked it out, satisfying it was not. The whole sliding while using the saber? Kind of cool. And then there's this bit where you have to swing from rope to rope. Where any other game would have opted for guided direction to enable you to actually pull it off, this goes total freeform, with poor distance / depth indication. After about five pointless, irritating deaths I was done. **** this game.

If the game didn't give a **** about being a videogame, about difficulty; if it focused on being a brilliantly fun SW experience, where playing a Jedi actually feels like one and not a nerfed, limited videogame creation, it could be great, but it wants to be a game too much. It also wants to be a difficult one too much, with its difficulty being utter artifice and so blatant that you can see all the tricks.

Oh and that "map"? Get da **** out of here. This is why 3d, large levels developed direction indicators - because no one likes having to look at some weird representation that bears no resemblance to where they are.

I don't know, maybe I'll go back to it in a day. Maybe I'll get lucky on those ropes - and it will be complete luck, there's no ****ing skill in that section.

There's also ...something off about Cal's movement. He just doesn't move in a way that feels right, it's this weird, swaying, off-kilter walk. Some of the faces are really weird. Somewhere Mass Effect:Andromeda is screaming: Hey, why does that get a pass?

It's been years since there was a decent SW game but this? It ain't it.

 

I'm sorry to say this, but plenty of people were able to handle the game just fine. At that point, it DOES seem like it's a skill-based problem for you.

 

Oh, I could do most of the platforming but it wasn't enjoyable, and then there's those two ropes where no matter what I do I can't tell what the trajectory is going to be in advance, which is kind of needed for platforming sections, because it's that freeform.

Actually, this review sums it up nicely:
https://dagersystem.com/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order/

They were trying, but they just didn't quite nail it.

 

They probably should have had accessibility functions for some of this stuff to allow folks like you to play it, for sure. That sort of thing is just now coming into focus in gaming, unfortunately.

 

Sorry to hear you didn't like it. I found many of the platforming segments frustrating as well.

 

Well, I liked some of it but if you're on a section that just eclipses all of that....

On the combat, even on that stupid cliff fight, the actual respawn was pretty damn generous, you respawn right then and there.

The wall-running and jumping works. Where it falls down is the ropes, the manual grab for climbing - where does it need to be manual? - and the whole force puzzles. I did the panel jumps, but guessing where the spinning panel is in time to force slow it, not a fan.

I probably will just give it another go because the bit that saw me play '**** it' card is immediately after a save circle, but I don't expect my getting past it to be anything other than luck. I will just so happen to get the perfect alignment and Cal will grab the damn rope. (What I suspect won't work is later stuff where you have to jump, rope swing, force pull to grab the next rope.)

The sad thing is, it would be a very easy fix - for instance, Ghost locks your direction after a swing or two so your chance of landing the jump is tilted way in your favour. You can still miss a jump, but it's hard to do once you realise the assist the game is giving you.

Thank you, I was feeling a bit cheesed off with you due to that other post but attributed it to that you've had a spectacularly crappy day.

It has some good accessibility stuff. The subs are good, I can do the combat most of the time, the omissions are pretty much what that review nails - they didn't apply the same sort of modifiers for combat to the puzzles / platforming.

I'm stubborn enough that I probably will go back to it. I probably will get past that section. It'll just take a lot of deaths.

 

I didn't have a insurmountable problem with the platforming stuff but there is a moment when you learn double jump on the Wookiee Homeworld and it's meant to be a transcendental moment when Cal reconnected with the Force but I just kept falling to my death which kinda ruined the vibe.

I do think the moment when Cal has to fall from the sky and land on the back of a flying beast is straight up broken, though and it randomly seemed to work eventually.

 

Correction - not a review. Stream-of-consciousness experience-at-the-time posting? Yes.

It's unfortunate that this game has to be in a post-Ghost of Tsushima world, because it's going to get compared to that and probably lose to it most of the time.

 

The maps weren’t great. The lack of a QT option forcing tons of painful backtracking was my biggest issue. Particularly on Zeffo, that planet was painful.

I played on Jedi Master, so the many, many deaths I took were fairly expected. I thought the combat was alright, though it wasn’t mind blowing. Scout Troopers being the melee grunts despite the entirety of the rest of Star Wars conditioning me that they are snipers was weird though.

 

So, had an idea, if I jump for that rope, running while holding up on the stick and then just jump maybe Cal won't change his arc and I might grab the second rope. It worked first time.

However, there is one very clear, inescapable conclusion from a later bit - under certain conditions, my depth perception on games is ****ed. Why? The goddamn Force Push tutorial. Nigh-on every time the R2 button wouldn't register or do so too late. 'Hit when blue. - no, that's actually too late. But, because R2 is not a precision button, I remapped it to X. Still took ages to hit that damn ball. I'm amazed the section got signed off as acceptable to play because its messaging, its indicators as to what to do was awful.

Still, between these two points - did enjoy it more, duffed up some Stormies, some Tomb Guardians, some animals, done a couple of puzzles.

 

Probably my most satisfying gameplay Force power moment was when I Force pushed a sliding puzzle brick right into a bounty hunter and immediately crushed them, that was fantastic. Total fluke but Awesome

 

I'll start playing my copy when I either finish Dark Souls III, or simply admit that the damn game is too hard for me. I had a quick go on JFO to make sure it worked, and it seemed fun, but as I'm currently playing both DS3 and AC: Odyssey I just can't cope with another joypad fighting layout at the moment.

 

Oh man Zeffo could be a maze at times, and the Kashyyyk base where a lot of the hallways looked the same.

I thought some of the combat was repetitive but @Jedi Ben did you stop before getting the Force Pull ability? I'm confused how ropes gave you trouble if you had that option to pull them toward you, and you can yank some guys toward you and get that "saber right through the chest" feature you're craving too. Also golden against those rocket troopers. Pretty much it helps with half the things you mentioned lol.

I actually liked the fact that you didn't have all these abilities unlocked from the start, and things were difficult/sometimes frustrating-- mirroring Cal's struggle to regain the Force. It really pays off once you unlock everything and start to master them, since you/Cal start to feel like kind of a badass. Enemies that I remember really struggling with earlier on I can now beat the tar out of in the arena combat mode. Though again, can get repetitive.

Ultimately I think the game excels best at the story though, particularly some of the moments where you explore the Venator and

Spoiler

that big payoff on Ilum

Which is def not what I expected when I started, and as someone generally a bit skeptical of DisnEU.

I hope you pick it up again Ben (maybe with that lens in mind).