How are people liking the game?

@heathhuston said:

For the final sequence, do you mean Vader's entrance and that whole escape scene? That was genuinely terrifying. From the moment you see Trilla's panic and fear gradually get worse as the music and Vader's breathing gets louder, to her death, to Cal realizing to just run the fuck outta there and Vader chasing you. I thought for sure Cere would sacrifice herself to save Cal. I love the dynamic of the crew, kinda makes me wish for an RPG with them all in the future. Cal and Merrin could be a great partnership. But I would be all for a direct sequel also. Loved every second of it.

But yeah, I really hope that sequence gets the credit it deserves. Also, the Order 66 scene. I genuinely felt emotional during that when the Master passed on. And when Cal faces off against his shadow and they make peace.

So many good moments. Honestly, best Star Wars content I've experienced in a long while. They did a fantastic job with the story, especially considering it has to be within the Disney bubble now.

I bumped the difficulty down away from Jedi Master and am having more fun now overall. I think I'd have left it alone if there were more humanoid enemies to fight but all of the erratic animals just make it weird and frustrating when they deal so much damage.

I think overall I'm finding it to be a pretty bad metroidvania and I wish they had either focused MORE on that to make it better or not bothered with those elements at all. I could level the same criticism at the combat but it's much less frustrating than the dread I have whenever it's time to backtrack through a map for what is PROBABLY going to be another ugly poncho.

Just beat it, loved, will probably clean up the extra stuff I didn't get, for trophies.

That ending sequence was....amazing. The characters in this game were fantastic all around, and I really want to see more of them. Greez alone might be one of my favorite characters of the year, what a fun person. All the voice acting was fantastic, particularly the main villain.

I didn't have any real bugs playing on PS4 Pro, but performance was pretty spotty at times, which was a bummer. I'm still super glad I picked it up though, Brad wasn't wrong calling it one of the better video game stories of this year.

I hope we get another game with this crew real bad.

Beat it yesterday and after a day of thinking about it, it might've been better as a short run TV show than a game. I really like all the characters and the story is more or less the reason to play Fallen Order.

Metroidvania elements are just there, but the second I realized the only thing you find are poncho colors I stopped exploring all together. There is kind of a bait early on to do with exploration when you find a pretty big upgrade, but that never ever happens again.

The combat ended up feeling tedious to me by the mid game, although the 2 last bosses are pretty good. Chucking Stormtroopers off cliffs never gets old, especially with fully upgraded push.

I might also be the only person who didn't like the final sequence. Its cool in the same way it was in Rogue 1, but its almost exactly the same thing and Vader didn't need to show up for the game to have a good conclusion. Especially if this is how all pre-RotJ of his appearances are gonna go - show up at the end and hilariously stomp everyone. Rogue 1, Rebels S2, this.

Also, screw Dathomir.

I just beat it with 100% completion and I really liked it. The way the map and UI is designed made it pretty simple to hunt down all the hidden things although completing the databank was tough.

I loved the cast. I think people are being unfair calling Cal boring even though I think the supporting cast were my favourite. I don't think you could have had the same quality of performance with a create-a-character. I liked his arc and by the end of the game I even changed my look entirely to get a Luke in RotJ vibe. It ruled. I was playing on PC and must have brute forced any of the major issues because outside of some wonky looking pathing and the occasional Looney Toons delayed fall when pushed off an edge my experience was unhampered.

I played on Grand Master and aside from some early game OHK issues it felt really tight. I think the decision to have animals tank more hits but have Imperials mostly die immediately maintained the feeling you want but still be a videogame. It's much less of "just a sword" than it was in Jedi Knight (although those games rule).

Several times throughout my experience I thought "imagine if EA had been doing this stuff the entire time they had the license." I hope Respawn gets another run at it but it will be interesting to see how they match the videogame power curve with what is sensible for the setting. I wouldn't want to see Cal get much more powerful than he was by the time the game ended otherwise you end up with a Force Unleashed situation.

My GOTY. So happy to be playing a "cinematic AAA" game in 2019 with more weight given to gameplay and exploration. I said it in another thread, but it just plays like a goddamn video game, with all the metroidvanian style exploring, the great pacing between gameplay and story sequences, the expertly spaced out upgrades... man I could go on.

Not to mention, when it matters, the art and graphics just look incredible. I was just stopping for minutes sometimes soaking in some of the vistas. This is an area I haven't seen many people talk about. It's probably the nicest art in a game I've played this year, often looks like concept art in motion at times.

This also needs to come up during whatever the sound / music awards for this years deliberations end up being. It's really good at knowing when to punctuate a scene or transition from one mood to the next, when to be quiet and when to go full Stars Wars bombast. The sound design is artfully executed pretty much throughout.

The performance is kind of unfortunate (I'm on PC with one of the more high end cards), but not immersion breaking to me (note though that I am weird and find this stuff fun). It helps that the performance mostly sucks during exploration sections where you're experimenting with the systems anyway, so is ultimately inconsequential.

It might be my favourite thing in the Star Wars franchise since the original trilogy. I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan, but it's giving me the same magic feeling I had as a kid watching the originals.

It's a great game that is littered with bugs and glitches to the point of it being unforgivable and should definitely have had more time in development before release.

That is my experience with it. I've beat it, but I can't 100% it because the game stopped tracking which chests and secrets I've gotten. So now I'm just waiting for another patch before coming back to it.

Just finished it, watching the credits now.

I really enjoyed it. The characters, story, world design, level layout, puzzles and art were all excellent. I wish they had introduced one character a lot earlier, and Cal is a little wet and generic, but everything else I liked a lot. The combination of gameplay types worked nicely and I thought that it gave enough space to all of them. Would have liked a few more shortcuts within the worlds but otherwise they were well put together (apart from the sliding sections). The set pieces were excellent - I especially liked the final sequences, the final flashback and the end of the Kashyyk ones. Great spectacle and well directed too - hard to take your eyes off for a lot of it.

The lag on the parry made the combat feel more messy than it should, which is a shame. And there wasn't much interesting to do with the force powers, plus they don't give you quite enough force to do that much cool stuff. I played it on hard and found the challenge just about right - I enjoyed the boss fights a lot although they weren't too difficult.

No bugs really, there's some animation and texture jank but it didn't get in the way of my enjoyment at all. For me it's just below Control in my GOTY ranking, because it's less original and distinctive mostly.

Yesterday I finished my game review on SWJ:FO after 25 hours of gameplay, here are my topline thoughts:

1. The game genre is action-adventure and it's much more ACTION than adventure.

2. There are "lite-features" of customization and RPG.

3. It perfectly recreates what's being a Jedi, sometimes I felt being in the movies living the adventure as one.

4. Character evolution is bonded to story missions.

5. There are small bugs and it crashed twice in 25 hours of gameplay.

6. This is possibly one of the games I had the most fun playing in 2019.

The game is simply underwhelming. A legion of small bugs, clunky movement, poor game mechanics and a banal story premise, fleshed out solely by some mediocre character development/interaction. Not a bad game, but it mostly gets by purely on the fact that it is a single-player Star Wars action game and we haven't had any of those in ages.

I am on the last boss and wanted to chime in again and say that I'm really hating every second of my engagement with this game. The combat feels weird and frustrating; the entire gauntlet leading up to the final segment is full of enemies at weird distances attacking in ways that leave you no time to combat them, the parry windows are bizarre and it's never quite clear what's just a lightsaber animation going through your skull and what is actually a hitbox, enemies don't seem to have any intelligent behaviours and instead just pick moves at random regardless of your distance or engagement with them. I fired Sekiro back up after six months or so of pause and I beat Owl on my second try, and just ran around that world picking fights and killing people. This game would have been a thousand times better as a linear action game instead of the weird grab-bag of hot game mechanics that it actually is. The best moments are the cutscenes, and they feel way too sparse when you're tasked with running around the world collecting ponchos and palette swaps.

Fallen Order is an exercise in tedium.

I'd be interested in seeing what this game looks like in 6 months or so. Besides the large variety of horrible performance issues and bugs, the parry needs to be fixed, straight up. The lag on it makes it feel like shit, even when you do it right. This is especially apparent when you try to parry the dual-wield enemies like you would fast attacks in Sekiro. Most of the time it doesn't work, and even when you do account for the lag it still feels like garbage.

Sekiro coming out earlier this year really highlights the massive difference in quality between the two, in terms of gameplay, mechanics and level design. I'm not saying other developers need to be held to the incredibly high standard Fromsoft is, but my god it's just painfully obvious how much worse it is. The recent beta for Nioh 2 also paints this game in a bad light in comparison.

The fact that this is an actual single-player Star Wars game that isn't lousy with microtransactions, and having a competent narrative, are basically the only things holding it up.

I played for a bit when it came out but decided to put it to the side until a few patches were released. In the meantime I played, beat, and thoroughly enjoyed The Surge 2.

I then went back to Fallen Order and immediately wanted to go back to The Surge 2. Exploring isn’t good; there’s too much platforming, especially the downhill parts, and the collectibles are underwhelming.

As others have mentioned, there’s lag in the combat and animal enemies feel like they’re from a different game. Your character also moves too slow and your dodge is too short.

Maybe I’ll come around but I don’t know. I just got to a point on the return to Kashyyyk where the game throws three big ass arachnids at you along with a sheep slug and they all bull rush you. Taking that into account with the above mentioned issues and it just felt tedious.

Update: Ok, I got further in where you get some more upgrades and the story picks up and am enjoying it more. Fighting the animals is still the weakest part of the game (aside the game’s streaming issues) but I’m having a much better time than before.