Awakening

Respawn channels the greats of Japanese action to deliver, at last, a Star Wars game worthy of the name

- Nathan Brown

There is nothing so satisfying in games as a perfectly timed parry. Anticipation, reaction, execution; defense turned into attack, momentum reversed in an instant. It is everything we love about action games distilled into a single button press: high risk and high reward, a move that makes you feel like a god when it comes off and might just kill you if you get it wrong. It’s a surprising foundation for a Star Wars game, but there’s a lot that’s unexpected about Jedi: Fallen Order. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Respawn Entertainment’s first foray into the action-adventure genre would be a straightforward linear romp and that its hack-and-slash combat would be an expression of the Jedi power fantasy, the protagonist cutting an easy swathe through all before him. Yet this planet-hopping, nonlinear adventure shares a level-design ethos with the likes of Metroid and Dark Souls. There are rest points that respawn enemies and refill your limited stock of healing items, levels that corkscrew back on themselves through ingenious shortcuts, and new abilities that open up pathways to previously inaccessible areas. And in combat? Over the course of our 45-minute demo, we die more times than we can count.

Little of this was apparent in Fallen Order’s formal unveiling during EA Play, its publisher’s E3 spin-off that takes place a few days before the show proper. The demo sells it as precisely the sort of linear action-adventure you might expect: Uncharted with a lightsaber, or Tomb Raider with Force powers. In combat, the game is simply being played too well. It all looks too easy. Behind closed doors at E3 a few days later, we discover the reality is very different. An extended, wave-based gauntlet intended as a combat tutorial instead shows us all the ways in which it is possible to die.