Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order — the soulslike with a lightsaber

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order came out on 15 November 2019, made by Respawn Entertainment — the Titanfall studio, not a reference to this desk’s name, though the coincidence amuses me every time I write it down — and published by Electronic Arts for PS4, Xbox One and PC. It’s set roughly five years after Order 66, the purge that ended the Jedi Order in Revenge of the Sith, and it casts you as Cal Kestis, a former Padawan who has spent the intervening years hiding as a scrapper on the junkyard planet Bracca, using none of his training, until an Imperial Inquisitor called the Second Sister spots him using the Force to save a friend’s life and the chase begins.

The bonfire without the punishment

The genre Respawn borrowed from is obvious within the first hour: meditation points that double as save stations, skill trees and fast travel hubs; enemies that respawn when you rest at one; a held pool of experience that drops at your death location and has to be walked back to before a second death erases it for good. That’s Dark Souls’ save-and-recover loop transplanted almost structurally intact, and it’s worth being precise about what Respawn changed rather than just noting the resemblance, because the changes are the whole personality of the game.

Souls games make recovering your dropped currency a genuine gamble — you’re walking back through the enemies that just killed you, at reduced strength, with no guarantee you’ll make it. Fallen Order’s version is gentler almost everywhere: meditation points are dense enough that the walk back rarely crosses more than a screen or two of space, enemies you’ve already thinned out on the way in often don’t fully reset, and the actual experience currency buys a comparatively shallow, mostly cosmetic-adjacent skill tree rather than the raw stat power a Souls build depends on. Losing it stings less because there’s less riding on it. That’s not laziness on Respawn’s part — it’s a considered choice to keep a mainstream Star Wars license’s difficulty legible to players who’ve never touched Dark Souls, while still giving series veterans the shape of the ritual they recognise.

Parry as the whole combat identity

The lightsaber combat is built around a stamina-lite block-and-parry system closer to Sekiro than to the stamina-management of core Souls — you can hold block indefinitely against light attacks, but a well-timed parry on a heavy swing staggers an enemy and opens a punish window, and most boss fights are, underneath their spectacle, a lesson in reading one or two specific tells. Force powers arrive slowly and deliberately: Push and Pull first, a slow-time Force Slow later, each one doubling as a traversal key as much as a combat tool — Push clears a ledge of debris as readily as it knocks an enemy off a cliff.

That traversal is the other genre Fallen Order is quietly running: a Metroidvania. Planets aren’t single-visit levels but hub spaces you return to once you’ve unlocked wall-running, double jump or the ability to climb specific surfaces, each new traversal tool unlocking a shortcut or a sealed vault you noticed on your first pass and couldn’t reach. Bracca, Zeffo, Kashyyyk and Dathomir are built with that backtrack explicitly in mind, in the same way the soulslike genre broadly treats its world as a single folded object rather than a sequence of levels — Fallen Order’s version of that fold is just gentler, more clearly signposted, less likely to leave you genuinely lost.

BD-1, Cal’s little astromech companion, is doing more design work than a cute sidekick usually gets asked to do. He’s the game’s save-file voice, chirping a tone when you’re near a meditation point; he’s the scanning tool that highlights climbable surfaces and lore entries; and late in the game he becomes the literal key to a specific late-game vault puzzle, decoding a language only he can read. Respawn clearly understood that a solo protagonist wandering dead alien ruins for forty hours needs something to react to on-screen, and BD-1’s beeped commentary — translated for the player only through Cal’s responses, never subtitled directly — is a cheap, effective way to keep a mostly silent traversal puzzle feeling inhabited rather than sterile.

The planets as a design essay

Each of the four main worlds is doing a distinct job rather than repeating the same biome with new dressing. Zeffo is the puzzle planet — ancient, extinct Force-sensitive civilisation, its ruins built around rotating platforms and light-bridges that require you to solve environmental logic before you’re allowed to fight anything. Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld, folds a small-scale Imperial occupation story into its level design, with Wookiee resistance fighters you can free acting as the planet’s version of side content. Dathomir is the horror planet, home to the Nightsisters, deliberately the most vertically disorientating and visually hostile of the four, its critical path gated behind Force abilities you won’t have unlocked on your first visit — a soft lock the game uses to teach you that this is a world you’re meant to leave and come back to, rather than one you failed to solve. That range, four planets each built to argue a different design point, is the strongest evidence that Respawn understood the Metroidvania shape they were building in, even where the combat underneath it stays comparatively simple.

The honest case against it

The combat, for all its Sekiro borrowing, never develops the depth its ancestor has. Parry timing windows are generous, enemy movesets are relatively small, and the game rarely demands the frame-perfect precision that makes Sekiro’s bosses feel like a duel rather than a pattern to memorise. Nioh 2 has three stances and a ki-pulse system layered under a similar parry core that gives high-level play somewhere to go; Fallen Order’s combat plateaus once you’ve learned the parry window, because there’s no second system underneath it rewarding further mastery. It’s an entry point into the soulslike shape of things, not a destination for someone who already lives in that genre.

The launch build also shipped rough. Frame-rate drops on base PS4 and Xbox One, load-time stutters and the odd game-breaking save corruption were common enough in the first weeks that Respawn spent months patching a game that had clearly needed another few in the oven — a familiar EA-adjacent story of a release date locked to a marketing calendar rather than to the state of the build. And structurally, the back half of the campaign leans on padding you can see the seams of: a late-game fetch sequence retreading Zeffo’s ice caves adds runtime without adding a new idea, at exactly the point a tighter edit would have served the story better.

The skill tree suffers from a related problem: it’s structured in five branches — Survival, Skirmish, Force, Lightsaber and Deflection — but a huge share of the nodes are marginal percentage buffs to damage or health rather than the kind of tool-unlocking choice that makes Souls levelling or Nioh’s stance mastery feel consequential. You’ll fill most of the tree over a single playthrough simply by playing the campaign at a normal pace, which means the “skill tree” reads less like a build you’re choosing and more like a checklist the game is ticking off on your behalf. A game this committed to borrowing Souls’ save-and-recover ritual might have borrowed its build-defining levelling too, rather than settling for a progress bar dressed as one.

Boss variety is the last soft spot. Several of the game’s toughest fights are rematches against the same handful of Purge Trooper and Inquisitor archetypes with slightly different colour palettes and slightly faster tells, which works once or twice as a callback to how far you’ve improved since an earlier defeat, and reads as a shortage of new content by the third or fourth repeat. The genuinely unique bosses — the Ninth Sister, the wall-crawling Gorgara, the final confrontation with Trilla — are where the combat system is doing its best work; the palette-swapped rematches are where it’s coasting.

Where it sits

Fallen Order works best read as a translation project — taking systems the soulslike genre spent a decade refining and porting them into a big-budget, story-forward, single-protagonist Star Wars game without losing the shape of what made them work. It sits closer to the accessible end of that spectrum than Nioh 2 or the genre’s own namesake, and it’s honest about that trade rather than pretending to a difficulty it doesn’t commit to. Its sequel, Jedi: Survivor, is the more ambitious game mechanically; Fallen Order is the better argument for why the formula travels.

That distinction matters for a franchise with as mixed a video game history as Star Wars has. The license had spent most of the previous decade in EA’s hands producing multiplayer shooters and a cancelled open-world project, with barely a single-player campaign of any ambition released between Knights of the Old Republic II in 2004 and this one. Fallen Order’s real achievement isn’t inventing anything — every system in it has a clearly identifiable ancestor — it’s proving that a mainstream licensed game could commit fully to a genre this demanding without EA softening it into a cover shooter or a live-service grind, and that commitment is what let a much stranger, more confident sequel get greenlit at all.

Spoilers below

The Holocron Cal and Cere are chasing turns out to hold the names and locations of Force-sensitive children across the galaxy, meant to rebuild the Jedi Order — and Cere, having once betrayed a fellow Jedi under torture during the Purge, ultimately chooses to destroy the Holocron rather than let it fall into Imperial hands and repeat that betrayal at galactic scale. The Second Sister is revealed late in the game to be Trilla, Cere’s former Padawan, twisted by Vader’s inquisition into becoming the very weapon Cere fears; killing her is framed less as a boss-fight victory than as Cere finally reckoning with the consequence of her own past failure, which is a heavier emotional beat than the combat systems around it usually get credit for setting up.