Conclusion

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the first single-player-focused Star Wars game in a long time. Developer Respawn has taken inspiration from several "Souls-like" titles, but ensured the game can still be appreciated by the masses. At the beginning of the game, you get to choose between several difficulty options which are explained reasonably well. There's also a "just the story" mode, which makes combat quite easy—good for people with limited video game experience who are still interested in experiencing the Star Wars story—very important in my opinion. The higher difficulty settings are challenging, similar to what we saw in Sekiro, but definitely not as unforgiving as in other titles.

The story of Fallen Order is interesting and well integrated with the epic Star Wars cannon. There are a few minor references to characters from the movies, nothing life-changing, though. The first mission, which also serves as an introduction to the controls, is fast-paced and full of action, almost like scenes from Call of Duty. It reels you in and makes you gasp for more "Star Wars". Later parts of the game are slower-paced, especially with the introduction of puzzles and exploration, which isn't a bad thing. The puzzles are varied in style and can easily be solved with a little bit of thinking. Exploration reminded me a bit of Resident Evil, or Sekiro, where you open up shortcuts to travel back to save points, so you don't have to smash through hordes of enemies over and over again. Inspired by Souls-games is the campfire concept, which lets you rest at spots scattered throughout the world, but enemies will respawn. You do have the choice to save or manage skills without healing, so enemies won't respawn. There is no fast travel in the game; after a map is complete, you do have to walk back a bit. This is simplified a great deal by one of the best map implementations I've ever seen. A 3D model of the level shows you exactly where you are—it can be zoomed and rotated. Quest objectives and interesting paths are marked automatically.

There is no crafting in the game, and the loot from chests feels like it was tacked on to the finished game just to tick off another check box. There are no weapons or armor to find in chests, just cosmetic items that let you change your lightsaber visuals. Gunplay is very good, especially with a gamepad. Well, it's not only "guns" but also your lightsaber—the moves are great, beautifully animated; they almost make you feel like a Jedi. Keyboard controls are a little bit clunky, especially dodge bound to the Y key is hard to use. Level design reminded me of Tomb Raider and God of War with some Prince of Persia sprinkled in. You can fall off cliffs—I am so thankful that these don't kill your character. Exploration is fun because you can freely jump around without having to go through hordes of enemies again. Also, it makes life easier for me because sometimes, I'm just too clumsy and fall down in random spots, which usually kind of sucks in a Souls-like game.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order uses Unreal Engine 4 with the DirectX 11 API. Looking at our screenshots, I have to say these graphics are good, especially the Star Wars related content is modeled very nicely. Major characters have great models, but side-characters and NPCs are strictly okay. In terms of eye-candy, textures are crisp most of the time, and lighting effects sometimes look like what RTX is promising us. Just to be clear, there is no real-time raytracing here. Most lighting is pre-baked thanks to Unreal Engine's versatility. A bunch of light sources are dynamic, and shadows do look fine. Overall, I would say these graphics are "good" for 2019, definitely not as nice as what we've seen in Gears 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2, but the hardware requirements of Fallen Order are more reasonable, too. Just like in most other Unreal Engine games, there's some pop-in, even at the highest "view distance" setting. It's not that bad, though—you almost have to look for it.

The number of settings to adjust is surprisingly low for an Unreal Engine game. You basically get the usual monitor settings and a bunch of presets that control six options, like "shadows", "textures", "draw distance", "texture quality", and "effects". It's nice that we are able to turn off motion blur for gameplay—it is always on in real-time rendered cutscenes. Other distracting effects can be disabled, too. Unfortunately, there's no way to adjust field of view. While mostly fine, I would have preferred it slightly less narrow. There's some situations where a wider camera angle would be nice, but these mostly seem to be oversights in level design/camera interaction—nothing game breaking. For me, the game did crash relatively often; I would say once every 90 minutes, so make sure you do hit every campfire even if it's just for the autosave.

Benchmarking was problematic because the game uses EA's version of Denuvo which requires reactivation for every hardware change, including for the GPUs. On Steam, you can swap graphics cards as often as you want without reactivation. The problem is that Origin only gives you four activations per 24 hours (yes, not five, I tested). In order to get at least a handful of cards into our comparisons, I grabbed a second Origin Premier subscription, which at $15 per month is the most affordable way to check out this game.

Update Nov 16, 7pm CET: Added a few more test results with more graphicscards.

Our performance numbers show good FPS results for both AMD and NVIDIA hardware. For example, for 1080p at 60 FPS, a Radeon RX 590 is sufficient. At 1440p, you'll be covered by the Vega 64 or a RTX 2060. For 4K Ultra HD gaming at 60 frames per second a RTX 2080 Ti is required, though. This is at the highest "Epic" settings. There's two more choices, "High" and "Medium". No idea why there is no "Low" option as that would be important for gamers with weaker hardware.

In terms of optimization, NVIDIA does a bit better than AMD. Within NVIDIA, Turing does have a slight performance advantage over Pascal, which to me looks like Turing's concurrent FP+INT execution at work rather than NVIDIA neglecting Pascal. On the AMD side, the aging Polaris architecture does better than Vega and Navi, which I find surprising. Especially the relatively low performance of the RX 5700 XT hints that AMD didn't spend too much time optimizing for the game. Both companies released game-ready drivers yesterday, right on time for the world-wide launch.

Overall, I found Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order an extremely entertaining game that is more approachable than other Souls-like games and benefits immensely from the Star Wars backstory. I'm not 100% convinced the game is worth it at full price because replayability seems low. According to sources online, a single playthrough will last you between 10 and 30 hours. Thank to EA's Origin Access Premier, you are able to play the game at a relatively low price, and you get access to other titles, too. Just make sure you don't forget to cancel your subscription after you're finished with the game.