Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Review: The Perfect Padawan's Pilot

A New Hope for Star Wars Games

There is a specific sound that does something to anyone who grew up on these films: the low electric snap of a lightsaber igniting. For the better part of two decades, Star Wars games kept fumbling that sound. You were either an unstoppable god mowing down a hundred stormtroopers without breaking a sweat, or you were stuck in a clunky shooter where the Force felt like a gimmick bolted onto a gun.

Then, in 2019, Respawn Entertainment did the thing nobody had managed in years. With Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, they made the lightsaber feel like the single most dangerous weapon in the galaxy — and then made the person holding it feel vulnerable, human, and very much killable.

At Dadnology, this is a flat 10/10. And I want to be clear up front about something the saga review only hinted at: Fallen Order is my favourite of the two Jedi games. The bigger, flashier sequel does more, but it never recaptures the thing this first game gets exactly right. So before we get to Survivor and its five combat stances and its garden-tending hub world, we need to talk about why the original is the better adventure.

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Cal Kestis and the Weight of Order 66

The heart of Fallen Order is a scared young man hiding in plain sight.

When we meet Cal Kestis, he is not a Jedi Master. He is a scrapper on Bracca, a graveyard planet where decommissioned Venator-class Star Destroyers are torn apart for salvage. He survived Order 66, the moment the Republic’s clone army turned on the Jedi and wiped most of them out, and he has spent years suppressing his connection to the Force because using it is a death sentence.

Then he slips up, the Empire notices, and the hiding is over.

What makes this premise work is how grounded it is. Cal is not chosen, prophesied, or destined. He is a kid with PTSD and a half-finished apprenticeship, learning to be a Jedi from the wreckage of an order that no longer exists. His flashbacks to his master, Jaro Tapal, are some of the most affecting moments in any Star Wars game — they frame the Jedi not as distant monks but as teachers and father figures, which is a register that lands very differently when you have kids of your own.

This is the purest expression of what Respawn was going for: a tight, personal story about a boy finding his footing in a galaxy that actively wants him dead. There is no resistance to lead yet, no grand war to win. Just survival, and slowly, the courage to stop running.

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The Combat: A Lightsaber That Can Actually Hurt You

The most striking decision Respawn made was to make Fallen Order genuinely demanding.

The Soulslike Backbone

The game borrows openly from the Dark Souls school of design. Combat is about posture, parrying, and timing, not mashing. Block too early and you eat a hit; parry at the right frame and you stagger your opponent and open them up. Die, and you drop your accumulated experience at the spot you fell — you have to fight your way back and land a hit on whatever killed you to reclaim it.

You rest and save only at Meditation Points, and resting respawns every enemy in the area. That sounds punishing on paper, but in practice it turns every encounter into a real duel. When you square off against an Inquisitor or a Purge Trooper, you are not clicking — you are reading their tells, waiting for the opening, and committing. It gives the lightsaber weight and consequence. A single saber, in this game, is terrifying.

Fair, Never Cheap

The challenge is calibrated, not cruel. Fallen Order ships with four difficulty settings, and you can change them mid-game. You can widen the parry window, soften incoming damage, and tone down enemy aggression — or leave it all on and earn every kill. This is the single best concession to the dad schedule in the whole genre: had a brutal day, just want to live the fantasy? Dial it down. Want your reflexes tested at midnight? Crank it up. Either way the game respects your time.

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BD-1: The Best Droid Since R2-D2

Every great Star Wars story needs a droid, and BD-1 is one of the franchise’s best.

He clings to Cal’s back, chirps with genuine personality, and serves a dozen mechanical purposes at once: he’s your map, your stim dispenser, your scanner, and your hacking tool. But what makes him special is emotional, not functional. He hops onto Cal’s shoulder, reacts to the environment, and slowly becomes the relationship that anchors the entire game. By the end, BD-1 is the reason a few story beats hit as hard as they do.

He is the warmth that keeps Fallen Order’s darker, post-Purge tone from ever tipping into grim. That balance — heavy themes, charming companion — is exactly what the best Star Wars has always done.

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Exploration: A Galaxy Worth Getting Lost In

Fallen Order is a Metroidvania, and a tight one. You land on a planet, spot a door you can’t open or a ledge you can’t reach, and file it away — knowing you’ll return later with a new Force ability or traversal power that finally cracks it.

The Zeffo Tombs

The standout is the planet Zeffo and its ancient tombs, which feel like Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones relocated to a galaxy far, far away. These are real puzzle-boxes: rolling spheres, shifting walls, wind tunnels, and physics gizmos that ask you to actually think. It’s a kind of design that mostly vanished from the sequel’s more open layout, and it’s a big part of why the first game feels more deliberate and crafted.

Echoes of the Force

Exploration isn’t just about loot, though finding a new poncho, lightsaber part, or crystal colour is always a small thrill. It’s about Force echoes — narrative fragments scattered through the world that tell you about the people who lived and died in these places. A frightened stormtrooper writing home, a Jedi who hid an artifact before the Purge. This environmental storytelling makes the galaxy feel haunted and lived-in rather than just a series of arenas.

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Why Fallen Order Beats Its Own Sequel

This is the part I care about most, so let me be direct: of the two Jedi games, Fallen Order is the one I’d hand a friend first — and the one I’d replay.

Survivor is a technical marvel with more of everything: more stances, more customization, more world, a sprawling hub planet in Koboh you can settle into. On a feature checklist, it wins. But “more” is not the same as “better,” and a few things tilt the scale decisively toward the original.

The first reason is the freshness of discovery. The first time you wall-run, the first time you Force-pull a stormtrooper off a ledge, the first time BD-1 unlocks a door — those firsts only happen once. Fallen Order is built entirely around that wonder. The sequel, by design, can’t surprise you the same way, because you already know how to be Cal Kestis.

The second is pacing. Fallen Order is a focused 18-to-25-hour adventure with a clean dramatic arc — escape, train, search, confront, decide. Nothing overstays its welcome. Survivor is bigger, but bigger brings padding: side content that dilutes the throughline, a hub world that slows the momentum. The original moves with purpose.

The third is the crafted feel. Those Zeffo tomb puzzles, the linear-but-dense Metroidvania loops — they feel hand-built. The sequel trades some of that intentionality for openness, and something gets lost in the swap.

None of this is a knock on Survivor, which is also outstanding. It’s simply that Fallen Order feels like a long-lost Star Wars film from the era of the originals — a tight, cinematic, 20-hour experience with a beginning, middle, and end. That purity is worth more to me than any amount of extra content.

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A Love Letter to the Original Trilogy

If you grew up on the first three films, Fallen Order is a homecoming.

Respawn nailed the “used future” aesthetic that defined the originals: scuffed, grimy, lived-in. Bracca is a literal Star Destroyer graveyard. Kashyyyk is a vertical Wookiee jungle groaning under Imperial occupation. Dathomir is all bone-white mist and Nightsister dread. Every texture, from the wear on BD-1’s chassis to the industrial hum of Imperial machinery, feels authentic to the universe rather than glossily reinvented.

The score by Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab deserves its own paragraph. It sounds exactly like John Williams while still carving out its own identity, swelling at the right moments and going quiet when the story needs room to breathe. The first time the main motif kicks in as Cal squares up for a duel, it’s pure goosebumps.

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The Dadnology Perspective: One More Meditation Point

As dads, we love Star Wars but rarely have a five-hour evening to sink into a grinding RPG. Fallen Order fits the schedule better than almost anything.

The Ritual of the Meditation Point

The Meditation Points double as a natural stopping ritual. You reach one, you rest, you save. “I’ll just get to the next Meditation Point” is the Star Wars equivalent of “one more chapter” — a clean way to slot a session into a busy life. Because resting respawns enemies, there’s a small risk-reward tension that keeps you sharp without ever wasting your time.

The Watch-Along Factor

If you’ve got kids who love The Mandalorian or Clone Wars, they’ll happily watch you play this. It’s cinematic, heroic, and the violence is Star Wars violence — lightsabers and droids, no gore. It earns its T rating honestly and is genuinely fine to have on while a ten-year-old looks over your shoulder. It’s a lovely way to share the lore one evening at a time.

The Setup

On a PlayStation 5 , the DualSense haptics let you feel the saber hum in your palms and the resistance of a Force Push in the triggers. Add a decent gaming headset and the spatial audio becomes a real combat tool — you’ll hear a Purge Trooper closing in before you see them. This is a game worth giving good hardware.

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The Honest Nitpicks

A 10/10 here means perfect for what it set out to do — not a flawless object. And Fallen Order has rough edges worth naming.

The biggest is navigation. The Metroidvania backtracking is mostly satisfying, but the holo-map is genuinely confusing. It’s a chunky 3D model that’s hard to read at a glance, and more than once I wandered in circles trying to find the one unlit path forward. A clearer map would have smoothed out some real friction.

There’s also the launch-era technical jank. At release, Fallen Order shipped with stutters, texture pop-in, and the odd crash, particularly on base consoles. Patches and current-gen hardware have largely tidied this up, but it’s part of the game’s history and worth knowing if you’re playing an older version. The occasional janky platforming hitbox can still snag you, too — a couple of deaths will feel like the game’s fault, not yours.

None of it dents the experience enough to matter. But honesty is the house style, and a great game with a bad map is still a great game with a bad map.

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FAQ

Should I play Fallen Order or Jedi: Survivor first?

Play Fallen Order first, always. It’s the first chapter of Cal Kestis’ story and Survivor assumes you already know it. It’s also my favourite of the two: tighter, more focused, and full of the freshness of discovery the bigger sequel can never quite recapture. Start here.

Is Fallen Order too hard for a non-Souls player?

No. It borrows soulslike ideas, but the four difficulty settings let you dial down parry windows, incoming damage, and enemy aggression at any time. You can play it purely for the story or crank it up for a serious challenge — you control the Force.

Do I need to know the animated shows to enjoy it?

Not at all. Fallen Order explains Order 66 and the Jedi Purge cleanly on its own. But if you’ve watched Clone Wars or Rebels, the lore and a few cameos hit much harder.

How long does Fallen Order take to beat?

The main story runs a tight 18 to 25 hours, with a little more if you chase collectibles and Force echoes. That focused length is a big part of why it works so well for a busy dad schedule.

Is Fallen Order okay for kids to watch?

It’s rated T for Teen and is reasonably family-friendly to watch. The violence is Star Wars violence — lightsabers and droids, no gore. Older kids who love The Mandalorian will happily watch you play.