Jedi: Fallen Order. Finally a “Dark Souls” type game I can enjoy.

Joshua Birk
3 min readJan 6, 2020

When Dark Souls first came out, I was a huge fanboy. It was that game I wouldn’t stop trying to get other people to play. It was a unique and thoughtful approach to the action RPG genre — which is a genre which can definitely use some shaking up from time to time.

Fast forward to today and pretty much once I’ve read how much a game is “Souls-esque” or whatever term meant to say it’s pretty much a Dark Souls clone (I’ve also seen Soulsbourne tossed around) … I give it a pass. I’ve tried the Souls series, I’ve tried Bloodbourne, I tried the Surge … and I’ve quit every one after the early titles.

That isn’t to say they aren’t good games. It’s just once the novelty of having to be meticulous about combat or face severe consequences wore off … I realized it’s not a mechanic I enjoy. I enjoy the exploratory nature of the game, but when I turn a corner and see some buffed up monster waiting for me I just hate thinking about how many times I’ll have to fight them to move on. The repetition really kills the joy for me.

That brings us to Jedi: Fallen Order, which the reviews described as something like a Soulsbourne game but everything else was getting great feedback so I decided to risk it.

But that risk was mitigated by reading about one of the core things that I think all of these style of games should employ: a solid difficulty setting. If you just want to be a Jedi and play the story Respawn put together, you can do that and avoid all the Soulsbourne mechanics. If you are like me and appreciate the genre but don’t want to get clubbed over the head with it, normal mode will make combat challenging but also often something you can just brute force through. And if you’re a fan of the mechanics, you can ratchet up the difficulty and go at it.

Additionally, Fallen Order is very respectful of the amount of time you spend gathering up XP. If you lose it in combat, you can get it back by just hitting the offending creature once. The is aided by the fact that the map structure and checkpoints makes it so you’re unlikely to go far to do that. Plus, NPC’s only respawn when you re-enter a map, so you aren’t constantly redoing huge portions of game play. Run back, bop the thing that killed you, figure out how to do it better.

And everything about the game is just so well done: the writing, the voice acting, the combat mechanics, the level design. When Respawn was announced, I was deeply suspicious of what Titanfall would look like. Infinity Ward had introduced mechanics into Call of Duty which had really soured the franchise for me. Killstreaks was a big one … the idea that the people doing the best on a server should get huge abilities to do way better just never worked for me. But then Titanfall came out and I loved it, and the sequel, and Apex Legends proved to be a seriously smart battle royale game and now we are here.

Respawn has shown that they aren’t just out to make games based on popular trends, they’ve shown they understand and can improve on those trends. It’s particularly impressive that they do this with both multiplayer and singleplayer concepts … most studios can barely succeed at both at the same time, much less iterate well on them.

Well done, Respawn. Keep it up.

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Joshua Birk

Gamer, polyglot developer and wrangler of strings and cats.