Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Review - 5 Ups & 3 Downs

3. It Finds The Perfect Mix Between Empowering And Challenging The Player

There's been a trend with a lot of licensed games over the last two console generations where those kinds of games never really prize difficulty as an asset. Most of the time that's because developers are more concerned with empowering players with specific roles; Batman: Arkham has Bat-fans become the Dark Knight by giving them an invulnerable skill-set, while The Force Unleashed put players in the shoes of a ludicrously powerful dark Jedi a year earlier.

These approaches are fine in and of themselves, but they do lose something without that element of challenge. Fallen Order manages to find the right balance between the two, by placing the player in the shoes of a Padawan who lost their master, and who is still learning how to be a Jedi Knight in a now unforgiving galaxy.

Confrontations require patience, and it's likely that most players will fail several times before they finish the story even on the default difficulty. But that's really quite refreshing, with the more considered approach to combat only lending itself well to the Star Wars IP, and in a way, the 'Jedi way' with which audiences are already so familiar.

Fallen Order's bosses are also brilliant to come up against. They're big, cinematic and challenging in all the right ways - even if it is frustrating when you die and miss out on an optional encounter.