Jedi: Fallen Order

The Empire Won. Now What.

When Respawn Entertainment pivoted from its multiplayer roots to deliver a single-player Star Wars story, the skepticism was reasonable. The result surprised a lot of people. Jedi: Fallen Order arrived as one of the more structurally ambitious Star Wars games in years, borrowing confidently from the soulslike and metroidvania playbooks without fully committing to either.

The combat asks for patience. Parries, force powers, and lightsaber stances combine into a system that punishes button-mashing and rewards reading enemy rhythms. The level design, built around a small set of planets you revisit as new abilities unlock, gives the exploration a satisfying density.

The Experience

You play as Cal Kestrel, a young Padawan who survived Order 66 by hiding his abilities and working as a scrapper. The story pulls him back into the open, hunted by the Inquisitors, searching for a way to rebuild the Jedi Order. The tone sits somewhere between hopeful and genuinely bleak, which is rarer in Star Wars than it should be.

The game stands alone in the timeline, set between the prequel and original trilogies, and requires no prior knowledge of the expanded universe to follow. A direct sequel, Jedi: Survivor, continues Cal's story.

Who Should Play This

The main story runs roughly fifteen to twenty hours depending on how much exploration you pursue. Multiple difficulty settings make the soulslike-adjacent combat accessible even to players unfamiliar with the genre. If you bounced off Dark Souls but still want something with mechanical weight, this sits comfortably in that middle ground.