They retracted their faux pas so we should retract our negative reviews

There are only two things carrying this game: a strong IP and graphical prowess. The game is visually impressive, and the Star Wars universe is immersive as always. However, that is all that I can say positively about Fallen Order.

I'll start with my biggest grievance: the level design is horrible and frustrating. To be clear, the worlds are beautiful but traversing the world is difficult, confusing, and often aggravatingly complex. Throughout the game, you visit several planets with varying sizes. Each world uses a "path and tunnel" design, meaning it’s not truly an open world but rather "open exploration" with only a few routes to get between major areas. This by itself is fine. Games such as Tomb Raider (2016) and God of War (2018) use this type of level design exceedingly well. It is a good balance between open-world design and linear story design. However, Fallen Order falls short by implementing one-way traversal paths EVERYWHERE. This means that if you make one wrong turn, you must go all the way back around to get back where you started. This is only made worse by the awful menu map that is hard to read and provides no waypoints or pathfinding to help you traverse. It is infuriating to think you are going the right way only to go down a one-way ice slide and find you have to spend 5 minutes to get back to where you were supposed to go. By far the worst planet is Zeffo which has a significantly larger level than all the other planets. It is maze-like and getting back to the ship after a mission is a mission in itself.

Zeffo having the significantly larger level raises the question of if Respawn Entertainment got over-ambitious with this planet only to realize it wasn’t possible to make the remaining planets as vast in later development. But I cannot complain because if all the planets were as maze-like as Zeffo, the game would be unplayable.
Moving on from level design, the concept of playing as a Jedi is hard to ♥♥♥♥ up. It checks all the boxes for novel gameplay, interesting characters, and satisfying combat. However, Respawn misses the mark with satisfying combat. Watching the gameplay of Fallen Order looks great and seems to represent the combat of a Jedi well. But when you pick up the controller (or mouse and keyboard) it doesn’t feel as good in the hand. The controls are sluggish, and the response time of Cal is slow between button presses and actions on screen. Almost every encounter with an enemy ends with me swinging at the air because I hit the attack button before the enemy died but it took so long for the action to register that the Storm Trooper is already dead from my last swing. It really diminishes the satisfaction as it loses the sense of precision and patience that is expected of a Jedi.

Finally, my last comment for this review (but far from my last issue with the game) is Fallen Order just feels too short. And it is important to recognize that it FEELS too short. The actual playtime is irrelevant because many games have average completion times of under 4 hours and they feel complete and fulfilling. The issue with Fallen Order is both that AAA games are expected to be longer (especially for the price) and that the pacing of the game makes you think it SHOULD BE longer. There was a bittersweet moment when the credits rolled because it felt like they could have offered much more but I was so happy to be done with the god-awful, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, absolute dog water of level design Respawn had the audacity to present the world.

1/15 STORY
🔲No story
🔲 Not main aspect
🔲 Bad story
✅ Average
🔲 Good
🔲 It'll replace your life

2/15 GAMEPLAY
🔲 Lifeless/static
🔲 Poor UI
✅ Average
🔲 Good
🔲 Excellent

3/15 DIFFICULTY
🔲 Playing asleep
🔲 Some brain usage
✅ Easy to learn / Hard to master
🔲 Difficult
🔲 Dark Souls

4/15 GRIND
✅ Nothing to grind
🔲 Isn't necessary to progress
🔲 Average grind level
🔲 Only if you care about leaderboards/ranks
🔲 Too much grind

5/15 GAME TIME / REPLAYABILITY
🔲 Long enough for a cup of coffee
✅ Short
🔲 Average
🔲 Long
🔲 To infinity and beyond

6/15 MULTIPLAYER
✅ No multiplayer
🔲 Trashy servers
🔲 Some hiccups
🔲 Smooth and pleasant experience
🔲 Co-op
🔲 PvP
✅ PvE

7/15 GRAPHICS
🔲 Stuck in the last century
🔲 Low Effort
🔲 Average
🔲 Good
✅ Excellent

8/15 AUDIO
🔲 Terrible
🔲 Bad
🔲 Not too bad
✅ Good
🔲 Excellent

9/15 AUDIENCE
🔲 Kids
🔲 Teens
🔲 Adults
✅ Everyone

10/15 PC REQUIREMENTS
🔲 Potato
✅ Decent
🔲 Fast
🔲 High-end
🔲 Bleeding Edge

11/15 PRICE
🔲 It's free!
🔲 Not recommended
✅ Wait for sale
🔲 Worth the price
🔲 Best investment ever done

12/15 FREQUENT UPDATES
✅ Abandoned
🔲 Last year
🔲 Once every year
🔲 A couple per year
🔲 Every week

13/15 BUGS / CRASHES
🔲 None / Not discovered
✅ Minor bugs
🔲 Can get annoying
🔲 Frequent crashes
🔲 Complete mess

14/15 MISC
🔲 Steam Workshop
✅ Steam Trading Cards
✅ Steam Achievements
✅ Content for Steam Points Shop

15/15 VERDICT
🔲 Recommended
✅ Not recommended