On top of being the best Star Wars game in a long time, Fallen Order is an amazing game in its own right and deserves to be played by all gamers, even those who aren't hardcore fans of the source material. Incredible blend of Uncharted-style platforming, Dark Souls-lite combat, and Metroidvania exploration. Story is well told with likable characters, areas to explore are stunning, and gameplay is addicting. Only thing stopping it from a perfect score is the lack of fast travel post-game. Throughout the main story the lack of fast travel is totally fine as the level design is spectacular on your story-driven visits to planets, but going back to clean up collectibles is a slow and daunting nightmare due to the sheer size of the maps.
With the exception of some tedious gamification (manually opening doors and flipping pages), Erica is a perfect FMV game with an excellent story, likable characters, intense sequences, and difficult decisions.
Gorgeous visuals and a **** soundtrack highlight an otherwise subpar game. The story tries to be thought provoking and meaningful, but suffers from translation errors, poor voice acting, and writing that ranges from passable to downright laughably bad. The characters are shallow and unlikable, and monsters/NPCs have annoying audio loops that repeat ad nauseum. The gameplay is equally shallow and unlikable, consisting of very basic mechanics that never truly develop into anything special, or unique, or, frankly, even anything fun over the course of the 4 to 5 hours that it will take to beat the game. When you're not simply running from point A to point B to advance the story, you're often kiting monsters repeatedly and running into colored orbs again and again while listening to some grating dialogue. There are some collectibles to find in certain, more open areas, but the game has no way to track what you've picked up, making postgame cleanup tedious. While all these negatives detract heavily from the game as a whole, the game does have a bit of charm with the aforementioned visuals and soundtrack. Playing through the game was a somewhat relaxing experience when it wasn't being annoying or tedious, so overall I didn't entirely despise my time with the game. I would only recommend playing if you find the game for less than $5 and you have absolutely nothing better to do for a few hours.
