I got this game on sale on Steam a few months back. Played through it, really enjoyed it. Would have felt I got my money's worth if I bought it at full price.
I'm a Star Wars fan, loved the Knights of the Old Republic games back in the day. This isn't a branching RPG like KOTOR, but I feel the story is still up to par with that. I was very invested in Cal's story, of the supporting characters, of the villains. It really feels like a Star Wars experience. And a lot of that is owed to the excellent cinematic direction and performance capture acting. I'm sure Fallen Order is hardly the first game to use these techniques, but it's the most extensive one that I've ever played. And it's used to great effect.
(late game spoilers warning!)
So screw the haters in this thread, Cameron Monaghan makes a great Jedi.
Though maybe it helps that I've never watched Gotham.
Gameplay wise, I think it's a lot of fun. I haven't played a lot of action games mentioned as influences on FO, like Dark Souls and Sekiro, so I can't say I have the most refined taste. But to me, the combat feels fluid, really capturing the feeling of being a Jedi, using a lightsaber to beat down stormtroopers or duel fallen Jedi. For me there was a rather steep learning curve at times (Ogdo Bogdo grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) but I got the hang of it before long and found it all very satisfying. Played through the whole game on the basic Jedi Knight difficulty and enjoyed it, started a second playthrough on Jedi Master and have progressed through it without major issue.
And the level design deserves a mention. Very expansive levels, lots of nooks and crannies to find secrets. There's lots of eye candy, with scenic views and atmospheric caves and tombs (played maxed out on PC, of course). The game's very sense of movement just makes it feel nice to go around exploring. There's no fast travel back to your ship to leave the level, which some may find annoying, but I thought was worth it. You tend to have new abilities when going back to your ship that lets you unlock new secrets, and it makes the whole experience feel seamless.
I say that, though the experience isn't totally seamless. I waited a few months to get the game, so I didn't have to deal with a lot of the initial bugs and glitches. But sometimes the platforming got a little irritating, like with all the sliding. There's lots of secrets to find...but they're mostly cosmetics for Cal, BD-1, or the ship that have no impact on gameplay. The Force echoes and stim upgrades you find are a bit more exciting, but still, there could have been a lot more variety and gameplay impact to the secrets. Another thing that I...don't necessarily think is a criticism of the game, but stands to be expanded upon in the sequels, is the lightsaber duels. I think the foundational lightsaber mechanics are great, the setup for each duel is dramatic. However, each fight takes place in a flat open arena. I think back to Empire Strikes Back or The Phantom Menace, and the dynamic nature of where the fight took place and how it progressed. If Fallen Order gets a sequel --
and it certainly looks set to -- then I think that's something they could expand upon.
That's another thing worth mentioning, that this game sort of feels like a miracle. EA has made no secret that they have a distaste for traditional single player games sold for a one-time purchase. They want to ring as much money out of the player as possible with lootboxes and microtransactions. The Battlefront games have been poisoned with that, and Visceral Studios' "Ragtag" project was infamously strangled because it was a single player game without that sort of monetization model. Jedi Fallen Order is mercifully free of any such predatory practices. It's not a reason to buy the game if you still don't think it's very good, but it's worth praising Respawn for rejecting any pressure to incorporate those things into the game. They even recently did a completely free update where they added features like a New Game + mode, a combat challenge mode, and a couple other cosmetic additions. Again, completely free. Some bean counter at EA must have had a fit.
On the technical side of things, like I said earlier, the game looks fantastic and overall runs well. There's been some discussion about the game's asset and environment streaming really being demanding on I/O, causing severe hitches on hard drives and even some on slower SSDs. I'm playing off a SATA SSD, and while overall the game is smooth, I do get the occasional hitch, and monitoring the game in Afterburner on a second screen shows quite a few frametime hiccups. I'm considering installing a NVMe SSD and transferring the game over to that just to see if that really irons things out. One thing that really hampers performance though and probably comes down to being a bug is Bluetooth. I prefer to play the game with an Xbox One controller, and I have Bluetooth on my PC's wireless adapter, so I was playing via Bluetooth. But I was getting really noticeable stutter, even on my new Ryzen 3800X/Radeon 5700 XT rig, where Afterburner was reporting a framerate still north of 100 but frametimes were the absolute pits. I'd seen mention online of Bluetooth giving the game issues, so I turned off bluetooth and connected the controller via USB cable. Massive improvement to frametimes, so much less hitching. So yeah, bluetooth controller support in the game is somehow borked.
Anyways. This is the best Star Wars experience I've had since at least Rogue One, possibly the best since KOTOR. Any Star Wars fan owes it to themselves to play this game, totally worth the time and money.