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The two worst things about Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order are the name and the architecture. The name needs some damn punctuation somewhere, maybe a colon or two, or at least the removal of the words “Star Wars” from the official name, since once you see the word Jedi and there are a bunch of lightsabers on screen you don’t really need the “Star Wars” part in the name because I’m pretty sure people are going to get it. I’ve been mostly calling the game Fallen Order, because that’s good enough, but my inner grammarian is deeply annoyed by how clumsy the title is.

That said, if that’s most of what I’ve got to complain about, and it is, we’re in pretty good shape. Folks have been waiting for a good single-player Star Wars action game since forever, and this one not only manages to fit the bill admirably but tells a damn good story in the meantime. Fallen Order is set just a few years after the end of Episode 3; Order 66 has been enacted and most of the Jedi are dead, but the Inquisitors are still out in force hunting down the handful who escaped. You play as Cal Kestis, a Padawan who got away by the skin of his teeth, losing his master and half his lightsaber in the process, and who has been working as a scrapper on a shipyard ever since. Some hell breaks loose, Kestis is forced to reveal his powers, and we’re off to the races, with him being rescued at the last moment by another fallen Jedi. The main narrative goal of the game is a Macguffin, more or less, taking the form in this case of a Jedi holocron filled with the names and locations of potential Force-sensitive children, and there is much talk about rebuilding the Jedi Order.

Now, this is interesting, right, because we know that ultimately they have to fail in this goal somehow, because by the time Luke rolls around there are legitimately only him, Yoda, and Obi-Wan left among the Jedi, and the Order very much does not get to be rebuilt. So the fact that the game starts off with the ending predetermined and still tells a great, compelling story is a serious plus in its favor. It’s beautiful to look at, particularly in its environments and any chance it gets to pull back and show some of the sheer scale of the ships and creatures in the distance (the initial shipyard level is really amazing in this respect) is going to be something really special. The characters are a highlight as well, especially Cal’s companion droid BD-1, who spends most of the game perched on Cal’s back and gets a number of upgrades over the course of the game to make him more useful to you.

The only weapon you get to use is your lightsaber; no initial period of running around with a blaster here unlike several of the older Jedi-focused Star Wars games, and while your powers take a while to open up (Kestis is a Padawan, after all, and he repairs his connection to the Force over the course of the game) once you’re firing on all cylinders the combat is satisfying as hell, with plenty of Stormtroopers around to mercilessly beat the hell out of along with a number of tougher enemies who will test your ability to block and parry. There are five major planetary environments and a few minor sub-areas, and the levels themselves are enormous, enough so that one of the game’s few non-technical shortcomings is that it really needed a fast travel system of some sort. There will be some glitches here and there, too, especially for those of us still on a regular PS4, but no bugs that prevented me from completing missions or anything like that. Kashyyyk in particular featured a lot of three- or four-second freezes during transitions through doors, as the game couldn’t get everything loaded up fast enough. There are enough little quibbles here and there to keep this out of 10/10 territory, but I’m perfectly content calling it a 9/10 or a high 8/10. The combat and the story (and the ending, my God) are more than enough to make this game one of the highlights of the year.

(What am I playing now? I brought my PS3 out of mothball status and hooked it up to the main TV, and I’m playing Demon’s Souls for the first time. I am perhaps a bit more excited about it than is reasonable.)

An interesting phenomenon, at least to me: I’ve noticed that the older I get the more annoyed I get by bad worldbuilding in my video games. This isn’t a story concern, necessarily; what I mean is that I need things like levels to make basic physical sense and seem in at least a cursory way to be things that could exist in the actual world the game is portraying.

Why yes, I am playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order right now. How did you guess?

It’s been a running joke for a while, at least among my immediate family: my wife works in occupational health and safety, so we notice these sorts of things: Star Wars doesn’t have OSHA. Everything, everything is positioned with no railings over a bottomless pit or, if there is a railing, there’s not a chance in hell it would keep anyone from falling over it or, uh, being thrown:

That shit is not safe. And don’t even get me started on this bullshit:

So I’m used to the idea that in a Star Wars video game there are going to be some fall hazards. The idea doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t make sense on a fundamental level, but it’s pre-established in the world. But here’s my problem with Fallen Order: you unlock your Force powers as you travel through the game, and you use them extensively to get where you’re going on whatever planet you’re on– particularly the wall run ability, which is used constantly.

So if I had to use half a dozen Jedi wall runs, had to Force Pull a convenient vine over to myself to swing across a huge gap, had to use Force Push to break through a conveniently weak area of wall, and — oh, right — had to exterminate hundreds of incredibly dangerous examples of the local fauna in order to get to an area, how the hell are there two dozen Stormtroopers already there when I get there?

(“Why the hell are the Stormtroopers so much less dangerous than this space goat” is another question relevant to the game, but not the one I’m discussing at the moment.)

This shit gets to me, guys, it really does. You don’t have Jedi powers, Stormtrooper! How the fuck are you here? How did you get to the top of this wroshyr tree on Kashyyyk that I’ve been climbing using my magic Jedi abilities for twenty minutes? Did someone drop you off there in a ship? Why did they do that? Are they going to come get you? Are you here just in case a Jedi shows up? Because they’re supposed to all be dead.

How did any of these chests get here?

Remember these goddamn things?

Random huge pieces of machinery with no clear function whatsoever that seem to exist only to impede player progress are starting to get on my nerves. There are tons of enormous machines everywhere (on abandoned planets; who built all this shit?) that serve no purpose other than to kill you if you don’t figure out how to properly avoid and/or slow them down (Oh, also: Jedi slowing powers. I had to slow down a huge fan and sneak through an airduct to get here! How are you here, Stormtrooper?) and I just want to know what they’re for. Why are there giant spinny blades with holes in them in this area? What’s this thing, that just slams back and forth but doesn’t seem to do anything? Who decided that these catwalks needed to have places where you had to jump over holes? Because every fucking catwalk has holes, and they don’t all appear to be damaged. Some of them just aren’t finished. Why? Is the Empire suing the shit out of their contractors? Because they need to be suing the shit out of their contractors.

I’m having a lot of fun with the game– don’t get me wrong. But Jesus, the level geography is like they deliberately tried to make no damn sense at all.