I regret those typos that it won't let me edit :(

I only played on Jedi Master but I felt like that was a decent challenge, not anywhere near as tough as Sekiro though. It was sort of like 'Balanced' in Darksiders 3. If you want something more akin to Sekiro then go with Grandmaster but I dont think you'll get the same sense of satisfaction, the combat just isnt quite tight enough and there arent that many bosses by comparison.

Honestly the combat isn't tight enough and damage scaling is just too obnoxious for the higher difficulties to feel all that satisfying. Jedi Master at the absolute most, and even I just got kinda bored and went to default.

I can't speak to how the game feels on PC—everything I'm about to say comes directly from my experience with the game on an Xbox One X. For additional context, if it really matters, I've also finished and loved most of the From Software games, including Sekiro earlier this year.

To answer your question directly: I pretty much despised this game on anything above (and including) its default difficulty.

You're going to be begging to have Sekiro's precision back, begging to have its clarity, its performance, its feedback, its ruleset. None of that is present in Fallen Order.

Fallen Order seems to make a similar demand of the player that Sekiro does—figure out how to parry. It's your lifeline in this game, your advantage. With run-of-the-mill enemies, the parry actually feels totally serviceable. Blaster shots are extremely fun to reflect back at their shooters. Generic Stormtroopers swing stun batons at you with appropriate heft and wind-up, exactly the sort that is legible enough to react to and, indeed, successfully bat away.

But with non-humanoid creatures and the game's more complicated enemies, including its bosses, the system completely falls apart. The parry mechanics, even though purportedly more generously timed than Sekiro's, never seemed consistent enough to deal with fast attacks. And I felt helpless against enemies who could launch combination strikes. And there are lots and lots of enemies who can do that.

Part of it is a lack of visual communication.

There's no "big spark" equivalent in Fallen Order. It's never clear whether you've actually parried or rather simply blocked an attack unless the enemy visibly reels backward. And in those situations, most humanoid enemies tend to recover quickly enough to block your retaliation. A lot of fights have the feeling of being out of your control, as a result, because you're not getting the appropriate feedback to adjust your own timing.

One example: A semi-common enemy called a "Purge Trooper" wields an electrified bo staff. These troopers strike with deadly, multi-hit pirouettes. If you're struck by the first hitbox of the attack, you're forced to eat the rest of the animation. You can attempt to parry the first strike, but it won't cause a visible stoppage in the enemy's motion. You can then attempt to parry each individual subsequent hitbox, but each attempt at a parry is also a gamble that, if failed, puts you into an unbreakable chain of damage.

I've seen other players complain that there is some kind of delay present between your button input and the block/parry animation. They're probably right, given the game runs at such a choppy framerate. But more to the point, I think there are times where the game largely doesn't recognize that you've parried in time. It doesn't feel like a timing issue—it just feels broken. As if what I'm doing on-screen isn't what the game is currently accounting for. I genuinely hated the game's climactic fights, because I never felt as though I had control over my own abilities, much less how to respond to those of my enemy.

There are other infuriating things, too.

Fallen Order has a dodge, but it does the egregious Dark Souls II thing of allowing enemies to rotate on an axis to hit you. I'd say it's more egregious here.

Early in the game, you unlock a Force power that allows you to put your enemy in a temporary state of slow motion. You're supposed to slow them and hit them, simple as that.

Enemies can strike with "unblockable" attacks. You're told you need to dodge these. But there's a very specific window not quite at the end of these animations in which a dodge will be successful. Dodge too early or too late and the enemy will simply pivot on an axis and hit you anyway. By these rules, the "slow time" Force power, when used on an enemy during an unblockable animation, actually puts you at a disadvantage. The enemy still pivots as quickly as they would normally, even in slow motion, but now the active frames on their attack have multiplied.

It's a baffling decision in a game full of them.

Eventually, I dropped the game to its easiest difficulty. The story is worth seeing, even if it's kind of pointless in the grander scheme of Star Wars, and some of the set pieces are bold (if not often a little janky/broken themselves). But I really, really, really hated the combat in this game. I resigned myself to Force-pushing enemies off ledges when I could, where I could. You don't really have a lightsaber. You have a light-baton, and no one ever just goes down to this thing. It's always a process of, okay, they've blocked it, now they're striking, now I've blocked their strike and I think their stamina is low enough to attack again, nope they blocked again.

It's just really tedious. The easiest difficulty doesn't make it any better. Just faster. That was benefit enough.

Sorry for the essay.

I played on Jedi Master and it was. . . O.K.? I agree with what others have said - a lot of enemy animations don't parse very well, particularly animal type enemies, and the hotboxes are total bullshit in a lot instances.

To that, I would add that I felt like combat, while not hard, was taking too long on Jedi Master. I've got a lightsaber - it shouldn't take 8-10 hits to chop a droid to bits but that's how the game is balanced. Honestly, I'd be interested to hear what a play through on Story Mode is like. The story is easily the best part of this game - the combat never really felt good to me and a lot of the platforming is total garbage.

@inevpatoria: I appreciate the essay. Those are the kinds of details that can make or break a gameplay loop. The Dark Souls II homing spin while dodging sapped the fun out of that game for me.

I find it interesting that story mode is winning.

I beat Sekiro and I played this on the "normal" difficulty and still had troubles in places. This is mainly though because I guess I just never really understood how the combat is supposed to work? Like the parry system is animation dependent I think. So it's not timing a button press but timing an animation of him raising his lightsaber up to parry properly - which means pressing a button a second or so before you think they will hit. Sometimes the parry does the slow-mo, sometimes it doesn't. Plenty of times I thought I was failing parries but I actually wasn't and the animation was weird. Dodging is awkward. Enemy placement can be frustrating with 3 melee guys rushing you at once while 5 ranged troopers are blasting you from afar.

I'm not quite sure if there was some special trick to fighting 3 melee baton troopers at once. I would parry one and get hit in mid parry animation by another. They all sort of rush you. For the most part I found a lot of the combat with larger groups of foes to be kind of frustrating rather than challenging - and this is on normal mind you!

If the combat was tighter then I would say play on a harder difficulty but it's not so just play it on normal. I saw they released another patch today that improved your characters animations and movement in combat but I'm not sure what that means.

EDIT: also I failed to mention, as @inevpatoria did above me, that you can't cancel out of anything or evade mid hit. The second you get hit you will have to eat the entire attack animation of your foe. This is extremely unfair in boss fights, where the bosses will shrug off any attack above the count of three but can subsequently stunlock you into ridiculous damage combos. They will also attack with multi tier moves that then end in unblockables. It's a mess. This system of being forced to eat entire combo strings and then get knocked down to the ground can make even mid-tier purge troopers a challenge. Ultimately what this means is that you're actively discouraged from trying anything fancy and instead rely on weird cheese tactics that guarantee hits on your end with the minimal risk of getting hit yourself.

Seems like I'll stick to Jedi Knight. After years of playing Call of Duty on Veteran for dumb reasons, I did Titanfall 2 on normal and thought Respawn nailed the pacing. I trust they'll do a similar job here so spending an hour on a boss fight might ruin that.

My GOTY is maybe DMC 5 so I have a bias towards those systems but I really liked this game. The combat is not as tight as sekiro as this is Respawn's first third person action game but it was way more fun. Sekiro was just not fun at all and it could have been.

There are some legit criticism of this combat, i agree with the criticisms of the parry system and i mostly dodged or blocked. I also felt we need more clear iFrames for the dodge

I played on Jedi Master and, outside of a few annoying encounters, didn't have too much trouble until the very last boss. That was infuriating on Jedi Master and at that point I just wanted to be done with the game, so I bumped it down to Jedi Knight.

I beat it on Grandmaster, and didn't have too much trouble but I couldn't really recommend it. Like most games with improperly tuned difficulty, the first half of the game is much harder than the last half, due to character progression. You end up with so many STIMs and ways to regen force, I even beat the last boss on my first try. Coming off of Sekiro, the parry in particular feels like dogshit. It doesn't let you parry multiple hits like you want to, and the higher difficulties make it feel even worse. You are better off just spamming dodge in this game, outside of a few select instances.

I feel like this game would have fared better 2 years ago. But with DMCV, Sekiro and Astral Chain out this year, it really shows how far behind Respawn are on some of this stuff. The character models also look much worse in comparison to DMCV, Death Stranding and RE2. It kinda just coasts by on the Star Wars license alone.