Late To The Party: Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

I finished Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order recently and...it has issues.

First, the cut scenes are ugly. Humans have faces that are smoothed out like an Instagram filter put over them, and it skeeves me out.

Next; this game doesn't know what it wants to be, and thus it conveys its information poorly. Is it a Dark Souls clone, where the respawning enemies teach you combat better? Is it a God of War clone, where you have to string combat moves together to create lethal combos? Is this a Prince of Persia clone where exceptional timing skills come into play to thrillingly traverse dangerous environments?

This game doesn't know. It just wants to give you doses of Star Wars so you can feel that jolt.

The combat is incredibly pedantic. I didn't even know my abilities gave me extra moves until well over 2/3rds into the game and even then: I had virtually no use for them. The game didn't want to encourage me to learn the new thing. So combos don't matter and spamming the attack button is boring. Parry wasn't a well explained concept either, since you can just permanently hold a button to block, what encourages me to try to time my blocks out?

So there were difficulty spikes that I just hated because I didn't know I had abilities that might help me. Which means the learning curve and improved combat doesn't matter.

Worse, controls were muddy, so I would find myself on slides without precise control and falling to my death just because, or searching for the out to a room with little direction, or in puzzle rooms without clues, or worse, knowing the solution and being frustrated that the solution wasn't working.

So: not Dark Souls, not God of War, and not Prince of Persia. What is the primary gameplay loop this game can confidently rest it's code on? I can't tell you, and I don't think Jedi can either. 

On top of that, the UI is working against me. I have three bars I have to pay attention to: life, blocking stamina, and force.

The life bar is in the lower left. The other two are in the middle bottom. I have to look away from one critical resource to another in order to see what's happening.

So the integration of these playstyles don't mesh well and the game doesn't build the bridges between them. I don't know how this game got the positive press it did, but it does not execute well and I finished it more out of pandemic frustration than the thrill of seeing it play out.