Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Impressions
A lone shining light in the world of Star Wars video games under the EA tenure, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order almost seemed as much of a surprise to the game publishing giant as the general public. A not spectacular but solid single-player Star Wars game with a dash of Dark Souls-style combat and an enjoyable cast of characters was an oasis in a desert of multi-player loot-box-focused multi-player affairs that left a bitter taste in people’s mouths.
Here we are a few years later and not only is the highly-anticipated sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor out but what’s going on with Star Wars games has changed drastically. Jedi developer Respawn is working on several projects related to the IP including an FPS and a strategy game, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was the best Lego game in years and arguably a definitive representation of the movies at the moment, and many developers outside of EA are in the midsts of making their own Star Wars projects. How many of these will be good, who knows but it feels like Star Wars games are fresh in a way they haven’t been in a very long time.
But what we have right here and now in 2023 is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and given how the first game was received and the potential it seemed to show for a sequel, how does it stack up? I can say I have not finished the game yet but I have put in about 20 hours so I feel pretty confident in giving my thoughts on the game.
Once you get through the initial mission, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor opens you up to its massive homeworld, Koboh. It’s not the only planet you’ll visit but serves as your home base most of the time and packs the most secrets and optional things to find and do. Most of the other planets have some optional quests and hidden areas but are far more straightforward. I don’t Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is much longer than its predecessor in terms of core story content I’ve seen people finishing it in 25 hours or so but the optional content can easily open up another 20 hours or so of game time if you so desire.
But what good is all that extra content or the story if it’s no fun? Star Wars Jedi: Survivor really opens up both combat and exploration with new powers, traversal abilities, and a surprisingly wide variety of lightsaber stances that really open up combat in a number of ways, and while you may have your preferences (I mostly stick with dual wield because I like the speed) all work really well. The biggest new feature is not only can BD-1 gain the ability to help you out in combat by hacking enemy droids and having the temporarily help you, you’ll also occasionally have a partner tagging along that helps a lot in battles including a special attack you can command them that is often invaluable.
Jedi Survivor is also one of the best-playing 3rd-person action games that involve heavy platforming I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s not on par with games like Mario but you need to do some pretty complex sequences and it’s just fun to pull them off. You’ll be doing this a lot to uncover secrets and while you always get some kind of reward, if you didn’t like the cosmetic rewards in Fallen Order (and I did not) you won’t be too happy here. For every stim pack upgrade, skill point, or force/life extension you’ll find a couple dozen ways to customize Cal’s hair, clothes, or lightsaber BD-1’s look, etc. If the frequency was less I wouldn’t be as annoyed but it’s never exciting and gets tiring (especially if I’ve beaten a really difficult enemy and my reward is a new mustache).
The story so far in Star Wars: Jedi Survivor isn’t anything too amazing but the core story isn’t the draw here in my opinion. Survivor has so many little stories and fun side characters that those fill in the narrative gaps really well. I’m not the biggest fan of splitting up the crew that had formed at the end of Fallen Order (though everyone shows up in Survivor in pretty short order) as I feel the story could have worked just as well with them not splitting up but it hardly ruins the narrative or anything.
My only other rather big complaint is the map in Star Wars Jedi Survivor. It uses the same topography-based design as the first and it can be confusing as hell. This could be mitigated by offering some kind of optional glowing path, an arrow, or something. It was frustrating in the first game and just as much here.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a bigger and bolder version of its predecessor and pulls it off pretty well. I do know there have been some pretty bad performance issues on some platforms, for what it's worth I’ve been playing the game on PlayStation 5 and have had very few issues but if you are wary, it’s never a bad idea to wait a little while for things to be patched, maybe a sale, etc. But I do feel confident in saying this is easily the best Star Wars game since Knights of the Republic and any Star Wars fan should check it out.
That’s it for today but Ill have at least one more post mid-next week and new content for Marvel’s Midnight Suns is dropping next Thursday so certainly look for my thoughts on that over the weekend. See ya real soon!
