The Subjective -
For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last few months, Jedi Survivor is the sequel to Jedi Fallen order. In Jedi Fallen Order you play Cal Kestis a Jedi Padawan who escaped Order 66 thanks to the sacrifice of his Master. You start the game in hiding but are quickly discovered by the Inquisitors and must flee. The initial interactions are there to teach you the ropes before you are given the main quest. Throughout your travels you gain force powers, friends, and cosmetic items as you fight the Empire.
In Jedi Survivor, you play Cal Kestis, a now Jedi, that escaped Order 66 and the Inquisitors thanks to the sacrifices of your new friends etc. The flow of the game is very familiar and mimics the first game down to the intro level, so you get familiar with both old and new mechanics. You are also introduced to new friends and allies. Cal has taken a more active role in the struggle against the empire including working very closely with Saw Gerrera. The latter is unusual as Saw became more violent and aggressive after the death of his sister. In Fallen Order and in “The Bad Batch” series he has become more extreme in his actions against the empire and was often shunned by the rest of the rebellion. It is odd that a character who calls them self a Jedi would get involved with someone like Saw, but it seemed to work in the context of this game.
The mechanics of the game get an update with more than just single blade and dual blade light saber combat. You end up with a total of four new flavors of combat including the combination of a lightsaber and a blaster. The downside is that you can only have two of these queued up at the same time. You have to get to a meditation point to change them out which is a bit of an annoyance. The game adds more force abilities including ones specific to the different styles of combat. You also get perks and perk slots to customize Cal (from an ability standpoint) even more. Perks, like combat styles, can only be changed at a meditation point. Both systems are cool in theory but end up (for me) being more of a pain in the ass than anything else. I ended up choosing a few perks and two styles of combat and never changed them out during my initial play through. Respawn did throw in the option to use a companion during combat and exploration, which was a cool idea, but one I often forgot about when things got crazy.
The Story was interesting, but really felt very formulaic. Even with the new locations, abilities, combat styles etc. It could have been a DLC for all of the other changes that were not there. You had fetch quests, new powers that were unveiled during flashbacks, chests of loot to find an open all while traveling around the “galaxy” trying to accomplish the main quest. This formulaic game style did not make the game unenjoyable, but it was something that I could not unsee from the start of the game through to the finish.
Another downside for me was that much of the game did not feel like a Jedi game at all. It felt like I was playing Donkey Kong or Super Mario. There were long stretches of nothing more than jumping and avoiding obstacles with small pockets of combat. These in many cases were not fun at all for me as I was looking forward to playing a Jedi game and with all the new force abilities and enhancements to combat, I just did not see why the developers needed to put in that many obstacles. It just did not make a lot of sense for a game like this, while the third person perspective added additional challenges as there were times when the camera angle auto adjusted and times when it did not both seemed to come at bad times.
The world building options in the game felt less like a part of the story than an addition to extend play time. I think some of these items should have been left until after the main story quest was complete. This, to me, would have added extra to game time after all the big quests were done.
Spoilers Ahead!
Ok the next paragraph will contain some spoilers so if you have not played the game or finished it and you don’t want it spoiled. then skip over this part.
Being a fan of Star Wars (I saw the original in the theaters as a kid) I am always interested in how things fit into the broader universe when it comes to games, movies, streaming etc. In this case both Fallen Order and Survivor are canon. That means they fit into the rest of the Star Wars universe and its overall context. In the case of Jedi Survivor, I am not sure where this one fits in. It is heavy with High Republic references (including one of the main bad guys) and has a lot of potential to set some cool things up in the greater Star Wars universe, but then it falls back onto some very old and played out troupes. The Jedi who turns evil because of the failures of the Jedi Order, the Jedi who turns evil because he becomes too attached. These have been done to death in the movies already so why are we rehashing them in a new game especially one that takes place in the space between the rise of the Empire and the Battle of Yavin (9BBY)? The plot and overall story tone felt forced and a bit disconnected to me. Cal’s flirtation with the dark side was not even an option, you had to choose it to move forward, and yet there were no consequences in the game that I could see from him giving in to his hate and rage. I had hoped that the game would explore a different path for the Jedi Protagonist and his adopted family, but sadly it did not. Finally, why are there so many people in this new game that have blasters and light sabers that are not force users?
The Objective –
The Game looked amazing (other than some of Cal’s hair styles). The landscapes and vistas in the game were very screenshot worthy and I found myself taking screenshots of views just because they were cool looking and well rendered. The downside to the improved graphics were some bugs in rendering, with certain textures rendering as flat or white blocks during game play. The controls were also buggy with controller and input lag showing up at very inconvenient times. This was on PC and Xbox One Series X (with an elite controller v2). The game had pauses, stutters, and more than once it crashed without any clear understanding of why. You could be sliding down a zip line one second and on the launch screen the next. These crashes were inconsistent and maddening if you had not hit a meditation/save point recently. Some of the rendering errors were terrible with lightsaber blades and/or blaster shots not rendering in combat.
The length of the campaign is good with enough changes of scenery to keep things going. Respawn increased the interactions with other characters making them feel more a part of the game than before. They can help in combat as well as exploration in some fun and unexpected ways. Respawn also added in more options to customize the Cal, BD-1, your Lightsaber, and Blaster from a visual perspective. If you are into that level of customization, they have you covered here. For combat and force abilities they have expanded them to allow these options to be customized to your tastes. These expanded combat and force abilities grow over the course of the game through exploration and as part of the campaign. When combined with the new Perks system it makes for some interesting options.
From a replay perspective the rather open and customizable nature of Cal and his capabilities do expand the game somewhat as does the Journey+ option where you can replay the game with new perks, and abilities available. Any skill points you acquired during the first run through are given back to you so you can spend them again and all of your selected abilities are cleared. It is an interesting option that I am looking forward to trying out in a few weeks after I have fully finished the game (finding everything).
Conclusion –
Jedi Survivor is a good game if you take it as a stand-alone item. It has bugs, but all games do. It also has story flaws, and continuity errors it also falls into formula quickly (also like many other games). Still, it is very enjoyable despite all of that. I had fun playing it and found myself not wanting to put the controller down. I wanted to get to the next stage and see how the story unfolded. The conversations with friends and opponents alike seemed a bit more real than in Fallen Order which distracted from some of the obvious direction the story was going. I have no real idea of where Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor really fit into Canon, given when they are supposed to happen. However, this does not and should not be taken away from the actual game. It is more of a wish from me as a Star Wars fan that these stories somehow fit into the larger universe and may want to have them make sense, and not just be an add on story with no connection to the whole. If you have not already bought the game I can and do recommend it although I would wait until Respawn has worked with the different console and PC vendors to fix some of the current crop of bugs.
