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.
