New Release Review:
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is now my favorite Star Wars game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. There are so many things that this game does just right that you could argue that this game is the best Star Wars game to date. An example that I’ll use is Jedi: Survivor’s excellent combat system and the number of directions you could go with it. You’re given 5 different stances that you can use in combat which consist of single, double-sided, duel wield, blaster, and crossguard. Each one is meant to help you feel like a Jedi Master, as you traverse through each planet. Speaking of which, each planet is filled with so much content that you can practically get lost exploring for hours. I once spent 10 hours just exploring and leveling up my Cal Kestis so much that I also had a huge wardrobe of cosmetics for him after. Even when I thought I explored every corner of the map, there was always a bigger mystery I had not discovered.
The cast of characters in Jedi Survivor is written so well that it can be hard to choose a favorite. Of course, we play as Cal Kestis, our main protagonist from the last game, however, he’s not the only returning character. Characters like Cere, Greez, and Merrin return, and lots has changed since the last time we’ve seen them in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. We do get new characters like Bode Akuna and Dagan Gera who both play a huge role in Jedi: Survivor’s plot. I won’t be discussing it for spoiler reasons but this story is a huge step up from the last game that it raises the bar for where Cal might go in his inevitable third game. With the addition of the many different stances and new game plus, you could get multiple playthroughs with this game, almost justifying the 70-dollar price tag. One big complaint I have with this game is how badly it runs on console, with constant problems dealing with low frame rate, pop-in issues, and textures not loading. I had my game crash 4 different times, one particular one right after a boss fight that ruined any tension the scene had. Even after all the patches it still ran bad and sometimes even worse than before. Hopefully, this gets patched so that future players can experience this amazing story with no bugs.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a perfect example of cinematic translation from movie to game. With an amazing soundtrack, action set pieces, and writing that it makes other Star Wars media look lower tier. With its amazing lightsaber combat system that allows you to be your own Jedi that you always dreamed of being, this game gives what any Star Wars fan would want. While the technical issues can be bad, the game itself does a great job of allowing you to overlook the issues and continue playing. In the end, I give Star Wars Jedi: Survivor a 9/10 score.

Yes the performance wasn't the best, but for me it wasn't bad enough for me to see how good the game underneath was.
The combat was honestly near perfect, lightsabers gave never looked or felt better and five whole stances give so much diversity and personality to the Jedi you want to be. This is further expressed in the best customisation in any game I've ever played. In terms of lightsabers each section can be replaced and redesigned and a whole range of colours makes it truly yours. Cal has different vests, shirts, hair styles and so much more to a level we never saw in the first game. Even BD-1 has different parts and colours to add an extra layer of customisation. All these parts and colours can be found in the different planets, which are unique in their own right. Koboh and Jedah were honestly the best parts of this game, huge open areas with many secrets and areas that we could've only dreamed of while playing the very linear planets in the first game.

The story was actually a real standout. The High Republic era of Star Wars is fascinating, and the idea of a secret planet away from the Empire is something the main characters strive for. Speaking of, they're just as endearing and likeable as the first game. Cal Kestis is now a veteran who feels as his efforts are doing nothing to stop the Dark Side, and has a whole new crew at the beginning of the game, but after the beginning in Coruscant, reunites the old gang and finds out about Tanalorr and sees a chance to really make a difference. His relation with mommy Merrin is now fully fleshed out, and was a highlight of the story. Greez is just as witty as before, with some much needed comic relief but really shows some true emotion near the third act. Cere has been collecting Jedi knowledge, and has easily the best and coolest boss fight in the game against Darth Vader himself. And the newest member of the crew is Bode, who has a genius and highly memorable plot twist I never expected. Also all the side characters you meet throughout the game that all end up in the hub of sorts, being the Cantina, and filling it up was a great experience. One of them even sends you on a side quest to kill bounty hunters that all ends up in the reveal of Boba Fett.
I know I've talking about the characters for a while, but they truly are the heart and soul of this game, and all the praise is completely genuine. This is a fairly popular game release, but not talked about nearly enough.

Jedi Survivor builds wonderfully off of the mechanics and story beats of the first game, but it doesn't really know what it wants to be. Bosses are genuinely difficult, but mini-bosses are bafflingly easy. The game never fully commits to anything, which leaves it feeling half-baked. The new story starts really strong, but struggles to stick the landing or end satisfyingly. Nothing here ever actively ruins what was good about the first game, so it's still genuinely fun (when its not chugging or bugging).

Jedi: Survivor not only improves on practically everything its predecessor did, but charts a bold, alternative course for what the 3rd-Person-AAA-Action-Adventure genre can be. Mostly by committing to making everything you do fun yet, at the same time, showing that doing so doesn't undermine the ability to be invested in a story or take characters seriously. One moment I'm platforming like Ratchet & Clank, the next I'm at the edge of my seat as characters have a moment.

It forsakes being the prettiest game, having the most elaborate simulations or animations, or having the most ambitious story in the world, for the fun that can be had if you don't take everything so seriously and have a connective tissue of heartfelt story along the way.

What is interesting is that this leads to some of the best setpieces I have seen in a long time. And moment-to-moment gameplay that is a delight. All wrapped in a story that has me absolutely pining for the next game.

Of course, Jedi: Survivor isn't perfect, there are graphical glitches that are distracting, even on Series X, and it feels like you hop back to a planet one too many times making the mid-game drag ever so slightly. But that is all easily overlooked. If you have any affinity for Star Wars, or just like the prospect of a fun game, Jedi: Survivor has you covered.

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One last note, I was super impressed with was how the game took Cal, the generic protagonist, and broke him. So that by the end, he was a real character I was invested in.

Which made the prompt "to embrace the darkness" incredible. I legitimately didn't want him to, but the game didn't just force your hand, but showed you there was no alternative. But then left you with that power for the rest of the game, always tempting you. Even when you didn't need it, you had a "win quick with the darkness" button waiting in the wings. I rarely used it, but there were moments of desperation when I popped it to survive. Just like Cal would. And then I felt bad for doing so, like Cal would.

Many video games try to give you dark powers or let you slide towards darker means, but hamfistedly guilt you for it. Like, "we rewarded you with cool new things you can do! But you are a bad person for using them!" And it sucks because you either have to commit to not fully playing the game or ignore its weird judgement that it hasn't earned.

But somehow Jedi: Surivor nails it. The loop of knowing you have a final resort, resisting the final resort, in desperation using the final resort, and then regretting it is powerful. And then the game sends you to orphan a child.

The last fourth of the game instills a surprising amount of dread because of all the no win situations Cal is put into. He's not necessarily the villian, but he can't keep his hands clean or some code up either. What will it actually take for him to survive? Can he protect his family without falling like the antagonists of this game did? I can't wait to find out.

So it has taken me exactly 2 months to finish this game and I have quite a bit to say.

To start, I just want to say I cannot believe the state this game was released in. My game would constantly crash making it impossible to progress and ontop of that I wasn't able to do the bounty hunting missions till I was 3/4 through the game as they did not work for me until the patch was released.

Now a lot of the stuff I mentioned was really holding this game back for me but I am able to look past all that due to what an absolute near masterpiece this is. The game looks and plays incredibly. The combat is amazing and there is a lot of variation. I did find this easier than the last game so I had to put the difficulty up to Jedi Master to spice things up a bit. As for the story, it has a very weak start but holy shit the last act really saves the entire narrative. The final act of the game was just incredible and managed to push this up by 0.5 stars for me.

Overall, minus the state of the game at launch this game is a must play. It has a lot of moments that warmed my heart as well as a few moments that made me tear up. It's safe to say I am very excited to see how Respawn conclude this trilogy.

Despite the high score, I'm very conflicted about this game. On the one hand, part of why Disney's exploitation of Star Wars has felt so bafflingly dull is that the imagery and sound design that Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic scuffled into existence 40-odd years ago remains perhaps the most inscrutable library of pop bangers ever created. From its subtle but no less direct commentary on fascism's mighty, comedic weight to ambience as simply relatable as a radiator's hum, Star Wars looks and sounds infallible. That it has become known for - even defined by - its failures is almost as remarkable an achievement as anything from the original trilogy.

But this franchise is ultimately a story of incredible failures, and this isn't the project to shake that weight. Admirably, to an almost overwhelming degree, Respawn puts in the work to prove Star Wars' worth. There's a hub world of daunting density, boss fights that insist (at least on the Jedi Master and above difficulties) on a near chemical mastery of the game's mechanics, a story that shames most beats of the modern big screen trilogy and a generally inspired breadth of game design that ought remind any fan of Titanfall 2's campaign what it means to sacrifice one's ego to a game designer. Never more so than when you find one of their combat or platforming challenges tucked inside a glowing gem inside a cave...though the latter can often demand just a little more than this game's systems are willing to account for, to the point they feel equally heavy handed as clever.

And yet...as much as Respawn clearly GETS IT, they don't...got it. That aforementioned hub world slowly becomes a constant pest, thanks to its incredibly misleading (hi, DOOM 2016) holographic map and innumerable dead ends owing to powers unlocked via story progression. Exacerbated by only being unable to fast travel via this franchise's eternally inexplicable bonfires (or, for non Soulsians, "meditation points") the world of Koboh is often disappointing to explore. And that's before you realize most of it's secrets are just new ways to trim our hero's beard or paint his lightsaber.

But the first game primed us for that sort of thing, so as disappointing as it is to experience it again, at least this time around almost all of these little puzzles conclude with fun, unique fights beforehand. I didn't play much Apex Legends beyond the 4th season reboot, but I did play a LOT of it beforehand, and if Respawn's three flagship titles say anything about the hundreds of people on its payroll, they love designing game mechanics.

I'm adding this paragraph last, because I can't figure out where else to put it: I don't think many of the characters rise above the roles they play in either the primary narrative or the expectations of a sprawling, pseudo-role playing action game. But I get why Turgle became a sort of mini-meme. For me, he's little more than an obvious, extremely loving ode to Psychonauts' Razputin, from design to voice actor, and that's enough.

But his stories are impressively off kilter as well, in stark contrast to the Pyloon's other most interactive regulars: a stereotypical cowboy bounty huntress, some treasure hunters disbelieving they're past their prime, a couple wanderers that just want to call anywhere home and, perhaps most notably, some grim looking guy apparently, and truly shockingly, allowed by the Star Wars arbiters to slowly unravel a story of what sounds like an intergalactic cocaine deal gone wrong. It must be hard to be an executive overseeing a game of this scope but...wow, and lol.

Which leads to something I wanted to ding this game a lot harder for, but began to feel it felt personal - the final third of this game consists of several extended sequences in which, especially on Jedi Master difficulty, the scenario designers seem to believe players can stomach heaps of shit. Whether it's boss fights that evolve over four or five phases with multiple - egregiously, unskippable - minute-long cutscenes or sequences of arena battles with no save point in sight, I suppose it's not for me to say whether a Star Wars game shouldn't be so damn unforgiving, but damn can this game be unforgiving.

I don't complain about that just to do it, either. Like the first game, Jedi Survivor seems to be in its pocket when the deck is stacked. Throughout the game, Jedi Master seemed like the obvious difficulty to play the game on, requiring an extremely satisfying level of attention while still allowing for just the right amount of skin-of-your-teeth, I usually play games on Normal but let's fucking go fuckery that a lot of games miss by only tipping the scales of HP/damage one way or the other.

But this game has a trifecta of boss battles that are so nuanced in their design, so punctuated by story beats and most importantly (for, it should be said, quite valid story reasons) biased against the player succeeding that I'd be fascinated to interview the designers of these fights. These three fights ask players to have such locked in mental and technical memories that they truly feel more unforgiving than most From Soft bosses, if and even only because progressing from the first to third phase can involve as much as three minutes of unskippable cinematics. If it's meant to be a test of focus, I failed.

Thankfully, the game allows you to drop the difficulty at any time, and believe me I descended the ladder gradual. I don't take pride in things I do privately, but each time I slinked down from 30+ hours of regular campaign play on Jedi Master to a lowly Padawan during these boss fights, I couldn't help but wonder...is it me, or the game? And how many of the millions of strangers who also played this game will judge me for my cowardice?

Because I worry this review might focus a bit too much on the negative, here I want to emphasize: I enjoyed trying to study and learn these bosses. Again, I played all of the game on Jedi Master otherwise. But at each pass, a combination of said cutscenes and other wild assault combos or, even worse, one-hit kills broke me. I had to move on.

Worst part being, again, I loved the design of each of these bosses. I wish I'd kicked their ass on concrete instead of silly putty.

Especially because the combat kicks ass, and there are gonna be enough professional and user reviews out there that explain why I don't need to go much into it. I often felt like an idiot forgetting that I wasn't just a guy with a laser sword but a full on Jedi, so other than the infinitely entertaining "force push a guy into the abyss" scenario I can't speak to the bemusing skill trees as much as I'd like to. But as someone who expected to love, only to spitefully appreciate, Sekiro's parry-based sword duels I truly love this franchise's only just so slightly softer approach to the same kind of idea. Maybe the lightsaber should be deadlier - of course it should - but at least it still makes all those crisp, wavy sounds whether it's bouncing off a Stormtrooper's shield or barely damaging a droid.

I wish it were just that one big thing, which at its core might be me being a thoroughly average game player, that held this game back from greatness. In some sense, it might even be nice if technical flaws marred my experience, though for me it was mostly noticing the ways in which these relative newcomers to the third person blockbuster had to cheat at things that studios like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics or even Remedy have come to personify.

On a Playstation 5 I didn't experience the debilitating glitches, crashes and so forth that PC and XBox players did - I just saw a game that often had to cut corners to attempt some of the big screen shenanigans of its inspirations. I'm talking chase sequences where NPCs are constantly warping into position for dramatic heft, traversal that belittles Jedi mobility for the same of a puzzle, or even simply, ironically, environment design that feels convoluted for designer satisfaction rather than player legibility.

But that's fine, because some of those games are unimaginable to begin with, and some of them have gameplay flaws that Respawn could never even dream of allowing to define one of their games.

But I do have to say, perhaps much like this review...this game has a hell of a pacing problem. I believe I mentioned it early, but once you realize the traversal skills come through story progression, story progression becomes the thing...only sometimes you want more health, or force energy, or stim pack capacity, and you can never be sure which tangent those things are tucked behind. But you CAN be sure that they are behind a tangent, some kind of tiny platforming or combat adventure the game will never outright tell you to do. This leads to a constant argument between what may or may not be worth pursuing, expectations about the difficulties of the next boss fights and honestly most often of all whether your brain can trust what your eyes thing they're understanding the map to be saying. At some point, no matter how exciting a slightly bigger health bar might be, the idea that the end of any given tunnel is just a new beard trim or color wheel for your lightsaber is far more discouraging than the gamer sickness of plundering every possible nook and cranny of a map.

This will likely read like a petty way to cap this, and I really don't mean it as an insult in the slightest. Like any regular guy, I'm more than prepared to say in the same breath that the original three Star Wars films had an impossible to describe impact on my adolescence but it's a mostly shit franchise full of junk and sorrow. Jedi Survivor does NOT, and because per Disney mandate it's quite an official Star Wars tale so why not feel strongly about it, do anything more than manipulate its characters into telling a standard video game hero's arc. It hints extremely early and often at what it wants to say about the nobility of Jedi, while also force pulling some incredibly flagrant references into the mix just to remind you that for all intents and purposes there's only one story worth telling in this timeless, multiple-galaxy spanning IP.

Anyway, I was Blaster + Dual Wield. I never figured out the love for Crossguard. Too slow.

Jedi Surivior is not a perfect games it has its issues like any game. Pacing definitely had its issues, and the launch performance was something alright. In my eyes it is the perfect sequel, you can see the core foundation of this game was growth, growing in their interconnected level design and sometimes all the shortcuts got a bit excessive and confusing but nonetheless I love exploring these big planets that aren’t open world but feel open and not too massive. The growth from combat to writing and these characters was just beautiful. It is not a perfect game and not for everyone, but it simply delivered for me in scale, growth and fun. I believe it is the perfect sequel, it grows and evolved in so many ways beyond my wildest expectations. It left me more than satisfied, and that’s all I can ask