Star Wars: Jedi Survivor Review

I decided to play Star Wars Jedi Survivor because I never thought I would enjoy Fallen Order upon a revisit as much as I did. That and the game would get heavily discounted on the PS Store pretty often which made me buying it hard to resist.

As a whole, I'd say the story is much, worse than Fallen Order but the gameplay as a whole is an improvement.

The story is a mess, a massive mess. I already started to tune out of the story when there is a huge time skip inbetween Fallen Order and Survivor. The ending of Fallen Order had everyone together and by the start of Survivor everyone is separated and are doing their own thing? What happened inbetween? There is some gaps in the story explained through flashbacks but not enough to paint a big enough picture on what happened inbetween. Cal is terrorist working for Saw Guerra and the latter never once makes an on screen appreance throughout Survivor despite being in Fallen Order.

Then there are other major issues with the story like how Cere and Cordova barely doing much of anything throughout the entire game and spending the whole game in the Jedi archive making it hard to care for their deaths later on. They don't assist Cal or do anything besides sit around making it really hard grow attached to them. On top of all this Vader is the one who kills Cere and knowing about the SW movies, you know Cal Kestis is not the one who defeats Vader but the game is setting up that Cal and Vader are destined to have a final battle together.

Other issues include villains like Dagan and Bode being underwhelming and poorly written. Dagan spends the entire game looking for a place called Tanalorr and Survivor also shoves in High Republic lore which wasn't even in Fallen Order which feels that more much jarring. Bode is also a very weak villain since his foreshadowing as a bad guy is almost non existent or whether or not if he was force sensitive and the only reason why he even is a jedi at all is because bounty hunters can only beat jedi with prep time and the element of surprise and this can't work in a game like this.

Final problem I can't overlook the weak story since much of Survivor's campaign is story driven and has lots of cutscenes. So it's hard to 100% ignore the story since you are going to engage with it in some way when playing

With all that said, gameplay as a whole is an improvement over the first game. I did play on story difficulty again because much like in Fallen Order the idea of a Jedi struggling against one or two stormtroopers is weird to me. I do like the additional of fighting style this time around, the addition of a John Wick style close quarters blaster style was quite nice and the idea of seeing a Jedi use a blaster at all in any SW is such a welcome novelty that it was in one it always took up a stance slot, that and dual bladed lightsaber was for horders and had the most appealing and over the top animations. The countering did feel more intiuitive this time all though I would prefer force slow to be used on one enemy rather than hordes since I don't think it's balanced well on story difficulty since it kind of becomes a move I want to spam since it doesn't take long for it to be used again.

Platforming and the adventuring aspect of Jedi Survivor is a massive improvement. One thing I love about Survivor is that it forgoes the usual video game sequel trope of the main character losing all of his powers at the start of the game. All of the moves you have like double jump, force push, pull all make a return but now you get a grapple hook, a dash, wall jump, various abilities with BD-1 and the ability to force slam.

Due to all this moment to moment adventuring feels even more engaging now since Cal isn't spending the entirety of Jedi Survivor learning moves he already knows. The game pretty much from the offset expects you to play Fallen Order and I respect it when any game sequel is daring enough to do that.

The grapple hook might be your usual automated grapple hook fare but combine all that with wall jumping, dashing, wall running along with the air launchers later in the game as well the puzzles thrown in and it's hard for me to get bored with the game, and on top of all this the new abilties slowly gets fed the player giving you new ways to traverse levels after getting them. Survivor does an amazing job at keeping the metroidvania philosophy without needing for the player spending 50% of the game to re learn all the abilities from the last adventure, I never thought the idea was possible but Survivor proved me wrong.

Only issue I have is that it can get a little confusing on where to go at times but the map 8 times out 10 always gave me the right nudge and I only looked up a walkthrough occasionally. The navigational aids added to the map was a helpful touch especially.

Overall, Jedi Survivor has very good gameplay but the story is an ugly mess. If you can get past how awful the story is there is, a very good game is here.