I missed the days of Uncharted and Tomb Raider, those games don’t exist anymore, instead open world “everything games” have taken its place, AssCreed, Horizon, Fallen Order etc.
So Jedi Survivor scratches that traversal itch well, it has limited platforming sections and exploration, but enough to get the sense of wonder I had previously in the worlds of the old games.
It does a lot of things and takes inspiration from Souls likes, adventure platformers, hack and slashes, open world etc, but does none of it particularly well. This iteration focuses more on platforming and metroidvania as compared to the first game, here are some things that I wished were better.
- It takes too long to get good. The setup at first seems very similar to Uncharted, solid platforming and combat wrapped around chunky set pieces placed in each act, however for some reason, Cal starts with losing all his abilities from the previous game and has to start again, you also slowly gain platforming abilities like air dash similar to a metroidvania. So you start the game feeling very anemic, a weak Jedi who can’t do much but just gets pushed along the story.
The first point where I felt the game had potential was an amazing boss fight set piece on a desert planet, at that point, the initial hours of the game were a slog, probably only sustaining interest from Star Wars fans
- It hates Lore I don’t mean the canon and Lucasarts vs Disney and all that, I myself am not familiar with the “correct” story, by Lore I mean how things work in universe are not consistent or sensical at all.
In one part of the game, you put on an imperial disguise and depending on the customisable hair and beard style you have, you obviously look extremely out of place, the disguise is also of a high ranking officer, but the NPCs of lower rank look down on you.
There are several simple visual or dialogue changes that could have been done, for example removing the rank from the uniform or acknowledging that the designers thought about imperial ranks. There are also problems of weird architecture, random items scattered around the galaxy which I’ll cover in my next 2 points.
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Exploration with no rewards Speaking of items, the loot in the game is terrible, consisting mostly of cosmetics, so while you take on a tough platforming challenge, you may end up with not much at the end, this also really brings up the Lore part, like finding paint colours for your lightsaber in a meat packing factory, or force essences in random caves. Exploration is fun for its own sake and there are “audio tapes” of side stories when walking around, but again very uninteresting stories that do nothing.
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Combat Lightsabers don’t cut people in this game, behaving more like glowy baseball bats in combat and act like movie lightsabers in cutscenes. As many people have pointed out, the combat was probably started out as a Sekiro style parry into deathblow mechanic that was downplayed so that casual players could get into it by mashing. Only 1 stance out of 5 has animation cancel and the most enemy attacks are not well telegraphed, bosses are designed better, but they still take 20-30 light saber cuts to bare skin without so much as a scratch. The stamina and health mechanic doesn’t gel and I wished they had designed a system that had the lightsaber cut off armor and limbs if they didn’t one a one hit kill.
Force powers are not integrated well, being quite useless against strong enemies, obviously dark side powers are more flashy and easier to implement, but maybe we’ll see it in the 3rd game
I did enjoy the puzzle sections of the game but it felt like it ought to belong and it completely different series altogether, the mish mash and inconsistent vision for this series really stops it from becoming one of the greats
Interesting how experiences can be so different. To me Jedi Survivor was an improvement over the first game, which I already enjoyed a lot. As far as I can remember you keep most (if not all) of your abilities. In the first game Cal has almost nothing after he essentially cut himself off from the force after the trauma of order 66. It’s and entirely reasonable explanation of Cal not having most normal Jedi abilities.
Survivor also has better combat, because of the new abilities and weapons, better graphics, and better traversal (looking at you, Zeffo). While I really like the story in Fallen Order as well, I also think that Survivor is better overall. It’s not as clear cut as good vs evil. There’s many different factions and people with different goals. In the end, it’s about everyone just trying to survive the tyranny of the Empire, whatever it takes.
The games definitely does feel very “gamey” though. There’s a lot of places where it’s clear that things are only the way they are because this is a video game. But to me that’s okay. A game doesn’t always need to be the most realistic and life-like experience. I don’t mind that a specific puzzle is totally unrealistic and clearly only there to force you to solve it. I can imagine that some people will not enjoy that though, and that’s okay.
It was a great game to me. I feel like none of the criticism mentioned applied to my experience.
Also Cal didn’t start by “losing all his abilities from the previous game”, he literally has a bunch of skills and abilities carried over from the first game, and Survivor expands on them. Not at one point I felt like Cal was a weak character, it depends more on the player controlling him. I’m not sure what you’d expect here, you need new gameplay features to unlock throughout the game to keep having something to progress towards, most of which feel like a natural progression in the whole experience.
I loved exploration and lore in this game, it very much touches on a bunch of stuff that didn’t get much attention yet, like the people/communities on Jedha and High Republic lore. I don’t feel like exploration should always be awarded with awesome items and loot, that’s a dumb expectation set by other games that awards players for just booting up the game and give them a pat on the back for completing every minor action. I feel like the only tedious part of collectibles was getting to 100% it, luckily the game gave us an option to find all missed collectibles later on.
I enjoyed overall combat, it felt solid and responsive. Clearly some playstyles differ in the way that you cannot cancel attacks, it’s a risk/reward mechanic for using stuff like a heavy stance over a snappy, quick and stabby stance with lower damage output. If you want one shot kills you can do this in New Game Plus I believe, although it takes away too much of the actual challenge presented by many mobs and bosses I believe. It’s still supposed to be a game, not a simulation.
You’re right about the glowy baseball bats but I think that Jedi combat is a tough one to pull off well. You can force pull any of the lower enemies into a one shot with the light sabre as it is and there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to do that with all human sized enemies that aren’t force users except that it would make for a dull game.
The loot is shit but I don’t know what more a Jedi needs other than armour or blasters but they don’t really use them. It is very weird that I had to find something in a box for me to get the idea to not shave my beard so close.
