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Jedi Survivor is a third person action game set in the Star Wars universe, where Cal Kestis returns for the sequel to Fallen Order, in search for a home safe from the Empire.

Gameplay

• Combat is mostly enjoyable as you’ll use Cal’s lightsaber and force powers to defeat various enemies including stormtroopers, bounty hunters, large and small wildlife, and various types of droids (some recognisable from episode 1).
• Lightsaber has five stances to choose from, including single or dual wield, double blade, Kylo Ren style 2 handed, and single blade combined with a blaster. Each stance can be upgraded with special moves. I mostly used the double blade as it features fast attacks and long reach, which helped me to evade enemy attacks.
• Many enemies will try to shoot you from long range, but if you time blocks correctly, your lightsaber will deflect the blaster bolts back to damage or kill the enemy.
• I regularly used force push to knock weaker enemies off ledges for instant kills. One time I even managed to do this to a miniboss who still had about 80% of their health bar remaining. You can also use the force to pull enemies, throw your lightsaber, and use mind trick to make enemies attack each other.
• Most of the game takes place on the planets Koboh and Jedah, in addition to a couple of smaller planets and a brief visit to Coruscant.
• Playing on Jedi Knight difficulty (the middle of five options), combat is challenging but mostly fair. I really struggled with the final boss who for some reason is significantly more powerful than Darth Vader, and because I wasn’t enjoying the game for reasons that I’m about to get to, eventually I just dropped down to story mode so I could be done with it.
• Much of the action takes place miles above ground level, and you have to navigate terribly designed maps which are full of huge gaps where you can fall to an instant death. You’ll need to jump, double jump, air dash, wall run, grapple and rope swing. The further you progress in the game, and the more force powers you unlock, the longer and more annoying these sequences become, regularly requiring the player to chain together 15-20 moves, and if you slightly miss time anything, you’ll have to go all the way back to the start of the sequence and do it all again. And there were a number of occasions where I was confused about where I needed to go next, or how to actually get there, which frequently interrupted the pace of the combat.
• Sure, Fallen Order had some sections like this, but while those were relatively short, Jedi Survivor’s maps are entirely built around it. Maybe some players like this kind of gameplay, but I don’t. It reminds me of the difference between Doom 2016 (which I loved) and Doom Eternal (which I hated, and yes I know I’m in the minority there too).

Story

• Story is nothing special, I think it suffers from the villains not being interesting characters, but its at least better than some of the recent Disney+ TV shows (Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka).
• Cal’s struggle with the dark side, and his relationships with the companions who previously appeared in Jedi Order, especially Merrin, did at least provide some excitement.
• Voice acting is good.

Technical

• It took me 25 hours to complete the main story and a few side quests.
• While I didn’t notice any significant framerate drops, the performance doesn’t feel smooth, like there are frequent small stutters (i7-12700K, 32GB DDR4, RTX 3080, 1440p). The first few hours seemed mostly fine, but it got worse the further I progressed. Koboh has the worst problems, but as its also the biggest planet, this is where you’ll spend the most time.
• I also regularly noticed white flashes at the edge of the screen while panning the camera sideways inside buildings. I can’t remember seeing this before in other games so I don’t know what is causing it, perhaps the game was loading textures slightly slowly, even though its installed on my SSD.
• The game optimises some files (I’m assuming shaders) every time you start it up, it doesn’t take long, but considering the above issues, I’m not sure if this actually does anything.
• The game crashed twice with no error message. By itself its not the end of the world (I can live with 2 crashes in 25 hours), but it still deserves to be added to this list of shame.
• Level up menu doesn’t tell you what the abilities further up the tree actually do until you acquire the ability immediately below it. I’ve never seen a game do this, usually you can see the whole skill tree to plan your character build in advance, so this is a really dumb design decision.

Recommendation

Jedi Survivor isn’t a terrible game, and if Steam’s review system allowed a neutral option I would have picked that, but overall my feelings are more negative than positive.
While my dislike for the aerial gymnastics is a personal preference which other players might not have a problem with, you’ll still have to deal with unacceptable technical performance which gets in the way of the otherwise enjoyable combat and story.
Only recommended for hardcore Star Wars fans, on a deep sale.