I enjoyed Respawn’s first Star Wars game, Fallen Order, a pastiche of present-day gameplay concepts on top of a venerable, popular IP. Eager for something with the potential to improve upon some of Fallen Order’s shortcomings, I was interested in Survivor from the moment it was announced. There were damning reports about Star Wars: Jedi Survivor’s performance on PC, so I held off until the recent patch. Happily, I can report a patient gaming win here.
Survivor ran well on my aging, mid-tier PC (3060Ti, overclocked i5-10600k), with some framerate dips here and there. It’s interesting to play a Star Wars game that gives a sense of scale to the planets, and I think adding in fast travel this time created room to stretch things out a bit. Between that and how Star Wars the game feels by blending in distinctive architecture, character design, and fashion, this was a visual treat for me.
Some of that was a big dose of the prequel films, surprisingly. These two games are set in between Episode III and IV, and this one leans even more into the prequels by introducing a local faction that rose to power by taking over a Lucrehulk and its droid contingent. There are B1 droids sprinkled throughout the game (you know the ones, wiry builds and rather chatty), and if you’d told me that ahead of time I would have groaned, not being a fan of the prequels myself. By the end of this one, however, I’m starting to think these games could rehabilitate the sequels in my mind, as I enjoyed this dose of flavor. I suspect they have a smart writing team being selective about what to pull from the established universe, seeing as how they also made the excellent choice late in the game to draw from the same well Andor has.
On the gameplay side, it’s interesting that I have zero interest in any of the side content and Metroidvania-style exploration. Survivor does feel just as good in battle as any of the Jedi Knight games (massive praise coming from me, being my favorite melee combat in gaming until Souls came around). Maybe I’m okay with taking my lightsaber fencing fantasy in small doses. Cosmetics being exploration rewards is also a problem here–not interested–and running around wasn’t always consistently fun for me. I had whiplash from how awful Jedha was at times and then suddenly being the best parts of the game. There’s certainly a concerted effort to give the exploration-oriented players something to do, but I wonder if this would be a better overall experience if it were trimmed down.
Overall, I enjoyed Survivor more than Fallen Order. I’m excited to see where this trilogy goes with more iteration on this winning formula.
The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition was the last great Star Wars game imo with Respawn’s iteration coming next but not quite reaching that potential. TFU 2 sucked big time though. Except for the presentation which was amazing. I still fondly remember some great bossfights but the gameplay and story were a downgrade unfortunately.
My main problem with the game is that they locked animation cancelling to one of the 5 stances.
This means you are locked into Cal’s flashy spinning attack animations while your opponent decides to do a quick attack that comes out faster than your recovery.
It makes the game feel extremely jank when you take into account that they also gave almost every single enemy those red unlockable attacks AND that the dodge roll is gone in favor of the most useless side step I’ve ever seen.
So, it feels like you are piloting a tank rather than an agile Jedi with inhumane reflexes, something the first game didn’t struggle with at all.
Also playing this on PC currently. It’s good fun, but I feel like it is far less polished than the first. Sometimes completely janky.
Performance is pretty much fine, with some stuttering here and there that nothing will fix. But not a huge deal.
Here’s a tip though: always save at a meditation point before quitting. There are a few auto-saving checkpoints around story beats, but reloading these can cause issues - I recently got completely stuck by relying on one.
Basically, there’s a moment where you can force pull a door open, but then end up going a different way and acquiring a new ability. Then you come back through the now open door. I had to quit the game after getting this ability, and on reload, the door was closed. Nothing I could do to open it from this side, and no way back up and out in the opposite direction.
I tried everything, and if I was on console I think I would have been completely screwed, at almost exactly halfway through the game. I had to download a mod to get to a debug menu where I could expose and load a previous ‘backup’ save. No idea why they don’t just expose a couple of these saves in the ‘load game’ menu…
Contrary to my usual tendencies, I was not a patient gamer with Survivor. I got it on PS5 the week it released, if I remember correctly. The performance issues were surprising (although actually still better on release than Fallen Order was), but other than that the game was an improvement for me in every way. Once a few patches came out improving stability, it completely superseded the original.
Edit: And I’m glad to hear it runs well enough on PC now; once I upgrade my GPU I may watch for a sale and double dip.
