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Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is set five years after the events of the first game, and sees Cal Kestus fighting the Empire whilst looking for a place to hide out. The story itself, much like Fallen Order, is Canon to the wider Star Wars universe, and takes place roughly between Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and the destruction of the first Death Star.
You start out on Coruscant which takes around an hour to get through. This will unlock two extra lightsaber stances – double-edged staff, like Darth Maul, and twin-saber. It will also get you used to the traversal again, like wall-running to force-pulling, and grabbing ropes, pushing enemies off edges and so on. It serves the purpose of a tutorial or refresher, just to get you back into the way the game plays and reacquaint you with the combat.
The first planet, Koboh, is essentially a hub which you will return to on numerous occasions, after venturing out to Jedha and Koboh’s moon and a few other planets. Koboh, itself, is huge, with many areas being blocked till you acquire a certain skill – it’s the open world section of the game. The Ramblers Reach Outpost sees you meeting up with Greez and the Mayor, and as you travel the various areas on and off-world, you will rescue and find characters who will head to the outpost and set up shop there, turning it back into a thriving community. I have spent around 15 hours on Koboh so far, before heading to Jedha. There is so much to see and explore.
So we all know what the main story is with Star Wars in general: good vs evil, light against dark and the Jedi order going up against Dark Jedi and the Sith. You’re looking for the planet Tanalorr, which is hidden beyond an abyss in Koboh space. Apparently, this is a place the Empire can’t find and would be ideal for teaching the younglings. But, yeah, you’ll run into raiders after freeing a another Jedi, without spoiling things…
The traversal is much like Fallen Order with wall-running and rope-swinging (rather like the wall running in Titanfall 2, but third-person), but this time you don’t have to tap L2/LT to grab onto stuff. You have an additional skill where by, if you have wall marks which are vertical, you can push off and jump higher, till you reach the top as well as hopping side to opposite side, to reach a higher platform. It is very cool when you can successfully pull off mixed acrobatics to get to a new area. Additionally, at times you can mind control creatures to gain access to new areas, or grab a flying creature to get to a platform in the distance. It is nicely expanded over what you could do on the first game.
Combat, much like the first game, is best described as Souls-like, with blocks and parries with force attacks etc. Unlike the first game, however, you have additional stances which are available, and unlock as you play through the game. Each stance has it’s pros and cons, and only two can be equipped at any given time, so swapping them out means going back to a meditation point. Just like the first game, you can rest at said meditation points. However, if you do rest and get all your healing items back, all enemies will respawn. Just activating a meditation point without resting will create a save point.
Back to the stances! You have your standard single lightsaber which is a good all-rounder, there is also the staff with a blade each end, dual lightsabers, lightsaber and pistol, and finally crossguard which is what Kylo Ren uses in the final trilogy to the Skywalker Saga. Each stance, as well as force powers, can be upgraded in numerous ways to give extra attacks or strengthening an attack and so on.
You can modify your lightsaber at a bench with numerous blade colours and parts, to get it looking just how you want it. Alongside the lightsaber, there are also many different parts and paint for BD-1, allowing you to fully customise him. Customisation for Cal goes from head to toe with different hair cuts, beards, shirts, tops and trousers. You will find various customisation items in chests when you go exploring, but they are literally just that with no benefits, wearing sets and so on. Makes sense, really, given you are a Jedi that fights with a laser sword which will cut through anything!
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is an awesome game, but what is that huge grey object hiding in the corner… yeah there’s an elephant in the room, especially for PC players! First things first, my PC is decent running a Ryzen 7 5700X, 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz, RTX4070 12Gb (factory OC) and installed on a 2Tb Crucial SATA SSD (Windows 11 OS installed on a different SSD and everything up to date). I have no issues running anything else at 1440p High to Ultra settings. Hogwarts Legacy comes to mind, which I had little trouble with from Day 1 at 1440p Ultra, Ray Tracing off; Horizon Zero Dawn the same, and even though it is older, it is still an amazing looking game with large open areas, long view distance and so on, and I have to lock the frame-rate to 120fps… you get the picture.
I have to mention the state of the game. The Steam forums are littered with threads about performance, even after it has received a few patches already. These performance issues range from 10-series cards to highest end 4090, and same goes for CPUs, AMD GPUs and whatever combo you are using. I have found that no matter what resolution I use, or preset graphics setting (Ray Tracing and Motion Blur always off), the frame rate is all over the place, with wide swings from 40-100fps at times, and there is no rhyme or reason to it. I can be getting low frame rates in a hangar, with not much going on, but higher frame rates out in the open world, fighting multiple enemies. I will say that I have been lucky not to experience any crashes, but performance which shouldn’t be an issue and stuttering is REALLY bad.
Unreal Engine 4 has been out a good while now, and Respawn are generally really good experienced developers. I remember getting the aforementioned Titanfall 2 for PS4 for review, and the Day 1 patch was literally 90Mb (yes, really, Megabytes!) so I have a lot of faith in them to sort out Jedi Survivor sooner rather than later. I am using FSR2 Quality (FidelityFX Super Resolution) as AMD sponsored this game, and didn’t allow DLSS to be included for Nvidia owners. If I try to run it without using FSR, the performance tanks and it is unplayable. At least, using the upscaling (which I shouldn’t have to on my system), I have been able to play this for review. I will say that it has been migraine-inducing at times, and I have held off doing this last part of the review to see if it got fixed before I finished.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t, and is in a pretty poor state as of 16th May 2023 🙁
By the way, I normally do the breakdown of visuals etc. However, in the case of this, I am just going to give a baseline score out of 10. The game and story are AWESOME! I truly love it, and want to play it just like I did with Fallen Order. It looks fantastic and sounds great, but the performance has sadly ruined the experience for me, and now I am holding off until the game is completely fixed. The score I am giving literally just reflects the state of the game on PC, presently. Once the issues have been fixed, I will happily and freely, up the score to a solid 9/10.
Overall Score: 6/10
Thanks to our friends at Respawn Entertainment and EA for the review code.
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is out now on Xbox Series X / Xbox One, PC and PS5.
Important info:
- Developer: Respawn Entertainment
- Publisher: EA
- Players: Single player only
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!