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.

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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