Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the new video game set in the Far Far Galaxy, signed by EA and Respawn. Here are our pre-launch impressions.
After the successful experiment of a Star Wars video game not only single-player, but which even dared to contaminate itself with the best of the popular souls-like formula, EA is back to betting on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the second chapter of the Cal Kestis saga set between the original trilogy and the prequel.
And Survivor is a sequel through and through. In terms of story and gameplay, it highlights the full maturity of Cal, now a real Jedi, and no longer a young padawan: Respawn has made the wise decision to give him all the powers unlocked in the first episode, now he’s strong since the beginning. He starts and truly wins the boss fights he finds himself in, never coming out defeated even after the player has completed them diligently.
The cons of this approach is that, along the way, fewer and less incisive powers are unlocked, and the metroidvania component that had garnered so much acclaim on Fallen Order suffers a bit.
A Star Wars Story —
In purely narrative terms, the plot is perhaps more linear, but has the advantage of starting earlier and immediately presenting a very identifiable villain. The most interesting aspect is probably the focus on the High Republic period, quite rare in gaming (which will dedicate an entire title, Star Wars Eclipse, for the first time only in a few years). The writing sometimes seems to struggle to motivate certain passages – without going into useless spoilers – but it is full of pathos in the presentation of the villains of the moment, Jedi ethics and typical Star Wars humor.
The twists and turns come late as in the progenitor of the series, but they are remarkable: the last act (the final two chapters) encapsulates all that is Star Wars, with the good news, however, that this time we don’t have to wait for the closing bars to have an engaging plot.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is one of those single-player games so generous that, if we only looked at the storytelling component, probably two or three titles could have come out with all this material. As in Fallen Order and other similar productions for the story’s ambition (The Last of Us Part II comes to mind, although belonging to a relatively different genre), the story seems to drag itself a bit in a fairly long queue, and with a new faction at stake the Empire is largely only in the background, with all that goes with it.
In certain passages, BioWare, the “neighbouring” roleplaying company from BioWare does a lot: when it plays the interplanetary explorer it recalls Mass Effect, when it gives in to the fantasy vein of Star Wars (which, on the other hand, George Lucas himself described as fantasy in space, more than science fiction) seems Dragon Age, and we liked it a lot.
A couple of situations – the already mentioned Empire, the much chased and alienated new generation of Jedi, even a romantic line – always act as if to say “then we’ll talk about it in the next game”, producing a vice of Marvellian memory that has now infected the Skywalker franchise largely as well, but the ending is powerful and that’s enough for us, all in all.
What’s new in the game —
Survivor is also a real sequel in terms of gameplay, forged by the feedback collected in the post-launch years and by the desire to expand the successful original project. This has translated, for example, into shorter missions, into many more bosses that you meet along the way (many of which are optional), and into mounts that, rather than having a concrete impact on the way you navigate the map, are mainly functional to the development of the campaign.
The combat system has been extended with the new style dynamics, which tend to push the aggression button even further. The use of the lightsaber, from the parry of the Stormtroopers’ blaster shots to the lighting in dark environments, passing through the battle choreography (even without particularly elaborate combos), remains a very high point of the production – at least on par with the story, which we have already talked about, and exploration, which we will talk about.
The feeling of a more offensive game is heightened by the increased presence of enemies that go down with a single hit, such as droids, and by gimmicks such as tag-fights with different NPCs. And, in general, having the entire set of skills that we finished Fallen Order with at your disposal inevitably feels powerful.
Being well aware of this, Respawn did everything in its power to rebalance things: once you get the blaster style it’s hard to go back, but this style, like the others, has its pros and cons – to say the least one, it is slower than the two swords and less strong than the double blade, while it gives a big hand in reducing the enemies’ guard and never transforms the title into a shooter.
The Jedi series has stopped being properly linear, but it certainly hasn’t become open world. The approach adopted by the Apex Legends signature is a meeting point between the new God of War and Gears 5, with its hub zones in which to roam freely, collect items and discover secrets, but only a few side missions in a world where activities are mostly arrive, find something, done.
There is a handful of “Voices”, side quests in the language of the game, but mostly the contents found for the various planets are done and finished (and often in a short time, provided you don’t run into the usual map problems) , designed to bring new characters and some additional functionality to the outpost on Koboh. More content, bigger, but not everything is equally interesting: the various currencies and the different shops have little really interesting merchandise, and for Cal’s customization component – now deeper – just search and open the chests scattered around the galaxy. As strange as it is to find a beard and a haircut in a chest…
Even after the story is over, there’s always something to do: you stay in the game to complete the activities left unfinished to follow the plot (bounties, tombs, Rumors…), or you start again with New Game+, this time available immediately. We are talking about ten hours beyond the less than twenty clear requests to complete the main quest, a sign that the focus is still the Journey, to use in-game language, and its characters, rather than an expansion in the open world sense : a refreshing approach for 2023, even if perhaps we could have expected something more on the density and activities.
Old virtues and old vices —
And, still speaking of true sequels, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor maintains the figures that had characterized Fallen Order, for better or for worse. The fights, we mentioned, seem to be less punitive, with the styles that have brought more offensive options and many healing stims right from the opening bars. The puzzles are less predominant in the main story and more entrusted to secondary activities, and the exploration – always full of labyrinthine paths on several floors, serpentines and shortcuts – has been further extended, with Kestis who is now able to perform numbers from circus to get to your destination.
In one passage of the campaign, the protagonist’s movements become so fluid that you wonder if this weren’t the infamous magical parkour Forspoken was aiming for: a real technical achievement for the Californian development team, which can really boast of doing school.
Among the vices of Fallen Order, Survivor inherits an impressive amount of backtracking, with few available settings to which you return constantly, for a game that is not very big in itself but which narratively wants to do many things, and sometimes the gameplay simply fails to keep up with him. The map is still problematic and difficult to read, although the accessibility settings allow to improve the situation slightly, and compromises such as fast travel – cleverly deactivated when necessary – make at least returning to the Mantis after a mission and overall navigation easier at the end of the story.
The technical side of the Force —
Technically speaking, after the next-gen upgrade of Fallen Order, from Star Wars Jedi: Survivor we would have expected more. The game supports two modes, one at 30fps and the other (“Performance”) which aims for 60fps, but on PS5 both of these achievements are often a chimera. Both modes suffer from significant frame-rate drops, in the hub areas in particular but not only, with the one that should favor performance being so inconsistent (and affected by very marked tearing problems) as to be really difficult to recommend.
While we’re used to 60 frames per second, we frequently found ourselves switching to 30fps just for stability, only to find that the frame rate isn’t rock solid either: even in cutscenes, which are locked at 30fps regardless of mode. , there are vertical meltdowns, and that’s a shame because they are often epic, and written and shot with a care on par with other more famous story-driven.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the verdict —
Where Fallen Order was more world building and focused more on the Empire, Respawn’s new title is more personal (as the name suggests) and focused on the Jedi – on what it means to be, after the Clone Wars and the ‘Order 66, among all the contradictions of the cult.
Dirty and rough a bit like its direct predecessor, and a bit like the space that Lucas set out to explore with this saga from the very beginning, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is at a safe distance from being perfect, but that doesn’t change that it’s a great Jedi experience and a great Star Wars tale, from which even the next few films could safely take a note or two for the future.