It’s easy to think of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in terms of its predecessor. Jedi: Fallen Order was broadly thought of as a good game with a few snags holding it back, namely a few disruptive technical issues, an incomprehensible map, and an overreliance on backtracking through lengthy platform sequences (not helped by, you know, the incomprehensible map). Fix those, you reckon, and there’s probably a very good game here.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor reviewDeveloper: Respawn EntertainmentPublisher: EAPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 28th April on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC (Steam, Epic, EA)
Mostly, Jedi: Survivor has fixed all that. Or at least patched it up. There’s much less backtracking this time, thanks to new and plentiful fast travel points. The map is clearer, since sacrificing the Star Wars-iness of the last game’s flickering holo effects for this one’s more opaque visual helps a fair bit. And the technical issues are less catastrophic, although things can still get pretty rough at the seams – think hands, hair, and various items regularly clipping through surfaces, and some frantic pop-in and cloak-flapping when coming in and out of cutscenes. Plus one hard crash – but broadly, those gripes have been tended to.
On top of that, Jedi: Survivor’s systems have expanded beyond Fallen Order’s. Instead of adding a few potted plants to Cal Kestis’ ship, after you’ve collected their seeds from the wild, you now have an entire roof garden on the new planet, Koboh, that you can pootle about with. Instead of new people you meet during the story joining you on the ship as major characters, NPCs will now be recruited to Greeze’s Koboh bar, Pyloon Saloon. There’s a new mini-game, a kind of highly simplified auto-chess battler, where you can deploy units that you’d defeated in battle and scanned with your lovable droid, BD-1, to unlock them.
If I were feeling really miserable I’d call this stuff filler, but it isn’t quite. These are things that were already in Fallen Order that have had their little corners expanded: we already collected seeds and scanned enemies and had a little hub, of sorts, on the Mantis. You can see how they came to be – it’s a direct sequel, the team at Respawn has a lot of the foundations already in place, so now they have time to expand on the little things, so might as well. Again, that’s a recipe for bloat, but more importantly Jedi: Survivor, you’ll discover, is a game about finding small ways to make a life under the Empire’s oppression, and these little homely touches play into that. I might work through the last few opponents of the minigame – I am a sucker for miniature tactics – and I really could not have less interest in fumbling about with arranging space plants on a grid, but there’s something sweet about their presence, which strikes at what Fallen Order and more prominently, Jedi: Survivor really are.