Star Wars Jedi Survivor REVIEW

2023's standout surprise

By Ameer Ammar

I'm not the biggest fan of Star Wars (yeah I know that's heresy), but this might be the best piece of Star Wars media I have ever experienced and easily my favourite game this year so far, What Respawn and EA have done with this sequel to 2019's Fallen Order is nothing short of incredible. While I always quite liked Fallen Order, It wasn't really a special game, this sequel takes everything that worked in that game and not only improves on it, it nearly fucking perfects it. Combat is absolutely fantastic, While Fallen Order always felt like a decent base and was fun to play, Survivor turns it up to 11, Seemingly taking direct inspiration from Sekiro this time, I absolutely love how this takes the posture system and uses it to give so much depth to the new stances system that just makes fallen order look like a tech demo in comparison. Animation work is insane, every single stance feels and plays completely differently, I mained Blaster & double bladed and that gave me a wholly unique experience from someone who might main something else like dual wield and cross guard, It adds so much depth to the combat and the little detail of unique animations of switching between any two stances having a unique animation is so damn cool.

Story is what elevates it all though, Jedi Survivor picks up a few years after Fallen Order and quickly goes into showing just how far Cal Kestis has come, cut scenes look incredible, the lore implications for the wider universe of this game are very interesting and the whole thing just ended becoming not only my favourite story from the Star Wars universe, It has also made Cal Kestis who's amazingly performed by Cameron Monaghan my favourite SW protagonist by far, plus a stupidly strong side cast of characters, I really cannot wait to see how the next game assuming it'll be the end of a Trilogy will go an how Cal's story ultimately concludes. Open World is very God of War esque with open hub areas, however with this one, even though there's fewer planets than fallen order i'm pretty sure, there's FAR more to explore this time, especially Koboh which is massive and has tons to see and do, Pyloon's Saloon ends up being my fave spot in the game, I love when games give you a home base that grows over time depending on how much you explore and Jedi does it perfectly, with new convos every time you return and amazing fun characters like Skoova who you can just stumble upon in the world and hear stories from, it just has so many charming side content to explore and do, also loved the Jedi temples which reminded me of old AC games' temples.

Performance wise, I know this has been a huge point of contention especially for console users, I played this game on my 3060Ti/Ryzen 3600 PC, and while it wasn't flawless, the game ran pretty much perfectly fine the whole way through, the main areas that suffer in performance are Pyloon Saloon and surrounding area, the rest of the game performed really well for me going above 60FPS very often, I think I am just lucky since some people with far better PCs said it was unplayable, the one issue I had was stutters that I fixed by just freeing up space on my SSD/HDD which fixed it, however the occlusion bug is really annoying and breaks immersion in interiors by having weird white flashes when panning the camera around in a few places, hopefully this gets fixed soon. but overall, the game only crashed once and was perfectly playable at great FPS whole way through.

FINAL VERDICT

Jedi Survivor is a triumph, I don't even know how much better you can make this in a third game, with amazing combat, incredible writing and performances, and some of the best visuals I've ever seen that had me taking screenshots every 5 minutes, don't miss this one.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor - 9/10 - MUST-PLAY