He will survive! (Star Wars: Jedi Survivor in Review)

     Cal Kestis is a strong character in the Star Wars universe, even if you're not familiar with him yet. Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order came out a few years back and began the saga of a Jedi Padawan in hiding during the beginning years of the Empire before being found out and through a wild series of events, began something of an early rebellion. Cal and his new allies Cere, Greez, and Merrin (a former Jedi Master who has cut herself off from the force, a four armed ship pilot with some rocky morals, and a Night Sister from Dathomir respectively) have to make their way through the galaxy and face off against some nasty odds. I really liked the game when it came out and I have been known to say that Respawn Entertainment is the only EA-owned studio that is still making good content, or at least games that I'm interested in. I'm happy to say that we finally have a sequel to that game in the form of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. This is not a perfect game, and there are a lot of reports of pretty bad performance for the PC port of this game, but as I played the PS5 version, I didn't see too many really bad bugs. There was one really funny glitch that I'll talk about in a bit, but overall, the game was pretty solid, so let's get to talking about it as we take our ship into hyperspace.

The Force is still strong with you!

    With games that are sequels of this type, it's common to have the main character losing the powers that they achieved in the first game, but this game does things differently. From the beginning of the game, you have pretty much all of the powers that Cal discovered in the first game, and from there, he learns new skills and gets new gadgets to help him throughout the quest. It's a nice touch to the proceedings here, and something that I think really made this game feel much more fresh and new than a lot of sequels. This game still has the makings of a "Souls-like" game, though the first one was the only game of that type that I've actually beaten, and as such is probably much easier than any of the ones made by From Software. This game was a good bit easier than the previous one, I played both on Jedi Knight difficulty, which is standard, but I had a much rougher time with the first one. I don't know exactly why that is, it could just be due to many of the bosses in Jedi Survivor being somewhat similar, having lightsabers and being humanoid, whereas it seemed like there were more animal bosses in the past game. There was really only one required fight that gave me a really hard time, but the other fights weren't cakewalks by any means.  I will say that there are a few optional bosses that have just one hit kills, which is probably one of my least favorite tropes in games, especially ones that take a while to reload and then you have to backtrack to where you were. All the times that I was grabbed by the one-hit-kill moves just made me extremely frustrated and then it felt like I would have to wait an eternity, even though it was only about 30 seconds or so with the PS5 load times. 

    The exploration in this game is pretty phenomenal, I have to say. There's something a lot of fun about backtracking to the other areas that you've come to before, and the map system this time around feels a lot better, even though it's basically the same map system that was utilized in Jedi Fallen Order. It made it much easier to find certain obstacles to overcome, and something about it makes it much easier to get back to where I was before. The traversal mechanics in this game were also just really nice. I went into the game almost completely blind, so I was ecstatic to get a grappling hook in the first mission and to be able to use it in the whole game, in addition to the various force abilities that you receive. The Wall Run and Double Jump abilities also help a lot, and seem almost standard for Respawn's games, after the Titanfall games used them to great effect (I would love to get a new Titanfall game sometime soon, but at least the traversal mechanics live on). I just love a game with a good grappling hook mechanic, it really adds to the action in a meaningful way! When you have that original mechanic that is introduced early on in this one, and then build on it with other abilities that you get later, it makes it even that much better.

Fittingly, a story of survival.

    Like I said earlier, I'm not going to give spoilers for the story, but I did like the story overall. I was happy to see the characters from the original game once again, and some of them had much bigger roles than they had in their first appearance. Merrin in particular always made me really happy whenever she showed up, as she seems like the character who has grown the most in between the two games. It's nice to see what her Nightsister magic can do now that she's on your team for basically the whole game, which is nice. I also like the concept of the team-up attacks that were added for this game, even though you really only have two people who join you out in the field, Merrin and Bode (with Bode being much less helpful and less interesting overall). Without giving away the story, I will say that the pacing is really weird, with the Empire actually not being involved in a huge way, even though the first game had them posed as the main issue for the entire time. Here, they're always a looming threat, of course, but they don't take much direct action until almost the end of the story. It's really weird, but it does work well for the most part. Also, I have to mention that Richard Horowitz (voice actor of Zim from "Invader Zim" and many other characters) plays a character that looks like a frog and I just love that. He always voices fun (and maybe slightly annoying) characters, so I'm glad he's now technically in the Star Wars universe.

Chaos in space!

    This game is a good time overall, but let's talk a bit about the performance issues that I experienced. Hopefully these are things that can be patched eventually, but the biggest issue is the main hub area that you're constantly returning to throughout the game. There's a cantina (or canteen) that is owned by Greez which acts as a gathering place for a lot of characters that you meet throughout the game, but consistently, the game would grind to a halt for about 10 seconds or so while I waited for the doors to open. It's very weird to have such an obvious and visible loading screen in a game that is full of the "slowly slide inside the crack in this wall" style of hiding loading screens. It's a wild loading screen for what is not a very big area, but it's just full of different characters I guess. This was always annoying whenever I had to go inside the Canteen, but ultimately it didn't stand in the way of progress, it just made me want to avoid the area as long as I didn't have to go there. There was one glitch that I referenced earlier in this review which was really funny to me that I feel like I have to tell you about. There was one boss fight that ended in the enemy begging Cal to give him a warrior's death before charging at him, resulting in Cal giving him what he asked for. This was supposed to be a really serious moment in the story, of course, but the enemy started sliding around the floor as he was making his passionate speech. What was even worse is that the following scene ended with Cal cutting off his head (I think), but the enemy's body flew around the room so fast that I couldn't really tell exactly what was happening. Immediately after the scene, the guy's body was gone. That was the only glitch of that caliber that happened as far as I can remember, but it was really funny how completely it removed the tension of the scene.

    I really like Cal Kestis as a character, and I'm glad that we've gotten a new game with him, even though I think it would have been nice for Respawn Entertainment to take a bit longer to fix some of the performance issues before sending it out to market. I had a really fun time with the game on PS5, and I hope the PC ports will get fixed sometime soon, so that people will hopefully enjoy the game as much as they would normally. I don't know if this game made as much of an impact as the original game in this series, though I do think it might have been more fun, just with the different gameplay mechanics and different places to explore. I hope there is going to be more to this character, especially as the end of the game definitely leaves it open to another game in the series. As I said earlier, I've never been big on tough hack-and-slash games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne, just because they're a bit too challenging for me, but this game was a nice challenge, even though it wasn't as hard even as the first game. It's an enjoyable time overall, and I was genuinely surprised at some of the fun touches that were put in this game.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! I really liked this game and I hope you did too if you've tried it out. Obviously, I understand if you didn't, since it seems like this game is a mess in terms of performance, but I hope you do. Thanks so much for all of your support, and I hope you'll have a great week! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed Jedi Survivor, and I'll talk to you again soon. May the force be with you, always.