Jedi Survivor is effectively just more Jedi: Fallen Order. . . and that’s sorta ok?

I liked Fallen Order, it wasn’t a crazy hardcore Souls-like game, but it was enough to be challenging, and super super long. Great setpieces, great abilities, amazing fluid combat, and it was a refreshingly outstanding Star Wars story.

Jedi Survivor is . . more of all of that. It’s an incredibly similar situation to God of War: Ragnarok, where they didn’t take all your powers from you, you start off reasonably competent, then over the course of the game they expand what you can do to go beyond what the first game offered.

Also similar to Ragnarok, the game didn’t really feel like as chock-full of content as its predecessor. Jedi Survivor has one main full fleshed out hub world, which you can explore many disparate biomes of in a sort-of open-world-y approach, and then there’s a couple smaller planets you make various excursions to as away-missions. You never really get a full “go wherever you want” moment like in Fallen Order, but maybe I’m just filling that in with imagined memories.

Length felt, again, just like Ragnarok. It’s more focused than Fallen Order, and felt like it went past faster. Like this started as an idea of some DLC, which then grew into a whole game, but not like . . fully. Like they only found ways to expand it out to 70-80% of a game. But that’s not a bad thing! I will absolutely take a tight and focused game over a game that forgets what the hell it’s doing half way through or is filled with under-baked ideas to fill time.

Then there’s the bugs. The game is apparently hot garbage on PC, though I hear it’s been getting better with patches. I played on Series X as usual, and it was fine. It wasn’t like Hi Fi Rush or anything, that was effectively PERFECT right out the gate. There’s normal bugs common in modern high-budget games – graphical hitching, texture pop-in, wonky cloth physics, etc – those I can get over, it’s silly that we have to accept these things, but whatever, I’m not the kind of person who loses their mind when a game drops some frames or has to dip down to 1440p to maintain framerate. This game goes beyond that to real busted stuff, like hard crashes for daring to do something too awesome.

On multiple occasions in my playthrough I found a hard barrier where the game would go “dude, sick” and crash. Like I just got one of the major lightsaber upgrades and I was sorting through what all the moveset was, and went to encounter the first dude with it, dodged them, hit slow-mo, jammed the lightsaber into his trachea, but did so while it was triggering a QTE, which failed, so the game crashed with a big “mash X now!” thing on screen.

I also had a situation where I was deeeeep in combat between two warring factions, mowing down stormtroopers and droids. So I dodge one and he chucks out a couple grenades, then I activate slow-mo, push a group of stormtroopers into the grenade area of effect, then as I dash backwards I redirect a third dude into the area of effect. The grenade explodes, the game crashes. Dude, Sick.

I still enjoyed the game greatly, though. If you liked Fallen Order you’ll probably enjoy Jedi Survivor too. But maybe wait for a discount.