Note: 2023 was a fantastic year in gaming. I may have written this back in May and then gotten too caught up playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baulder’s Gate 3 to actually publish it until now! Enjoy this very late review to see how Cal Kestis’s second adventure builds upon the solid foundation of Jedi: Fallen Order.

The Good

Starting Powerful

Most sequels fumble this aspect of game design. In order to get players accustomed to playing the game, they find some convoluted excuse to take away all your powers or goodies from the first game. Survivor, thankfully, takes the opposite tact. In fact, it really feels like Cal has only grown in power since you last saw him. The opening hour or so serves as a great tutorial without having to rely on making you weak. Even a good 6+ hours in I was still discovering little powers or items from the original that I worked so hard to get and I thankfully just had at my disposal without having to force lift a finger.

The Best Uncharted Game in Years

Three of Survivor’s biggest strengths just so happen to be mainstays of my beloved Uncharted series.

The most obvious of the bunch is all the climbing that is clearly inspired by Mr. Drake himself. Thanks to mixing in tons of platforming with mountaineering, it never feels like a chore, and it really hammers home the grace of a Jedi.

Survivor also really embraces the partnership aspects of Uncharted games. Seemingly half of the game features a buddy tagging along with you on missions, helping make things more interesting by shooting both the shit and the empire with you. This is where the writing in the game really shines as all of the interpersonal relationships really get to grow and give you a greater sense of the family aspect of Cal’s crew.

Last, and perhaps most importantly of all are the absolutely bananas set pieces. There are numerous big set pieces (especially on Jedha) that showcases a development studio at the top of their game. Everything feels so epic and fast paced, and it’s tuned just right to make it feel like you’re pulling off these grand displays of power without causing frustration due to frequent deaths.

Crossguard Stance

I am a man of simple tastes. Whenever I play a Soulsborne game, I go hard on the Strengh/Dex build, so I can wield the biggest, slowest sword possible and just absolutely smash enemies with it. While Survivor features a few new stances like the pirate-y Blaster stance, the true highlight is the Kylo Ren inspired Crossguard Stance that lets you charge attacks and throw caution to the wind as you hope to connect a devastating blow before you get destroyed. After I unlocked this, I probably spent 99% of the remaining time using it exclusively, only switching to double bladed to take out some of the bigger crowds.

Bounties

One of the newest mechanics in the game is a series of 16 bounty hunters that are after you. These fights are maybe a step down in difficulty from the Legendary Enemies, but they are a fun little challenge to sprinkle in throughout your journey as they will take you all over the galaxy. Be sure to complete them all because the payoff is so perfect.

Merrin

In what should come as a shock to no one who played the original game, everyone’s favorite night sister is once again the star of this adventure. Her rapport with Cal is even tighter this time around, and her powers are perhaps stronger than the Jedi’s own ones setting up some of the biggest and most fun moments in the game. I almost felt bad for the other companions in the game because they had to know Cal and myself would’ve both rather been hanging out with Merrin whenever it was just them around.

Turgle

This down on his luck scammer is so charming that you will find yourself vowing to take down the entire empire single handedly if they so much as harm a single scale on his body. It felt like every time I returned to the Saloon, I found myself instantly running over to Turgle to see what new misadventures he had to share.

Skoova Stev

While Turgle might be getting all the love online, the real breakout star of Survivor is the minuscule Scottish Alien that you can find at many of the games ponds, diving for new denizens for the Saloon’s fish tank and regaling you with Captain Ahab level stories. It brought me such joy every time I saw the little dude dive in the water, and, fittingly, the last thing I did in the game was finish his fishing collection.

The Western of it All

The Jedi way lends itself readily to more of a Samurai type vibe, but as soon as you step foot on the main planet of Koboh, it becomes clear that there is serious John Wayne DNA at this game’s heart. Hell, there are even giant tumbleweed enemies!

Pyloon Saloon

One of the biggest Western drivers of the game is your buddy Greaves’ little oasis of a bar in the midst of the vast desert. This serves as a home base that you can upgrade and recruit characters to leading to tons of conversations, side quests, and good times.

More Open World than Metroidvania

Whereas Fallen Order was clearly inspired by Metroid and featured tons of backtracking, Survivor makes things far more open. Sure there are times when you realize you’ll need to revisit an area with new powers to unlock some cosmetic upgrade, the main story tends to shy away from backtracking and is always propelling you forward. While I do love a good Metroidvania, I did not miss that aspect this time around. With Cal being more experienced and powerful to begin with, it makes sense.

The Super Metroid Homage

Despite the move to more of an open world vibe, the game does still feature a fantastic reference to Super Metroid that put the biggest smile on my face early on and really set the tone for the fun and joy I was going to experience.

The Leap

While playing this game, I often thought of a couple of other recent sequels that did not quite deliver on the promise of their predecessors in Horizon Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarok. Those game felt like a lot more of what made the originals great with too much bloat to make it feel like a meatier sequel. I didn’t really get that sense here. Instead, it felt like they really were making a leap in their second iteration. Sure, some of the things could have used more fleshing out, but they took a lot of big swings and most of them landed.

The Mixed Bag

Performance

It is such a shame that the discourse around the launch of this game seemed to have been solely centered around yet another big AAA title releasing with performance issues and not how fun the game itself was. For the most part, my playthrough was not overly plagued by problems. In nearly 40 hours of gameplay, I suffered 3 crashes and only encountered one somewhat buggy area that made me load my last save. Playing in Quality mode (favoring graphics to frame rate) seems to have been the way to go on the PS5, and while you would notice the occasional stutter or texture taking too long to load, I never found myself taken out of the incredible Jedi experience.

Not Having 500 Lightsaber Duels

Lightsaber battles in this game are so incredibly tense that you will be fearing for your virtual limbs. Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough of them. The game does a smart thing where it arms some bounty hunters with lightsabers to employ the goodness more often, but those never quite match up with the epic boss battles of the main villains.

Legendary Enemies

Survivor seems to have gone with a quantity over quality approach to their legendary enemies unlike the far more subdued Fallen Order. About half of these encounters will make your heart race and require an hour plus of banging your head against the wall trying to figure out how to finally gain an edge with the Rancor and Spawn of Oggdo fights being particular highlights that will destroy your will to live for an evening or two. The other half, however, hardly seem worthy of the legendary title and fell easily. Maybe I was too powerful when I took those latter foes on, or maybe they were just trying to squeeze some more padding into the game. Still, I’m incredibly glad that I decided to see them all through and make legendary status for my Cal.

The Story

The one area where Survivor pales in comparison to its predecessor is the story. Some great beats are hit, but the overarching story feels a little meandering. The 5 year time jump provides a great starting point, but the main villain of the game does not seem overly interesting or really all that threatening. It’s clear he’s a placeholder to set up something bigger and they should have just let that bigger thing have more time to shine and develop than being rushed in over the final hours. In the end, it becomes more about the character interactions and learning things through force echoes than the main story.

So Many Skill Trees

You can’t possibly release a big AAA game without skill trees these days, and Survivor has more than enough to hold over all of this year’s big games. Having so much control over your character is great (especially with all the stance options), but with so many upgrades to choose from, I often forgot what I was going for and would wait until I had 5 or more points to spend and just do big changes at a time.

The Bad

The Map

This game and Nier: Automata are in a tight race for worst video game maps ever. Everything is fuzzy and it gets overly confusing trying to map out routes especially with all the verticality inherent of the levels. Part of the problem might have been the more barebones UI the game went with forcing me to constantly check my map and reorient to where I was going instead of seeing it signposted like a lot of open world games. There are some improvements to make it clearer what areas you have fully explored and which you haven’t, but it is not enough to save these disastrous maps.

Flying Kicks

Listen, the Crossguard stance is one of the most bad ass things in the game, which makes its running attack move that much more disappointing. The amount of times I tried to close the distance on a tough boss only to meekly kick him and fall down almost seemed like a joke. At least you get a trophy for pulling this move off while sporting a mullet.

All the Currencies

In order to purchase items from the various vendors scattered throughout the galaxy you’re gonna need to collect Priorite shards, Jedha Scrolls, Bounty Pucks, and Data Discs. Each vendor takes only one of those, and it always seems like you’re swimming in the ones you don’t need and lacking in the ones you do. It almost seems like the kind of thing you would set up in a micro-transaction heavy game except there are no such predatory practices at play here. At least the vendors do give you plenty of good rumors to follow-up on.

The Timing

Jedi Survivor is easily this year’s recipient of the Horizon Zero Dawn award for poor release timing. With just two weeks between the release of Jedi Survivor and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players could not properly breathe and enjoy Cal’s latest adventure. Hell, I wrote most of this review over a five months ago and could not be bothered to edit it until now because the draw of Hyrule was that strong.

The Verdict

All in all, Jedi: Survivor is precisely what a sequel needs to be. It builds up on what made the first game great, while also adding a ton of new content to provide for a far more epic experience. If the inevitable sequel can manage to get the story back up to the same quality of the original, then we will easily have one of the greatest trilogies in gaming.