Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Jedi Knight Cal Kestis returns ready to strike back against the Empire.
Reminder for reviews: I'm only really going to talk about what stood out to me, so anything I don't bring up is most likely just fine.
If an issue isn't bad enough to detract from the experience, then that's a good thing - just like something not standing out as being noteworthy doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing.
It's perfectly fine for a thing to serve its purpose and nothing more.
MOVIES
- Still no new movies watched, although I have re-watched Prometheus (decent, with serious flaws), Alien: Covenant (ridiculous), Ready or Not (excellent) and The Batman (also excellent).
- Hopefully, my copy of Deadpool & Wolverine will reach me early and I can watch it while recovering from birthday shenanigans this weekend.
GAMES
- Game summary: As one of the last surviving Jedi Knights, Cal is driven to make a stand during the galaxy’s darkest times - but how far is he willing to go to protect himself, his crew, and the legacy of the Jedi Order? (Xbox.com)
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a frustrating game, both as an experience and something to write about, because it's one of those games that makes scoring it impossible.
- First off, it looks great >95% of the time, with only some slowdown and textures needing to load in when turning the camera quickly with lots happening on-screen.
- Jedi: Survivor is absolutely a step-up from Fallen Order and I was impressed at just how good it looked on my Series S.
- The music, sound effects and voice acting are all great too, with brilliant original pieces of music and a helping hand from some classic John Williams too.
- And, as mentioned, the performances are great, which I assume included motion capture on top of the voice acting.
- There is a really great story here, filled with plenty of twists and turns that never went too far or started to feel like it was wearing out its welcome.
- There are also some pretty spectacular locations to visit, and some really great-looking creatures and enemies to deal with throughout.
- I also like how well Cal (played again by Cameron Monaghan) can move around the various environments, although I wish new traversal methods weren't locked behind story progression.
- All the above sounds great, right? But have you noticed the key part that hasn't been mentioned?
- I really, really don't like the combat in this game, especially when up against large groups.
- Credit to Respawn for not taking Cal's powers away from the end of Fallen Order, but I think they added a bit too much this time around.
- It is very easy to unintentionally attack or take some other action that you absolutely do not want to do, but the button combinations are too similar or you held one button a fraction too long.
- And when you're fighting half a dozen different enemy types and their variety of attacks that all need different responses at the same time, it's far too easy for one mistake to make a fight unwinnable.
- It's this poor encounter design that also makes Jedi: Survivor feel a lot, lot harder than Fallen Order.
- I'm not a great gamer or anything, but I went through Fallen Order on Jedi Knight (normal) difficulty with a few struggles here and there, but nothing too bad and I never changed the difficulty once.
- In Jedi: Survivor? I found myself constantly adjusting the difficulty to avoid getting frustrated with how badly set up some of the fights were.
- Weirdly, it's the boss fights I found the most fun as most of them are single enemies you can focus on without needing to dodge, parry, block, avoid area of effect attacks and attack all at the same time.
- If you're a casual gamer/Star Wars fan, just stick to Story difficulty and blast through what is an excellent adventure to avoid getting frustrated by the combat.
- I think the biggest problem around the controls in combat is that it feels almost like the developers designed the game to be played immediately after Fallen Order.
- It might well be the case that if you go straight into Jedi: Survivor after finishing the first game that things might feel easier to deal with.
- It kind of sucks if it's been a while between finishing Fallen Order and this though, and I can't imagine how long it might take to master the controls might for first-time players.
- Then again, I don't want to be too harsh because I had this issue with Batman: Arkham Knight, not enjoying it at all when I first played it, years after Arkham City.
- But when I played Arkham Knight straight after Arkham City, it became my favourite game in the series.
- It could be the same here, but the problem is that the Star Wars Jedi games, and especially Survivor, are much longer games than the Arkham series.
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a fantastic Star Wars experience, but disappointing encounter design and trying to give the players a few too many abilities making combat far less intuitive than it should be. [7/10]
TV
- No new TV shows started yet, but the previously-mentioned birthday recovery period may be a decent starting point this weekend to begin something new.
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