I wasn't a fan of Fallen Order, but I really enjoyed Jedi Survivor. It's still largely the same: a search action game with very minor soulslike elements, but almost every aspect has been improved. Instead of a scattering of small planets, you have two major ones with a couple of smaller areas. And, thank christ, they have fast travel between save points now.

Over the course of the game you also get even more traversal options, which was the most fun part of the game for me. By the end you're grappling, air-dashing, and wall-running all over the place. Combat is mostly the same, but with two new styles: a slower, more powerful stance that gives your saber the dumbass little vents on the sides, and a saber/blaster stance, sorta like in Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin. However, for some reason, you can only equip two stances at a time, so you pretty much just want a stronger one for bigger targets and a faster one for large groups. There isn't a whole lot of difference between most of them.

I had a better time with the combat in this than I did in the first game, but I also made the mistake of playing the first game on hard. It made the already sloppy, weightless combat feel even worse, as enemies could take a whole lot of hits from a damn light saber. I played this one on normal, and at least most "regular" enemies will die from one hit, which feels... accurate. The Jedi cut through these guys like butter.

The story is another strong suit. I would say the characters are the main area in which this series excels. They're better Star Wars "movies" than anything since Empire Strikes Back, with the exceptions of KOTOR and Andor. Greez is good and my best friend and also my space dad.

Another plus is that Cal has a variety of sick outfits this time. I hated the stupid-ass poncho in the first game, and the developers seem to be aware that nobody liked it. There was One decent outfit in Fallen Order, and it's the one used in flashbacks here. Characters also joke about Cal's stinky old fuckin ponchos pretty frequently.

So, I would say this is a solid 4/5 game, b--

hold on, the review crashed. I have to restart it. Oh, wait, now it's stuck. Restarting again...

Alright, look. I'm not saying EA are technically "Criminally negligent" in allowing this game to ship in its current state, and I'm also not saying it's "actually fraudulent" to charge 70 dollars for a game that's, at best, an early beta build. But one certainly could come to those conclusions! My total count of Things That Required A Restart are as follows:

- 6 hard crashes to the dashboard.
- 1 freeze.
- 3 softlocks: twice, the game would not allow me to force push an item that I needed to push to progress, and in another instance it would not let me use BD's electro-dart ability to raise a platform. Nothing would enable it, not even fast traveling to another point and back.
- 2 memory leaks, degrading performance to the single digits. One of these ended in a hard crash.

As weird as it is to say, these crashes might not be a huge deal in most games. You know, games that autosave all the time? But, in their strange dedication to providing surface-level Souls elements, this game only saves when you rest at a meditation point. So if you're running around finding collectibles, make sure to rest as often as possible so you don't lose an hour of progress. I did.

And about the performance... hoo boy. It seems to be bad all around, and PS5 is probably the most stable version out there. I played on the 30fps mode, because the "60" one is more like "somewhere from 30-48" and it was usually fairly consistent, but also a low-res mess. The entire game was blurry, with weird trails following most characters, especially near foliage and reflective surfaces. I don't know enough about underlying tech to say exactly what causes this, but it looked awful. The game was frequently running at what appeared to be 720p or lower, causing me to miss collectibles that I passed by because they simply blended into the rest of the visual soup.

I would say that I recommend this game when these issues are fixed. I WOULD say that, but I won't, because many of the first game's bugs were never fixed. At best, I hope the PS6 or PS5 Pro version can brute force it into running a bit better, like the PS5 version of Fallen Order did.

There's a great game in here. It's a shame that Respawn keeps releasing broken products.

I'll be honest, I kind of get why I don't play a lot of warriors games, I get burnt out on them pretty quickly. I mean it's repetitive to it's core, and while that can be fun, it can also be a bit tedious if you want to do side stuff before story stuff, which I tend to like to do.

Either way, it was a really good game, I think most of the characters I played were really fun (my top 5 being Greatsword Link, Sooga, Teba, Impa, and Mipha). Framerate dipping aside, I think this game is really neat, and I think a neat AU story from the base world of BotW.

The one complaint I have is that Aster felt like a very nothing character at the end of the day. We know what he's doing it, I just don't get why entirely. Even then, I don't find him a particularly interesting villain for when he's on screen, he's fairly generic and flat.