Having not played the first game I was surprisingly kinda excited to play Star Wars Jedi Survivor and it was ... good? Idk I liked the game sure but of course I heard about the game releasing in a messy state and my excitement kinda got drained but I persevered.

First off I did have performance issues throughout the game. At the very start there is supposed to be a prompt to use the force to move a piece of railing to climb up, I never got the prompt and when i quit to the main menu and started the save back up again, my game crashed. I also had frames drop during cutscenes very frequently. So this put a damper on my overall score for the game.

I found some of the platforming very inconsistent, when it was good it was great I loved it but when it was bad... it just didn't work? On multiple occasions Cal just fell off the wall for no reason and wouldn't climb onto some walls even though I jumped as near as possible to it. I will say though near the end of the game when you get the grappling hook, I found that very fun.

The combat is very good, I thoroughly enjoyed the options of stances and upgrading each stance till I found my favourite (crossguard). The parrying system is satisfying and hitting blasters back at stormtroopers gave me good supply of dopamine. One grievance I did have with the combat was some enemies unblockable attacks (red attacks). The game says to evade the enemies when they flash red and sometimes that didn't work (potential skill issue). I also thought the last boss fight with Bode was ridiculously hard considering I played on Jedi Knight or Normal.

The story was great which was a pleasant surprise considering it's star wars and they haven't made very many good movies recently. I love Cal as a protagonist and found his relationship with Merrin believable and compelling. I LOVED Bode turning bad, I kinda thought he was dodgy at the start but he won me over as a good guy eventually and then boom he kills Master Cordova, great twist. I loved Dagan Gera's story arc and liked how he had a very good reason to be a bad guy and found him very believable as the main villain for the first half, two thirds of the game. Cere's death felt meaningful and the fact Darth Vader was the one to do it makes me like it even more. I also found the game pretty funny. I thought some of the characters in the Saloon were class, like Turgle who you save from Rayvis. I came across some Echos that were Turgle getting threatened by bandits for trying to scam them which I found hilarious.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor gets a 3.5/5 for me and it's a very frustrating score because I think with a few tweaks to the mechanics and bug fixes it could easily have been a 4 or even 4.5.