Much like how the original STAR WARS was a melting pot of all of George Lucas' interests (Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, not wanting to be his dad), the JEDI series from Respawn continues to intrigue with how it picks the most engaging elements from a variety of other successful games: DARK SOULS, UNCHARTED, and now, RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2. While it mixes all these together into an entertaining enough of a cocktail, this is an embarrassingly kneecapped game, suffering from technical eyesores a year after release that make you wonder why Respawn goes through all the effort if they can't deliver a fully functional product.

The diet SOULS combat is still here, and it's more varied, with more lightsaber stances and enemy types to take on. The way the game dolls out skill progression and locks the stance-switching ability kinda forces you to just invest in whatever you already use the most, which limits the appeal of trying all the new options. I personally never used Blaster Stance once, because by the time I got it, I was so deep into building up dual-blade and crossguard that I couldn't be bothered to start a grind over.

Traversal is much the same as FALLEN ORDER. Climbing, wall running, and now there's a short range grapple hook (Which would've been way cooler IMO if it could've been used in combat). I have to be fair and lodge a complaint here that I lodged in my UNCHARTED 4 review: Games like A THIEF'S END, GOD OF WAR RAGNAROK, and JEDI really need to add a stamina meter to climbing if it's going to be such a constant method of movement. When it's just brain-off, directional auto-climbing, it's so unengaging. There are some GREAT sequences where you need to very swiftly time jumping combos to escape enemies, or fight bosses. Moments like this are great for keeping you on your toes and making you feel like all the platforming was building up to something.

Cal and his Pals are probably, to date, my favorite SW characters since Disney bought Lucasfilm. Interesting stories, engaging motivations. I'm not a fan of splitting the cast up between games, because you lose a lot of character development and narrative consistency when you're left to infer things that happened over a 5 year in-universe gap (i.e. my big gripe with the Uncharted sequels). The thematic throughline of SURVIVOR asks you to consider what kind of life you live when all you can pursue is vengeance. If all that you have to survive for is correcting a perceived injustice, whether real or imagined, then what, or who, are you really living for? The new characters make the larger cast very interesting, but I will say the longer Disney continues to mine the years between trilogies for content, the more they risk dooming the narrative appeal of the mainline films. I mean, how impactful was Order 66 when all of the Games, Books, and TV Shows keep revealing that there's always a new litter of Jedi that managed to survive?

Larger worlds to explore were very cool. The RDR2 comparison comes from having a central home base to build up and maintain, with characters populating it based on your progress for conversations that build up the world and allow you to unlock items. As much as I liked the semi-open worlds and their Metroidvania progression paths, I wish we could've explored MORE planets with unseen biospheres. Koboh and Jedah are just Clone Fighters of Kashyyk and Tatooine IMO. I'm fucking tired of sand planets in Star Wars.

Last but not least, I played this nearly a full calendar year after its release and I encountered T-posing baddies, character torsos detaching from their heads, NPC allies getting stuck on terrain, textures failing to load, and a host of other laughable bugs, glitches, and performance drops. Nothing game breaking or which crashed my game. But dudes, this is from one of the biggest developers on the planet, and licensed from the most popular IP of all time. How can you have something this broken out in the wild? What's in the 130+GB install size? The team said in interview they were specifically targeting next gen hardware with SSD drives. Why does it play like it's on a floppy disk at times?

I'm giving this a low 7, but if this was a polished title that had taken more time to alleviate its presentation issues, I'd easily call this a high 8. I had a good time despite the bumps, mostly from the story, and I'm personally excited for the third installment in this trilogy. Here's hoping it doesn't fall apart like Ben Quadinaros's podracer.