Despite the high score, I'm very conflicted about this game. On the one hand, part of why Disney's exploitation of Star Wars has felt so bafflingly dull is that the imagery and sound design that Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic scuffled into existence 40-odd years ago remains perhaps the most inscrutable library of pop bangers ever created. From its subtle but no less direct commentary on fascism's mighty, comedic weight to ambience as simply relatable as a radiator's hum, Star Wars looks and sounds infallible. That it has become known for - even defined by - its failures is almost as remarkable an achievement as anything from the original trilogy.
But this franchise is ultimately a story of incredible failures, and this isn't the project to shake that weight. Admirably, to an almost overwhelming degree, Respawn puts in the work to prove Star Wars' worth. There's a hub world of daunting density, boss fights that insist (at least on the Jedi Master and above difficulties) on a near chemical mastery of the game's mechanics, a story that shames most beats of the modern big screen trilogy and a generally inspired breadth of game design that ought remind any fan of Titanfall 2's campaign what it means to sacrifice one's ego to a game designer. Never more so than when you find one of their combat or platforming challenges tucked inside a glowing gem inside a cave...though the latter can often demand just a little more than this game's systems are willing to account for, to the point they feel equally heavy handed as clever.
And yet...as much as Respawn clearly GETS IT, they don't...got it. That aforementioned hub world slowly becomes a constant pest, thanks to its incredibly misleading (hi, DOOM 2016) holographic map and innumerable dead ends owing to powers unlocked via story progression. Exacerbated by only being unable to fast travel via this franchise's eternally inexplicable bonfires (or, for non Soulsians, "meditation points") the world of Koboh is often disappointing to explore. And that's before you realize most of it's secrets are just new ways to trim our hero's beard or paint his lightsaber.
But the first game primed us for that sort of thing, so as disappointing as it is to experience it again, at least this time around almost all of these little puzzles conclude with fun, unique fights beforehand. I didn't play much Apex Legends beyond the 4th season reboot, but I did play a LOT of it beforehand, and if Respawn's three flagship titles say anything about the hundreds of people on its payroll, they love designing game mechanics.
I'm adding this paragraph last, because I can't figure out where else to put it: I don't think many of the characters rise above the roles they play in either the primary narrative or the expectations of a sprawling, pseudo-role playing action game. But I get why Turgle became a sort of mini-meme. For me, he's little more than an obvious, extremely loving ode to Psychonauts' Razputin, from design to voice actor, and that's enough.
But his stories are impressively off kilter as well, in stark contrast to the Pyloon's other most interactive regulars: a stereotypical cowboy bounty huntress, some treasure hunters disbelieving they're past their prime, a couple wanderers that just want to call anywhere home and, perhaps most notably, some grim looking guy apparently, and truly shockingly, allowed by the Star Wars arbiters to slowly unravel a story of what sounds like an intergalactic cocaine deal gone wrong. It must be hard to be an executive overseeing a game of this scope but...wow, and lol.
Which leads to something I wanted to ding this game a lot harder for, but began to feel it felt personal - the final third of this game consists of several extended sequences in which, especially on Jedi Master difficulty, the scenario designers seem to believe players can stomach heaps of shit. Whether it's boss fights that evolve over four or five phases with multiple - egregiously, unskippable - minute-long cutscenes or sequences of arena battles with no save point in sight, I suppose it's not for me to say whether a Star Wars game shouldn't be so damn unforgiving, but damn can this game be unforgiving.
I don't complain about that just to do it, either. Like the first game, Jedi Survivor seems to be in its pocket when the deck is stacked. Throughout the game, Jedi Master seemed like the obvious difficulty to play the game on, requiring an extremely satisfying level of attention while still allowing for just the right amount of skin-of-your-teeth, I usually play games on Normal but let's fucking go fuckery that a lot of games miss by only tipping the scales of HP/damage one way or the other.
But this game has a trifecta of boss battles that are so nuanced in their design, so punctuated by story beats and most importantly (for, it should be said, quite valid story reasons) biased against the player succeeding that I'd be fascinated to interview the designers of these fights. These three fights ask players to have such locked in mental and technical memories that they truly feel more unforgiving than most From Soft bosses, if and even only because progressing from the first to third phase can involve as much as three minutes of unskippable cinematics. If it's meant to be a test of focus, I failed.
Thankfully, the game allows you to drop the difficulty at any time, and believe me I descended the ladder gradual. I don't take pride in things I do privately, but each time I slinked down from 30+ hours of regular campaign play on Jedi Master to a lowly Padawan during these boss fights, I couldn't help but wonder...is it me, or the game? And how many of the millions of strangers who also played this game will judge me for my cowardice?
Because I worry this review might focus a bit too much on the negative, here I want to emphasize: I enjoyed trying to study and learn these bosses. Again, I played all of the game on Jedi Master otherwise. But at each pass, a combination of said cutscenes and other wild assault combos or, even worse, one-hit kills broke me. I had to move on.
Worst part being, again, I loved the design of each of these bosses. I wish I'd kicked their ass on concrete instead of silly putty.
Especially because the combat kicks ass, and there are gonna be enough professional and user reviews out there that explain why I don't need to go much into it. I often felt like an idiot forgetting that I wasn't just a guy with a laser sword but a full on Jedi, so other than the infinitely entertaining "force push a guy into the abyss" scenario I can't speak to the bemusing skill trees as much as I'd like to. But as someone who expected to love, only to spitefully appreciate, Sekiro's parry-based sword duels I truly love this franchise's only just so slightly softer approach to the same kind of idea. Maybe the lightsaber should be deadlier - of course it should - but at least it still makes all those crisp, wavy sounds whether it's bouncing off a Stormtrooper's shield or barely damaging a droid.
I wish it were just that one big thing, which at its core might be me being a thoroughly average game player, that held this game back from greatness. In some sense, it might even be nice if technical flaws marred my experience, though for me it was mostly noticing the ways in which these relative newcomers to the third person blockbuster had to cheat at things that studios like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics or even Remedy have come to personify.
On a Playstation 5 I didn't experience the debilitating glitches, crashes and so forth that PC and XBox players did - I just saw a game that often had to cut corners to attempt some of the big screen shenanigans of its inspirations. I'm talking chase sequences where NPCs are constantly warping into position for dramatic heft, traversal that belittles Jedi mobility for the same of a puzzle, or even simply, ironically, environment design that feels convoluted for designer satisfaction rather than player legibility.
But that's fine, because some of those games are unimaginable to begin with, and some of them have gameplay flaws that Respawn could never even dream of allowing to define one of their games.
But I do have to say, perhaps much like this review...this game has a hell of a pacing problem. I believe I mentioned it early, but once you realize the traversal skills come through story progression, story progression becomes the thing...only sometimes you want more health, or force energy, or stim pack capacity, and you can never be sure which tangent those things are tucked behind. But you CAN be sure that they are behind a tangent, some kind of tiny platforming or combat adventure the game will never outright tell you to do. This leads to a constant argument between what may or may not be worth pursuing, expectations about the difficulties of the next boss fights and honestly most often of all whether your brain can trust what your eyes thing they're understanding the map to be saying. At some point, no matter how exciting a slightly bigger health bar might be, the idea that the end of any given tunnel is just a new beard trim or color wheel for your lightsaber is far more discouraging than the gamer sickness of plundering every possible nook and cranny of a map.
This will likely read like a petty way to cap this, and I really don't mean it as an insult in the slightest. Like any regular guy, I'm more than prepared to say in the same breath that the original three Star Wars films had an impossible to describe impact on my adolescence but it's a mostly shit franchise full of junk and sorrow. Jedi Survivor does NOT, and because per Disney mandate it's quite an official Star Wars tale so why not feel strongly about it, do anything more than manipulate its characters into telling a standard video game hero's arc. It hints extremely early and often at what it wants to say about the nobility of Jedi, while also force pulling some incredibly flagrant references into the mix just to remind you that for all intents and purposes there's only one story worth telling in this timeless, multiple-galaxy spanning IP.
Anyway, I was Blaster + Dual Wield. I never figured out the love for Crossguard. Too slow.
But this franchise is ultimately a story of incredible failures, and this isn't the project to shake that weight. Admirably, to an almost overwhelming degree, Respawn puts in the work to prove Star Wars' worth. There's a hub world of daunting density, boss fights that insist (at least on the Jedi Master and above difficulties) on a near chemical mastery of the game's mechanics, a story that shames most beats of the modern big screen trilogy and a generally inspired breadth of game design that ought remind any fan of Titanfall 2's campaign what it means to sacrifice one's ego to a game designer. Never more so than when you find one of their combat or platforming challenges tucked inside a glowing gem inside a cave...though the latter can often demand just a little more than this game's systems are willing to account for, to the point they feel equally heavy handed as clever.
And yet...as much as Respawn clearly GETS IT, they don't...got it. That aforementioned hub world slowly becomes a constant pest, thanks to its incredibly misleading (hi, DOOM 2016) holographic map and innumerable dead ends owing to powers unlocked via story progression. Exacerbated by only being unable to fast travel via this franchise's eternally inexplicable bonfires (or, for non Soulsians, "meditation points") the world of Koboh is often disappointing to explore. And that's before you realize most of it's secrets are just new ways to trim our hero's beard or paint his lightsaber.
But the first game primed us for that sort of thing, so as disappointing as it is to experience it again, at least this time around almost all of these little puzzles conclude with fun, unique fights beforehand. I didn't play much Apex Legends beyond the 4th season reboot, but I did play a LOT of it beforehand, and if Respawn's three flagship titles say anything about the hundreds of people on its payroll, they love designing game mechanics.
I'm adding this paragraph last, because I can't figure out where else to put it: I don't think many of the characters rise above the roles they play in either the primary narrative or the expectations of a sprawling, pseudo-role playing action game. But I get why Turgle became a sort of mini-meme. For me, he's little more than an obvious, extremely loving ode to Psychonauts' Razputin, from design to voice actor, and that's enough.
But his stories are impressively off kilter as well, in stark contrast to the Pyloon's other most interactive regulars: a stereotypical cowboy bounty huntress, some treasure hunters disbelieving they're past their prime, a couple wanderers that just want to call anywhere home and, perhaps most notably, some grim looking guy apparently, and truly shockingly, allowed by the Star Wars arbiters to slowly unravel a story of what sounds like an intergalactic cocaine deal gone wrong. It must be hard to be an executive overseeing a game of this scope but...wow, and lol.
Which leads to something I wanted to ding this game a lot harder for, but began to feel it felt personal - the final third of this game consists of several extended sequences in which, especially on Jedi Master difficulty, the scenario designers seem to believe players can stomach heaps of shit. Whether it's boss fights that evolve over four or five phases with multiple - egregiously, unskippable - minute-long cutscenes or sequences of arena battles with no save point in sight, I suppose it's not for me to say whether a Star Wars game shouldn't be so damn unforgiving, but damn can this game be unforgiving.
I don't complain about that just to do it, either. Like the first game, Jedi Survivor seems to be in its pocket when the deck is stacked. Throughout the game, Jedi Master seemed like the obvious difficulty to play the game on, requiring an extremely satisfying level of attention while still allowing for just the right amount of skin-of-your-teeth, I usually play games on Normal but let's fucking go fuckery that a lot of games miss by only tipping the scales of HP/damage one way or the other.
But this game has a trifecta of boss battles that are so nuanced in their design, so punctuated by story beats and most importantly (for, it should be said, quite valid story reasons) biased against the player succeeding that I'd be fascinated to interview the designers of these fights. These three fights ask players to have such locked in mental and technical memories that they truly feel more unforgiving than most From Soft bosses, if and even only because progressing from the first to third phase can involve as much as three minutes of unskippable cinematics. If it's meant to be a test of focus, I failed.
Thankfully, the game allows you to drop the difficulty at any time, and believe me I descended the ladder gradual. I don't take pride in things I do privately, but each time I slinked down from 30+ hours of regular campaign play on Jedi Master to a lowly Padawan during these boss fights, I couldn't help but wonder...is it me, or the game? And how many of the millions of strangers who also played this game will judge me for my cowardice?
Because I worry this review might focus a bit too much on the negative, here I want to emphasize: I enjoyed trying to study and learn these bosses. Again, I played all of the game on Jedi Master otherwise. But at each pass, a combination of said cutscenes and other wild assault combos or, even worse, one-hit kills broke me. I had to move on.
Worst part being, again, I loved the design of each of these bosses. I wish I'd kicked their ass on concrete instead of silly putty.
Especially because the combat kicks ass, and there are gonna be enough professional and user reviews out there that explain why I don't need to go much into it. I often felt like an idiot forgetting that I wasn't just a guy with a laser sword but a full on Jedi, so other than the infinitely entertaining "force push a guy into the abyss" scenario I can't speak to the bemusing skill trees as much as I'd like to. But as someone who expected to love, only to spitefully appreciate, Sekiro's parry-based sword duels I truly love this franchise's only just so slightly softer approach to the same kind of idea. Maybe the lightsaber should be deadlier - of course it should - but at least it still makes all those crisp, wavy sounds whether it's bouncing off a Stormtrooper's shield or barely damaging a droid.
I wish it were just that one big thing, which at its core might be me being a thoroughly average game player, that held this game back from greatness. In some sense, it might even be nice if technical flaws marred my experience, though for me it was mostly noticing the ways in which these relative newcomers to the third person blockbuster had to cheat at things that studios like Naughty Dog, Crystal Dynamics or even Remedy have come to personify.
On a Playstation 5 I didn't experience the debilitating glitches, crashes and so forth that PC and XBox players did - I just saw a game that often had to cut corners to attempt some of the big screen shenanigans of its inspirations. I'm talking chase sequences where NPCs are constantly warping into position for dramatic heft, traversal that belittles Jedi mobility for the same of a puzzle, or even simply, ironically, environment design that feels convoluted for designer satisfaction rather than player legibility.
But that's fine, because some of those games are unimaginable to begin with, and some of them have gameplay flaws that Respawn could never even dream of allowing to define one of their games.
But I do have to say, perhaps much like this review...this game has a hell of a pacing problem. I believe I mentioned it early, but once you realize the traversal skills come through story progression, story progression becomes the thing...only sometimes you want more health, or force energy, or stim pack capacity, and you can never be sure which tangent those things are tucked behind. But you CAN be sure that they are behind a tangent, some kind of tiny platforming or combat adventure the game will never outright tell you to do. This leads to a constant argument between what may or may not be worth pursuing, expectations about the difficulties of the next boss fights and honestly most often of all whether your brain can trust what your eyes thing they're understanding the map to be saying. At some point, no matter how exciting a slightly bigger health bar might be, the idea that the end of any given tunnel is just a new beard trim or color wheel for your lightsaber is far more discouraging than the gamer sickness of plundering every possible nook and cranny of a map.
This will likely read like a petty way to cap this, and I really don't mean it as an insult in the slightest. Like any regular guy, I'm more than prepared to say in the same breath that the original three Star Wars films had an impossible to describe impact on my adolescence but it's a mostly shit franchise full of junk and sorrow. Jedi Survivor does NOT, and because per Disney mandate it's quite an official Star Wars tale so why not feel strongly about it, do anything more than manipulate its characters into telling a standard video game hero's arc. It hints extremely early and often at what it wants to say about the nobility of Jedi, while also force pulling some incredibly flagrant references into the mix just to remind you that for all intents and purposes there's only one story worth telling in this timeless, multiple-galaxy spanning IP.
Anyway, I was Blaster + Dual Wield. I never figured out the love for Crossguard. Too slow.