I'm going to link my enemy combat design video series because so much of what's frustrating or disappointing in this game ties directly to what I care about most as a combat designer and why I created these videos in the first place. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaAa7EbxLMGOqF1EKT-ppDtgAUdrHC_ps
Overall, Jedi Survivor takes the successes of Jedi Fallen Order and fans them with the hot flames of more and more gameplay scope, much of which does little to improve the established formula.
Performance Gripes
This game's performance sucks. It's not optimized. I waited a year to play it, hoping it would get better, and it did, but barely. The variance in how well the game could run in different areas (on an RTX 3080 and 12th Gen Intel i7) ranged from 15fps to 60fps, probably averaging 45 with massive slowdowns in certain areas (the worst was outdoors on Jedha, which was unplayable without me pausing the game to lower the graphics settings to the minimum temporarily, and it still ran at <45fps). It doesn't fully utilize my CPU or GPU (and I explored all the fixes players have tried to find), so it's a mystery how the studio employed Unreal Engine so poorly.
Environment Art
Aside from issues with clarity in level design and lighting (below), this game is GORGEOUS. The art is the biggest reason I did not stop playing despite my annoyance with its gameplay. The fundamental Star Wars identity is crystal clear, the fidelity and range of environments are beautiful to look at, and spaces feel engaging to explore even when the level design becomes convoluted or unclear. No complaints here!
Story
Meh. It's not much of anything, it's barely even a story. The few meaningful plot beats are flimsy, the core motivation for the quest barely makes sense, and every time someone started yammering about "Tanalorr," my eyes glazed over. The characters are charming, I particularly liked Bode, but the game does very little with them. The immensely copious, mostly boring, and expository conversations with the various denizens that Cal can collect for his saloon also did nothing for me (other than stab me directly in the heart with the trauma of the KotOR Remake team I worked on having been dissolved). There's nothing positive to say here, but there's also not much negative to say because, frankly, there's nothing of substance going on in the first place, good or bad.
World Design
The maps are so big and jammed so full of collectibles that they border on being a 90s throwback. There are literally HUNDREDS of collectibles, most of which feel frivolous and time-wasting, with an imbalanced spread between the rare "Wow, that challenge was enjoyable to overcome to get this!" to the more common "Why on earth would you put this here? The environment is completely unreadable, and I don't feel bad I couldn't find it."
One of the core collectible types is just a faint blue aura, which, in some environments, looks exactly like everything else that is visible around the player at all times. One of the core collectible types is literally invisible and only conveyed through a response from the droid on Cal's shoulder, often tied to innocuous environmental objects that a player would have no reason to want to look at. There's a guy the player can meet who captures fish FOR the player, and one can only assume this was a fishing minigame that was reasonably cut from the game's absurd scope. Why can I plant seeds on a roof? This doesn't feel like a gameplay verb that is doing much of anything for this experience.
I don't have anything fundamentally against the overall design of adding a big hub world with lots of objectives to do, but outside of the critical path, Koboh honestly starts to feel like a huge mess the longer the game goes on. One big part of this is that the map is simply too big and becomes utterly unreadable other than "Did I go through this door before?" Beyond that, there are SO many "return to this with a new mechanic" moments that basically incentivize the player to ignore the entire planet until they're near the end of the game. At this point, I was exhausted with so many other flaws that the idea of trying to do meaningful side content (the actual quests, not just fetching hundreds of collectibles) felt like a waste of my time -- especially given the basis of PACING in a game, which is "evenly distribute side content alongside the main story."
It really feels like the scope of Koboh completely escaped the team, and they lost any sense of why a player would engage with it at any specific moment in the game. There was no basis from other games they were drawing on for this experiment, and I don't think the experiment was particularly successful.
The critical path in terms of level design, however, is generally... pretty good! The visual differentiation between various areas on Koboh was overall quite cool (though some are more boring than others), and the other planets the player visits at least have a clear visual identity, though were mostly less exciting for sci-fi locales. The level design of traversal was basic for most of the game until all the mechanics were unlocked, and from there, the game offered a few zones that felt engaging (though almost always straightforward). Some puzzles are fine but not impressive. There are a billion shortcuts, which feels convenient since I wouldn't want to replay most level segments even if I had to. They go out of their way to make everything so interconnected that a player who hates fast travel could never use it, which is certainly a choice in a game that's this big.
The level design would be best described as visually awesome but imperfectly conceived. The biggest flaws, as mentioned earlier, are in the side-path design of some areas where the environment art and lighting render certain paths totally unreadable, which feels like a knock-on from the game being too high-scope and the team not having time to refine their visual approach to player level design affordances.
Combat Design
The player has more abilities, attacks, and weapon styles, but all of these have some of the least refined animations and controls I've seen in a recent and well-received AAA action title. Combat is more chaotic than ever, with encounters involving up to a dozen enemies simultaneously attacking from all directions. However, only one of the weapons (dual lightsabers) can cancel from attack animations to block the constant staggered enemy attacks. The blaster and lightsaber combo is great for managing enemies (overpowered on lower difficulties, to be honest), but its sword attack animations are visually awkward and don't feel like something a Jedi would do. The "heavy lightsaber" is a neat callback to other action games, but it also makes zero sense given a lightsaber doesn't weigh anything, and Cal seems to be handling it like an 8lb claymore (it also doesn't feel well-balanced for any encounter with more than 2 enemies).
I personally played on the medium difficulty, which is trivially easy compared to the same difficulty in the previous game, after watching my roommate force himself through the highest difficulty with nothing but constant complaints. The team went from Souls-inspired deliberate animation-based gameplay with a good variety of enemies for the game's quick pace to something that felt more like pure chaos at worst and overly repetitive at best. Large encounters are just silly, with projectiles endlessly flying from 4 directions while 3-5 melee enemies take turns swinging within < 2-second windows one at a time, making the player's optimal actions "spam the block button and hope some of these enemies get parried and just throw out wide attacks as much as possible to try to break some of their stun meters." Small encounters are relatively fine but get pretty boring when the spread of new enemies stops growing less than halfway through the game.
Why does Cal have force powers when most enemies are immune to them for most of the game? The balance between "pure power fantasy" and "difficult and deliberate action game" is completely lost. On the highest difficulty, combat is just a slow attrition of throwing out safe attacks and ranged attacks because the enemies are utterly relentless, especially if fighting more than one at a time. It's optimal to mind-control enemies as often as possible, but then this feels like trivializing the experience and turning Cal into a coward even further.
In Dark Souls and Sekiro, the games that originally inspired this or were similar to it, most basic enemies have fewer than 4 animations to choose from, which are dead simple and easy to understand. Nearly every enemy in this game is capable of throwing out what feels like 5-10 unique melee attacks (potentially also ranged attacks, potentially also dodging) on top of having super armor as long as their stagger meter isn't empty as well as parry attacks they throw out after blocking multiple attacks. This means handling >3 enemies means tracking 3 completely different animations, and hitting 3 enemies means at least one of them will randomly pivot from blocking the player to attacking them. This whole "block and then parry and then attack the player" concept was brilliant in Sekiro where engagements are generally 1v1 (and the player can easily position enemies to fight them one at a time), but here, it's often optimal to use weapons with wide attacks to deal with weaker mobs of enemies and then just accept the punishment that one of them will probably super armor through it and hit you in the middle of your combo.
Oh, also...bosses? Mostly boring! Only the main boss was interesting. Otherwise, the animation quality and variety were just a step back from the first game. Most of the big creatures were very basic and largely annoying rather than engaging. They re-use "raiders who stole lightsabers" way too much, probably because it seems like they struggled to find an excuse to put lightsabers on screen with their story, but those guys re-used the same animations constantly and also had effectively zero weight in terms of story. I didn't bother looking for the bounty hunters because my friend convinced me they weren't interesting. VFX and animation timing clarity on many boss attacks also just isn't great -- all stuff that, again, feels like it suffered for the team reaching beyond their resources and time a bit.
Overall, the pacing and flow of player and enemy attacks just feels...like a mess. It's fine, it's playable, and it's not terribly boring or worth uninstalling the game over, but I just don't see a single improvement over the original game, nor do I feel like this team of combat designers has a great understanding of what makes the games that inspire them work so well.
Conclusion
I largely agree with one of my best friends on this: if the series continues on the path established by this game and keeps lacking refinement, insisting on a massive scope beyond what the team has the resources to polish, then I probably will not return to their games. There's a foundation of a great game between the cracks here, but it's remarkable how many steps back the team made from what was a BETTER foundation on the last game.
Overall, Jedi Survivor takes the successes of Jedi Fallen Order and fans them with the hot flames of more and more gameplay scope, much of which does little to improve the established formula.
Performance Gripes
This game's performance sucks. It's not optimized. I waited a year to play it, hoping it would get better, and it did, but barely. The variance in how well the game could run in different areas (on an RTX 3080 and 12th Gen Intel i7) ranged from 15fps to 60fps, probably averaging 45 with massive slowdowns in certain areas (the worst was outdoors on Jedha, which was unplayable without me pausing the game to lower the graphics settings to the minimum temporarily, and it still ran at <45fps). It doesn't fully utilize my CPU or GPU (and I explored all the fixes players have tried to find), so it's a mystery how the studio employed Unreal Engine so poorly.
Environment Art
Aside from issues with clarity in level design and lighting (below), this game is GORGEOUS. The art is the biggest reason I did not stop playing despite my annoyance with its gameplay. The fundamental Star Wars identity is crystal clear, the fidelity and range of environments are beautiful to look at, and spaces feel engaging to explore even when the level design becomes convoluted or unclear. No complaints here!
Story
Meh. It's not much of anything, it's barely even a story. The few meaningful plot beats are flimsy, the core motivation for the quest barely makes sense, and every time someone started yammering about "Tanalorr," my eyes glazed over. The characters are charming, I particularly liked Bode, but the game does very little with them. The immensely copious, mostly boring, and expository conversations with the various denizens that Cal can collect for his saloon also did nothing for me (other than stab me directly in the heart with the trauma of the KotOR Remake team I worked on having been dissolved). There's nothing positive to say here, but there's also not much negative to say because, frankly, there's nothing of substance going on in the first place, good or bad.
World Design
The maps are so big and jammed so full of collectibles that they border on being a 90s throwback. There are literally HUNDREDS of collectibles, most of which feel frivolous and time-wasting, with an imbalanced spread between the rare "Wow, that challenge was enjoyable to overcome to get this!" to the more common "Why on earth would you put this here? The environment is completely unreadable, and I don't feel bad I couldn't find it."
One of the core collectible types is just a faint blue aura, which, in some environments, looks exactly like everything else that is visible around the player at all times. One of the core collectible types is literally invisible and only conveyed through a response from the droid on Cal's shoulder, often tied to innocuous environmental objects that a player would have no reason to want to look at. There's a guy the player can meet who captures fish FOR the player, and one can only assume this was a fishing minigame that was reasonably cut from the game's absurd scope. Why can I plant seeds on a roof? This doesn't feel like a gameplay verb that is doing much of anything for this experience.
I don't have anything fundamentally against the overall design of adding a big hub world with lots of objectives to do, but outside of the critical path, Koboh honestly starts to feel like a huge mess the longer the game goes on. One big part of this is that the map is simply too big and becomes utterly unreadable other than "Did I go through this door before?" Beyond that, there are SO many "return to this with a new mechanic" moments that basically incentivize the player to ignore the entire planet until they're near the end of the game. At this point, I was exhausted with so many other flaws that the idea of trying to do meaningful side content (the actual quests, not just fetching hundreds of collectibles) felt like a waste of my time -- especially given the basis of PACING in a game, which is "evenly distribute side content alongside the main story."
It really feels like the scope of Koboh completely escaped the team, and they lost any sense of why a player would engage with it at any specific moment in the game. There was no basis from other games they were drawing on for this experiment, and I don't think the experiment was particularly successful.
The critical path in terms of level design, however, is generally... pretty good! The visual differentiation between various areas on Koboh was overall quite cool (though some are more boring than others), and the other planets the player visits at least have a clear visual identity, though were mostly less exciting for sci-fi locales. The level design of traversal was basic for most of the game until all the mechanics were unlocked, and from there, the game offered a few zones that felt engaging (though almost always straightforward). Some puzzles are fine but not impressive. There are a billion shortcuts, which feels convenient since I wouldn't want to replay most level segments even if I had to. They go out of their way to make everything so interconnected that a player who hates fast travel could never use it, which is certainly a choice in a game that's this big.
The level design would be best described as visually awesome but imperfectly conceived. The biggest flaws, as mentioned earlier, are in the side-path design of some areas where the environment art and lighting render certain paths totally unreadable, which feels like a knock-on from the game being too high-scope and the team not having time to refine their visual approach to player level design affordances.
Combat Design
The player has more abilities, attacks, and weapon styles, but all of these have some of the least refined animations and controls I've seen in a recent and well-received AAA action title. Combat is more chaotic than ever, with encounters involving up to a dozen enemies simultaneously attacking from all directions. However, only one of the weapons (dual lightsabers) can cancel from attack animations to block the constant staggered enemy attacks. The blaster and lightsaber combo is great for managing enemies (overpowered on lower difficulties, to be honest), but its sword attack animations are visually awkward and don't feel like something a Jedi would do. The "heavy lightsaber" is a neat callback to other action games, but it also makes zero sense given a lightsaber doesn't weigh anything, and Cal seems to be handling it like an 8lb claymore (it also doesn't feel well-balanced for any encounter with more than 2 enemies).
I personally played on the medium difficulty, which is trivially easy compared to the same difficulty in the previous game, after watching my roommate force himself through the highest difficulty with nothing but constant complaints. The team went from Souls-inspired deliberate animation-based gameplay with a good variety of enemies for the game's quick pace to something that felt more like pure chaos at worst and overly repetitive at best. Large encounters are just silly, with projectiles endlessly flying from 4 directions while 3-5 melee enemies take turns swinging within < 2-second windows one at a time, making the player's optimal actions "spam the block button and hope some of these enemies get parried and just throw out wide attacks as much as possible to try to break some of their stun meters." Small encounters are relatively fine but get pretty boring when the spread of new enemies stops growing less than halfway through the game.
Why does Cal have force powers when most enemies are immune to them for most of the game? The balance between "pure power fantasy" and "difficult and deliberate action game" is completely lost. On the highest difficulty, combat is just a slow attrition of throwing out safe attacks and ranged attacks because the enemies are utterly relentless, especially if fighting more than one at a time. It's optimal to mind-control enemies as often as possible, but then this feels like trivializing the experience and turning Cal into a coward even further.
In Dark Souls and Sekiro, the games that originally inspired this or were similar to it, most basic enemies have fewer than 4 animations to choose from, which are dead simple and easy to understand. Nearly every enemy in this game is capable of throwing out what feels like 5-10 unique melee attacks (potentially also ranged attacks, potentially also dodging) on top of having super armor as long as their stagger meter isn't empty as well as parry attacks they throw out after blocking multiple attacks. This means handling >3 enemies means tracking 3 completely different animations, and hitting 3 enemies means at least one of them will randomly pivot from blocking the player to attacking them. This whole "block and then parry and then attack the player" concept was brilliant in Sekiro where engagements are generally 1v1 (and the player can easily position enemies to fight them one at a time), but here, it's often optimal to use weapons with wide attacks to deal with weaker mobs of enemies and then just accept the punishment that one of them will probably super armor through it and hit you in the middle of your combo.
Oh, also...bosses? Mostly boring! Only the main boss was interesting. Otherwise, the animation quality and variety were just a step back from the first game. Most of the big creatures were very basic and largely annoying rather than engaging. They re-use "raiders who stole lightsabers" way too much, probably because it seems like they struggled to find an excuse to put lightsabers on screen with their story, but those guys re-used the same animations constantly and also had effectively zero weight in terms of story. I didn't bother looking for the bounty hunters because my friend convinced me they weren't interesting. VFX and animation timing clarity on many boss attacks also just isn't great -- all stuff that, again, feels like it suffered for the team reaching beyond their resources and time a bit.
Overall, the pacing and flow of player and enemy attacks just feels...like a mess. It's fine, it's playable, and it's not terribly boring or worth uninstalling the game over, but I just don't see a single improvement over the original game, nor do I feel like this team of combat designers has a great understanding of what makes the games that inspire them work so well.
Conclusion
I largely agree with one of my best friends on this: if the series continues on the path established by this game and keeps lacking refinement, insisting on a massive scope beyond what the team has the resources to polish, then I probably will not return to their games. There's a foundation of a great game between the cracks here, but it's remarkable how many steps back the team made from what was a BETTER foundation on the last game.