We’re coming up to the unofficial Star Wars holiday of May the 4th, but much more importantly for us Star Wars fans is the recent release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the follow-up to the excellent Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Whilst the previous was a much smaller scale affair in story, gameplay and design, the same can not be said for the envelope-pushing sequel, and that is both a good and bad thing.

Set five years after the end of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Fallen Order took players on an adventure as Cal Kestis, a young Jedi whom survived the infamous Order 66 massacre of the younglings ordered by Darth Vader in the aforementioned film. We find Cal as just another average citizen hidden away in the galaxy, trying to avoid capture from the Empire and go about his life. As things go, this doesn’t happen, and Cal is thrust into the fight against the Empire both for himself, and for the future of his Jedi brethren.

After the events of Fallen Order occur, we’re left with Cal and his ragtag group of miscreants and mentors aboard their ship the Mantis, ready to go throughout the galaxy and fight the Empire in their own, guerrilla warfare manner… except at the opening of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, another five year time jump has occurred, and Cal is with a new team of freedom fighters, and of course his trusty droid side-kick BD-1. What happened to course the breakdown of the team? Well that gets answered over the game. Are the new team as charismatic and interesting as those that came before? No, bar one anyway. Thankfully though, this jarring change of team doesn’t linger too long, as the beauty of Coruscant will quickly take anyone’s attention.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – A Whole Lotta Gameplay

As it stands, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is firmly an RPG-lite, in the sense that like other games, we get the opportunity to level up our skills, customise our equipment and player and more besides, but it doesn’t fully commit to a huge, sprawling open world, instead keeping it semi-linear, and there’s no multi-option conversations, romance options etc. that you’d consider a full RPG to have, like Mass Effect or The Witcher for example. This is not a criticism, but quite the opposite.

Between customising Cal and BD-1, there’s that many different aesthetic options that I’ll be surprised if many people would see their own versions on someone else’s screens. From a mullet-wearing Cal with brightly coloured leather trousers and Stormtrooper vest, to a military crew-cut Cal that looks like he jumped straight out of the X-Wing Pilot program, you’ll be able to create any version of a Jedi you could think of… and of course the same could be said for BD-1, minus the mullet.

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As with Cal and BD-1, you can customise your lightsaber, and just like the rest of the customisation options, Respawn have taken what they did with Fallen Order and multiplied it by ten. You can collect and then change every conceivable part of the lightsaber from the obvious, the colour of it, to the less obvious, the receptacle, the emitter and more.

Customisation is just the tip of the iceberg in the game though, with a hugely expanded skill tree available to players, and with this is the game’s first major success story. Most sequels find some convoluted excuse to remove the player’s powers from the previous entry, leaving them a weakling to be built up and levelled up again. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor does the opposite, so all the skills and powers we learned during Fallen Order are still available to use, and with over seventy skills over multiple different skill trees to learn, we can become even more powerful. This includes additional lightsaber moves, force abilities or just plain, boring, RPG-standard fare health and focus increases to make us a more durable threat to the Empire. Is there too much? Perhaps, but better to have too many fighting options than not enough.

With that said, there are arguments to be made that there is too much of the game as a whole. Some of it does feel bloated and undeveloped at the same time. For example the saloon aspect of the game… Shortly into your first foray on Koboh, you’ll come into relative ownership of a saloon, which will become your central hub of sorts, where you’ll regularly travel to and from with news and developments.

With the saloon comes the ability to grow seeds, similar to the previous games limited garden on the Mantis, although this is far bigger and almost a gardening sim of sorts; you’ll be able to recruit new people to stand around and occasionally talk to in your saloon, some with added benefits, most with none, and more besides. It doesn’t ever feel like you’re working towards something other than a basic, nothing below the surface benefit, unfortunately. Thankfully along with the poorly conceived/written ‘rumours’ – sidequests, basically -, this isn’t the meat and bones of the game, but instead a poorly conceived distraction.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor does make its predecessor look puny in many ways, but especially with the combat. With the huge amount of skills already mentioned, you’ll be carving your way through the swathes of Empire lackeys in no time… or at least you would were there many about. It felt during my time with the game that for every fight with a handful of Stormtroopers came another ten minutes of exploring, which when you’re trying to be the biggest and baddest Jedi the galaxy has ever seen, can be frustrating.

There are various challenges and simulations that’ll take you momentarily from the main game and into a second space where you can decide who and how many you can fight, but for such a massive game with such huge amounts of fighting potential, there was a distinct lack of enemies and variation throughout. It never gets old deflecting a laser bolt (or multiple with the right upgrades) back at the idiotic Stormtroopers though.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – Performance Issues Be Damned

With all the exploration present in the game, far more than Fallen Order, it was nice to see just how gorgeous the game looked. From the opening scene in Coruscant to the Shattered Moon of Koboh and more I won’t spoil for you, the game looks outstanding, and every bit of what a AAA EA game should look. I died several times from not paying attention at where I was going because I was taking in the scenery far too often.

Unfortunately with every polygon the game has on offer, it was always going to come with its disadvantages. No matter the system the game suffers pretty bad in the framerate department, regardless of whether you’re on the Performance mode the game offers or not. On PC the game will crash and shutdown at indeterminate times, but on my run through on PS5, I had very minimal complete crashes, and instead suffered huge framerate drops, without any real consistency or reason to it. EA announced ‘weeks of patches’ to rectify these issues thankfully, but it did make my time on the game frustrating at times.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is fun, there’s no denying that. There’s enough variation in the character creation and fighting that no two people will fight in the same way with the same Cal, but the performance issues, bloated world and surface-level sidequests mean you’ll be frustrated with just how close this game comes to being a GotY contender. There’s no contest though, with Fallen Order and this, you’ll struggle to find two games where you feel as much like an actual Jedi as you do here…

8/10

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