This isn't the sequel I was looking for
But a [Fallen Order] sequel could inject some personality into [its characters], and if it focuses up on polishing a smaller feature-set - instead of doing a mediocre job of imitating four different genres - I could absolutely see Respawn delivering a Jedi iteration that's truly exciting from start to finish.
That was my wishful, optimistic hypothesis three years ago. But I guess the simpler and more-likely outcome for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was always going to be "more of the same" and, yeah, that's what it is.
Just like its predecessor, Survivor crams together Dark Souls map mechanics and stamina-based combat, poorly-interconnected worlds that "can" be revisited but aren't worth the effort, clunkily-controlled Uncharted action sequences, and a story with some well-acted scenes but which lacks an overall compelling (or coherent) plot.
The resulting mess is, well, it's kinda like when a game looks beautiful in a screenshot -- but real-time motion suffers from awful framerates or glitchy visual effects. What I mean is, there are sweet moments in Survivor - wall-running through a canyon, force-pulling a structure down to crush stormtroopers - and when you see intriguing landmarks on the horizon, hear an NPC talk about some side-story, or survey points of interest on the map, it feels like the game is promising a whole lot more exciting content.
But those promises are consistently let down by repetitive and punishing fights; by unclear and inconsistent platforming behavior; by underwhelming puzzle and exploration rewards (yeah, more lightsaber cosmetics!); and by a weirdly-paced story which is only really memorable for how absurd its third-act twist is.
... and by some truly incredible technical issues, even though post-release patches have made some progress, there are still glaring problems. My living room setup's GPU (AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT w/ 8GB VRAM), for example, just wouldn't load most textures (like other reports around the interweb: 1, 2, 3), making many sections of the game literally unplayable due to visual unclarity; I had to stream it from a different PC instead.
(no, this isn't what it's supposed to look like.)
As before, maybe a Souls superfan will get something out of this - particularly the unforgiving combat, which can be downright relentless as the game proceeds, like the
If somehow, despite crippling layoffs, there does end up being a third Cal Kestis game: I don't expect it to be any different.
Progress: finished on Story difficulty.