Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

Reset the clock everybody, it's time for another shitshow of a release for a triple A developer and to literally no one's surprise, publisher, Electronic Arts. Though, at time of writing, Bethesda and Arkane Studios seem poised to take some heat off of them and reset the clock again with Redfall. Currently still on the clock however, is everyone's favorite religious fanatics the Jedi, with Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. This particular game, continues the trend of shitty releases and unfinished games, likely rushed out by its publisher, as we continue to show that we'll buy it anyways and, they can (maybe) fix it later. With the Star Wars IP, that is a pretty solid bet, as the fan base is very large, and tends to be aggressively supportive, generally to its own detriment. Which, this statement may lead to my own online crucifixion, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is overrated. That's not to say it's bad, to the contrary it is good, just not the God-sent masterpiece that quite a few make it out to be.

Let's let the altar boy out of the confession booth first, if you intend on buying this game for PC wait for performance patches, as of writing there's been one that helps non-ray tracing performance, which did improve the performance to at least playable levels on my high-end rig. Before that patch however, the game sat generally between 15 to 40 fps. After, it would occasionally get down to 20, usually during combat, you know when you don't want it to happen, but would generally sit in the 30-60 range. I've heard mixed things about consoles, and with the extremely poor performance I experienced, I'm unsure who to believe.

Beyond technical issues, let's see the light side and get to what this game does well. For starters, when not stuttering to hell, the game looks pretty fuckin' good. The soundtrack is decidedly Star Wars. You get a nice little hub on the first full planet that has a good amount of character content that adds a little reflex to how the story is going, and some sense of impact on the game world. The story is undoubtably solid, albeit a bit of the standard Star Wars laissez faire, much like the New Testament, that never really digs in too far into its potential, at least not since Knights of the Old Republic 2. Combat can be a nice mix of fun and challenging, with a but that also leads us into the dark side of things.

While usually the dark side is more fun, this time it refers to the bad that holds this game back. Foremost, like being stuck in Church as a child, there were many times where I was mumbling "God, this fucking sucks" under my breath. In Church, it was just being there, in Survivor, it was the unresponsive controls in combat, between the animation locking, enemies attacking through your attacks, blocking just straight up not working (yes when block is available and the incoming attack is not unblockable), enemies attacking faster than dodge is possible, among other annoyances, I can decisively say that the combat is severely overhyped. Which for a Souls-like is a pretty big negative, it's like difficulty less by design and more by shitty mechanics. Also, like how I acted in Church, Cameron Monaghan's performance as Cal tends to ring hollow, and leaves a little to be desired. Though I hesitate to say that, because in fairness, it's probably not very easy to act in what was likely entirely greenscreen environments, and Star Wars does have some experience with less than stellar acting performances, that people have somehow fallen in love with in Hayden-sight.

While Star Wars fanboys make this game out to be made of solid gold, like the Pope's codpiece, its really made of silver, like the Vatican's Holy Butt Plug collection. It's still good, but the way people, notably game critics, treat it makes me question how much money they were paid for their reviews. If you like Star Wars you'll probably like it, just not on PC. It's good, not great, hampered by unresponsive controllers, terrible optimization, but brought up by a solid story, especially for Star Wars, solid atmosphere, and occasionally fun moments. Honestly, this game is difficult to get a score, the technical issues hamper it significantly and if it gets fixed in the future, it'll probably deserve a higher rating but as it stands currently, but as it stands on it gets a probably overly generous 6/10* with an asterisk in the potential case of being updated to a New Testament.