Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Before you ask: Yes, you still slide down things in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
In case you’d managed to forget, those sliding bits—which sent self-made Jedi Knight Cal Kestis careening down ice slopes and greased-up tree trunks on planets across the depth and breadth of the Star Wars universe back in 2019—were some of the strangest portions of Survivor’s predecessor, Respawn Entertainment’s generally fun action-adventure Jedi: Fallen Order. In playing the sequel—which we spent three hours with last week, at an EA Games press event in Los Angeles—we were fascinated to see these slippery inclines return. Not because they’re egregiously awful, or anything (although they’re still far from the most fun you and Cal can get up to as you quest across the various backwaters of the galaxy in pursuit of lost Jedi treasure). But because they emphasize what a grab-bag of a game Respawn has once again made here, in pursuit of capturing everything a player might want from a modern-day Star Wars game: A combination of Metroid-style exploration, crossed with surprisingly elaborate platforming/navigation, crossed again with combat that operates as a fast-paced, Star Wars-y take on From Software’s Dark Souls games. And also, sometimes, you go sliding on your ass down a big, muddy slope.
Our list of “Do Not Spoils” from the preview event is about a mile long (not shocking, given that the game’s not out until the end of the month, April 28). But we can at least confirm a few basics, including the fact that Survivor takes place five years after the end of Fallen Order, as Cal, once a padawan unlucky enough to still be in training when Order 66 got handed down during Episode III, continues to wage a not-especially-successful guerilla war on the currently-thriving Galactic Empire. That eventually sees him (and constant droid companion BD-1) get shot down over new planet Koboh, a rocky, oil-covered world that’s kind of like what you’d get if Deadwood was forced to share a planet with space dinosaurs.
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What Koboh offers most of all, though, is space: Levels in Survivor are quite a bit bigger, and much more open, than the ones in Fallen Order, allowing far more opportunities for exploration and poking at the edges of the map, climbing and leaping across rocky outcroppings and abandoned buildings, and, of course, wall-running on especially streak-y looking bits of wall. (How else would you remember that this is from the studio that made the Titanfall games?) Your rewards for said ranging run the gamut from useful to decidedly not: Finishing a mini-dungeon or jumping challenge and getting a new skill point or perk feels great; getting a brand new beard style for a more grown-up Cal, not so much. (To be fair: In our time with the game, it was mostly good about doling out cosmetic rewards, like the many beard manuals we picked up, for easier accomplishments, while real exploration generated real benefits.)
Per that exploration: Respawn has also sucked in a few more reference points for its roiling stew of a Star Wars game, adding in more puzzle-based chunks of gameplay clearly lifted from Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. (All the way down to sending you into shrine-esque puzzle zones to solve them; they even have a similar aesthetic, courtesy of Survivor’s importation of elements from Disney’s recently introduced High Republic setting.) While not especially taxing—move Battery A to Slot B, which lets you get Battery B, which lets you…, etc.—these sections do break things up nicely. The worst you can say about these sequences is that they’re often a bit too well defined or discrete; Jedi: Survivor sometimes feels less like a hybrid of different gaming styles than it does two or three different games, all fun—the run and jump platformer, the surprisingly in-depth action game, the puzzle game, and so on—taking turns.
The real star of the show, gameplay-wise, remains that combat. Jedi: Survivor looks great overall (at least, on the beefy PC rigs EA had us playing on), but never better than in a fight, which the game’s designers described as looking deliberately “choreographed” in its approach to lightsaber battlin’. But while the flips and laser swords are cool, combat in Survivor is more interesting in how it tries to capture the ways Jedi fight in the films. I.e., lots of ways to avoid hits—important, when you’re wading into a gunfight while wearing only robes. (Or fashionable jackets, in Cal’s case.) In the sections we played, that meant blocking (now with a stamina meter that measures how steady and resilient your block is), timing-based parries, rolling, and an ability that allows Cal to massively slow down time. All of that gels with an expanded stance system for lightsaber combat, each of which offers new defensive options: Double-bladed sabers can automatically deflect blaster fire, for instance, while dual-wielding your blades can let you trigger powerful automatic parries. (We didn’t get to play with all the toys in our time with the game, unfortunately—including the surprise addition of a blaster, for when you’re feeling a little less elegant and civilized, and a little more “shoot that guy in the face.”)
All of this works great—when you’re fighting fellow people and battle droids, at least. (And, yes, the battle droids from the prequel trilogy are back, in all their “Roger Roger” glory. They’re mostly funny!) The combat gets far more frustrating and repetitive, though, when you’re facing off against the many wild animals that Cal is forced to murder on his quest—most notably an optional boss fight that we won’t spoil here, except to say that, if you’ve never watched an entire warehouse full of gaming nerds individually lose their minds while dying, again and again, to a boss with one and two-hit kills in abundance, you really haven’t lived.
On the story side, meanwhile—and in accordance with the Imperial bulletin’s worth of spoiler notes we’re trying to avoid—we’ll simply note that Survivor benefits from setting itself (like the recent Andor) in the most interesting period of the various Star Wars settings: The actual rise of the Empire, when our heroes are destined to get their teeth kicked in, and every act of good takes on a certain air of tragedy. You can see the points, even early on, where Respawn has tried to take seriously the basic question of what being in Cal’s situation—committed, for life, to a fight he almost certainly can’t win—would do to a guy, his allies, and his beliefs. Cameron Monaghan remains charismatic in the central performance; everyone else is mostly doing, y’know, Star Wars acting, but it’s all engaging enough.
From what we’ve seen of it so far, Jedi: Survivor won’t shake anybody’s world to its core—but it’s also unlikely to disappoint. It’s a general, and genuine, improvement on Fallen Order, but not a monumental one; it performs the successful sequel trick of refining what worked in the past, and taking the focus off the stuff that didn’t. The bottom line is that, if you’re looking for a big, expensive, expansive adventure in the Star Wars universe, it looks like it’ll easily scratch that itch.
