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star wars: jedi fallen order and jedi survivor jedi fallen order is not really a game I ever intended to actually play the combo of "soulslike,” a genre I don't really care for, and Star Wars, a movie I have not and probably will not see is like a match made in hell. why would I ever have played that? cut to the pandemic and my roommate gets a month of EA play and asks me to play through it so she can watch. usually I'd have turned her down but the promise of a pizza once the local place opens up and having basically nothing else to do means I decided to give it a try and it was one of the most "yeah it's okay" game to have ever "Yeah it's okay"-ed. it's a game that's neither good enough for me to recommend but also not bland and boring enough for me to warn people away from. it's a game with some high highs and much lower lows that aren't quite enough to really make the experience not worth playing, though that itself might be enough of an indictment to warn you away from it there and then. this is best summed up with the two different parts of the gameplay: the game's downright awful combat system and it's really fun platforming, though it's not quite doled out in equal amounts. one of these is sadly the focus of the game and it's not the better of the two. the game's combat comes in the form of a soulslike, albiet a much more bland, limited and basic one, with a few flavours of the same weapon with one or two combo strings and a difficulty that turns every fight into a total slog of nothing but blocking followed by a finisher—like the worst parts of playing yakuza 3 on hard thrown into a game and made the entire combat system. it's some of my least favourite combat I have ever played in a video game and that's on easy. if you played this on hard it might be the worst combat ever thrown into a video game, a game that already feels way too long on easy and is 1000% way too long on anything higher. it was one I tried on normal and almost abandoned due to how little fun I was having with it before I switched to easy. you have two weapons, kind of: your standard one handed and then a dual sided variant that feels a little different. it has some cool spinny attacks and has a wider range but the fact it's just the normal blade but with another at the bottom means it doesn't really help the combat feel more fleshed out, it still feels just as samey even when you try and switch it up because it feels less like another unique weapon and more like a slight moveset variation (there is also a few dual wield attacks but its like 1 or 2 sprinkled among the main weapon types, it's not a usable style). there's some basic ranged stuff like the telekinesis grab and a sword throw. I did like throwing enemies off the level with the grab but too often they're just too strong to be grabbed which means you won't get a ton of use out of it beyond an occasional fodder enemy, though for these ones you are given a slow status effect you can put on them for a free hit or two, which is nice and super useful. the game also relies, very heavily, on one of my least favourite mechanics, the parry. the game's boss fights are more or less reliant on them and dodging won't work as well as you'd like, it's all about guards and parries and I really don't like this. it's just not fun and I never enjoy doing it. the windows are very tight and I just never adapted to it, but to its credit it is fun to deflect enemy shots with it back to them—I did enjoy that, even if the parry focus in the boss fights completely ruined them for me. i love the creature fights though. there's a good variety of them and they're all super well designed. it handles alien life better than almost any other game i've played. it even has cool superbosses for you to find (it's the only collectable really worth going for beyond the stat upgrades). there's even some really cute non hostile critters scattered around the planets that i always took time to capture some snapshots of in the games photo mode. now for the game's other half, the platforming. i love it. It has some basic uncharted-style climbing but in there it mixes in some really cool prince of persia style parkour elements like a double jump, wallrunning, rope climbing and even some cool ziplines and the game makes really good use of them in a lot of its levels. it's the reason why i think the game’s level design is overall good and i think if this element was missing then I'd probably actually hate this game. it's what makes it fun to me and it's used amazingly well in every level, it makes it feel almost like a ps2 game at times, like a golden age prince of persia, and i think that alone makes it worth playing through the fairly bad combat for it, because it has some killer set pieces (i love the platforming in the underground ruins and the swamp). it also ads to the metroidvania stuff the game has going on with the unlockable upgrades and additions, though i liked this in some ways with the platforming and how it gave you access to cool side paths and shortcuts and even some whole optional areas like a whole destroyed carrier ship that makes up a good 1-2 hour chunk of game if you decide to explore it (there's some really fun optional boss fights too with bigger and more dangerous critters which is the main collectable i went out of my way to make sure i did all of). In other ways it just bogs the game down with very pointless collectables (like the ponchos and sword parts) and really ads to how the game just feels way too long. the story is fine I guess. again I have not seen these movies so the stakes and terms all felt meaningless to me, which is entirely a me thing because my roommate seemed super into it. It's a treasure hunt with some pretty cool seeming villains (like evil corrupted versions of the faction the MC belonged with and I love the main woman in this faction, the cool rival) and I liked the space witches and the cute lil pilot guy a lot, plus I love the MC's robot friend, he was adorable, but I found cal himself to be a little boring and the story didn't really evoke much from me. it's just a fine enough adventure story that I have to imagine is improved tenfold with movie knowledge. the game does at least have some decently varied levels, a cool rainy junk planet with a fun train setpiece, a dense jungle, a cool swamp full of pools to swim around, a surprisingly cool desert planet and a killer snow zone. Unfortunately, the music i didn't find myself caring for. i found it a little bland but it's pretty serviceable, full of what i assume are songs and motifs from the movie, though again those didn't do much for me since I've never seen it. The level variety is hurt by having some very bland levels that go on far too long, some boring bases, caves, a bland grey planet that's mostly mountains and bases and even more boring ruins that make up a significant chunk of the game's runtime, if not most of it. a runtime that is also far too long for what the game has going for it, combat and level variety wise. It's not helped by the metroidvania elements it throws in there that just pad the runtime with hunts for lightsaber parts and *ponchos*. it's about a good 12-15 hours, probably a lot more if you try for the 100% and it runs out of steam for me in about half that length because its puzzles are pretty bland. it's got too many bad environments and its combat gets boring after the first hour. there was no dlc or anything major and it's a game that's very cheap to get now. it'll run you at most £10 on a bad day, and i think whether it's worth it or not really depends on if you like what i've described, though star wars fans are a no brainer here. you'll probably love it. it's not super for me though and it's not a game i have any strong, fond feelings for. if jedi fallen order is a perfectly okay game then jedi survivor is the perfect "yeah it's okay I guess" game. it's a game with some serious highlights bogged down by design trends it tries far too hard to chase and a harsh difficulty that ultimately end up making it kind of a slog to play most of the time. much like the original the big issue here is the combat and the fact the game really wants to be a soulslike despite its best qualities being totally at odds to that. it expands well on some of those best qualities by giving it even better platforming, an even cuter cast of critters and a pretty solid set of level gimmicks, but it's still so held back by that focus on combat that makes some of those cool levels just miserable to run through with forced encounters that make you have to engage with a very basic and unsatisfying combat system that got stale hours ago. it's a game that comes so close to being one I like but just makes the same stumble all over again. so what does jedi survivor actually add to it? well for a start the hub ship has been expanded to being a whole hub town now, with different stores mainly selling cosmetics, a saloon and a whole ton of pretty solid sidequests to partake in. you can slowly expand the town with more people as you explore the planet, too, adding gardeners, bounty hunters and other stuff to it, which I think is super neat, though it feels a little afterthought-y with how it doesn't really get given any focus in the story at all and you're never really made to engage with it. the levels also have some neat gimmicks thrown into levels which make it feel more like an older game, an energy the original had at times but this one really runs with at times—zones where you can't walk on the ground because of sandworms or swarms of bugs and have to platform around, wind to work around, vehicle segments, other characters to play as or a super fun level where you need to dig buried objects out of tar. not every level has a gimmick like this but the ones that do are always highlights especially since they're where the platforming really shines the most as you need to focus on that like in the sandworm level to get from platform to platform or modifying the level and finding climbing paths during the bug segments. the platforming here is even better too, with a grappling hook, mounts, gliders and a mid-air dash which you can extend into a double dash with a later upgrade plus tons of small fixes added that make it so much more fluid and fun. it might be one of the most fun 3D platformers around right now if you can get past the combat. there's tons of uses for it, too, including some fun optional challenges that are pretty brutal and the open world has lots of little areas you can find and explore with it. It's used really well for the game's puzzles, which are a lot better and more varied in this one. the combat is a step up, at least. while it still suffers from most of the same flaws, now there's just some slight ways to mitigate the game's issues and it overall feels much easier on those easier difficulties and it's still as fun as it was before to throw enemies off of ledges. it gives you the first game's abilities back, same movesets complete with the meter draining special moves, but it also adds 3 more styles to it which does at least add some variety, you have a massive dual handed broadsword style which is too slow for me to get much use out of but it does huge damage. it's good for bosses. there's a dual wield stance as a real thing now with a focus on parries. it's okay but I found the parry focus to make it my least favourite style. you also get the best style that never left my rotation, the gun style. this is a style that combines the sword with a cool blaster gun. you replenish ammo with the word by hitting people and you can shoot from a range which helps to shred shield and health, plus there's even a cool ability where you can charge and aim for massive damage, taking out entire groups in one shot sometime. it's the best the combat system gets. the boss fights are better too. they're easier but also more varied and more fun, same with the optional ones (including a fun set of bounty hunter missions that reminded me a lot of mercenaries for ps2 but a lot less cool) and a particularly cool boss here too which makes great use of the games dashes as you take on huge monsters and ships in a sky battle. the story, uh… exists, I guess. again I have not seen the movies so a lot here just kind of goes over my head but it just feels like *another* retread of the original—a treasure hunt to find a special thing (in this case a planet instead of a list of names) and a hunt for crewmates across the galaxy (in this case refinding them after a splitup which just feels so contrived and that really goes against the original ending). it's annoying because it starts off strong, introducing a new crew of rebels that go across the galaxy sabotaging the empire and getting up to antics. they're a fun gang but *spoilers* the game kills all of them off bar one in the same level they're introduced, it's a shame since that setup was a lot more interesting than the full game we got. it doesn't give much of its new cast time to shine at all outside of a pretty solid twinky (he's cute I guess) main villain and a twist villain you can see miles away, though I do still like him and his role a lot and he is deeper than I expected. it's a shame the townspeople you meet don't get any focus though, especially the frog guy. I loved him and I do like the adventure energy of the story, even though I do wish it was a little more different to the basegame. i'm still not really into the aesthetics of this universe at all still and this game really solidified that since its levels overall were far less interesting than pretty much anything in the first game with a ton less variety all for the sake of the game's kinda sorta open world. the game does have some nice looking levels like the jungles, the starting city level, the cool sky bases, the final planet which does admittedly have a fantastic look to it for the 5 mins you're there and a cool destroyed valley, but the main planet is mostly just sort of nothingy outside of the jungle and the destroyed area. it's just bases and mountainy areas and they all look very samey, same with the desert which I really found boring very fast and so much of the game takes place there which makes it feel like it drags super bad. I also just don't find most of the character designs appealing (bar the evil twink and the goth party member), and cal especially has had the worst downgrade over the course of the two games, from being a little cute in the first game to a beardman beardbro nothingburger looking character here. even in fiction men cannot escape twink death, a sad sight. the music, too, is again just a little generic, very "cinematic" and bland. it fits the movie and world, sure, but it just does less than nothing to me and it left me with no real memorable tracks, which is a shame. the game is a lot easier than the previous game but it's also a good bit longer thanks to that open world. it still goes on too long, though. which I find more over-long i'm not quite sure. i'd probably lean on this one even though the combat variety is a lot more fresh feeling. it's a good 15 hours or so and that's just way too long for what the game is and has to offer and it's a lot more if you do want to dig into its sidequests and open worldy metroidvania stuff, which is heavily expanded here. both are dirt cheap too, easily buyable for under £15 a piece, though survivor is a good bit more expensive. i also have to say that while it's better on next gen, it does have a previous gen port and for some this will be the way to go, especially since only the ps4 and xbox one versions are on disc. the ps5 version is basically a stub disc which is a huge shame, so keep that in mind when purchasing. it's not all that much more expensive if you do want a version complete on disc. those two are more or less it for now. the sequel sets up for a third game that, knowing me, i'll end up playing because of the platforming and end up hating because of its combat and aesthetics, though I do think there's potential here for improvement if they ditched the soulslike elements and went for something more akin to FF7 remake or granblue relink (the assist mechanic two characters gets already reminds me a little of these games). I think it could be a great time, but we'll see if that ever happens since the developers seem to be stuck in the GAAS mines with apex legends, much to the disappointment of their long time fans from when they made the titanfall games, which I've never played but 2 does seem like a great time. it's for sure one i'd love to get around to, same with the first which is one of the most xbox one looking xbox one games which alone is a selling point for me. in the meantime if you do like their work on those games, maybe this is worth a try to tide you over.