3/5 ★ – Gibbs's review of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

Disappointing. That weird but wonderful mix of Dark Souls, Metroidvania, and Star Wars is back — and once again, it works. But it feels like Respawn didn’t quite understand that this was what made the first game special. Somewhere along the way, Jedi Survivor loses sight of its own strengths. Let’s start with the good. The combat is still fantastic — even more refined and satisfying than in Fallen Order. Cal’s expanded moveset feels fluid, his abilities feel great while fighting, and blend naturally into platforming. Running along walls, chaining dashes, and grappling creates a great rhythm between exploration and combat. The problem is that this experience only applies to a few planets. The smaller ones are dense, carefully designed, and genuinely fun to move through. But they make up maybe a quarter of the total game time. And that’s the core issue: size. While the smaller planets have tight, deliberate design, the larger ones — especially Koboh — feel like a sprawl of filler. It’s huge, but largely pointless, full of things tucked away for the sake of scale. You end up riding creatures across vast stretches of land just to get anywhere, and it feels bloated. It’s as if they tried to “Elden Ring” it, forgetting that Jedi Survivor is fundamentally a Metroidvania, not a Soulslike. This kind of open space doesn’t complement the moveset — it smothers it. The joy of these games comes from using your abilities in cleverly crafted environments, not trudging across empty landscapes. Can you imagine if instead of Hollow Knight’s hundred intricate rooms, they were instead twenty-five oversized, half-empty ones. It’s bloated to a level of ridiculousness, and the flow is gone; what’s is a checklist. It also sucks, because that classic Metroidvania feeling of coming back to something you saw earlier but didn’t have the tools for, but now do is usually exciting. Here, just thinking about travelling all across the world to open a chest for a shitty cosmetic is just such a chore. The cosmetic rewards felt completly useless and boring in Fallen Order too, but now it’s even worse because it’s not even fun to get them. Unfortunately, that design philosophy bleeds into the story too. The whole thing is just so…nothing? For about 80% of the runtime, almost nothing meaningful happens — you’re just chasing broken MacGuffins and bouncing between massive planets with little narrative momentum. It’s clear they had to justify the existence of these oversized maps, so the story keeps contriving reasons to revisit them. It would’ve been far more compelling to explore ten smaller planets with strong story hooks than two giant ones with none. It even drags the story out for far longer than it needed to be. The final stretch is easily the best part — things finally get interesting, but it’s a long, slow road to get there. And that’s the frustrating thing: there is an incredible core here. When the game clicks, it really clicks. The combat, the traversal, the atmosphere — it’s all there. But it feels buried under layers of bloat and trend-chasing. You can feel the corporate fingerprints all over it, as if someone decided bigger automatically meant better. In the end, Jedi Survivor feels like two different games at war with eachother. Just like the Star Wars films themselves, it starts with a clear strong vision, only to be stretched thin and warped once the money starts rolling in. They have the talent for a great product, but they bit off more than they could chew and tried to get as much mainstream appeal as possible, diluting the whole thing down.