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

Platform: Xbox Series X Time Taken: 21.5 hours As someone who doesn't like souls games I was hesitant going into Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order back in 2019. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked that game (in fact it was my GOTY for 2019) so my anticipation was high for Jedi Survivor. I was so pleased when I realised that they had taken pretty much everything I liked about the first game, expanded the story and added a bunch of great quality of life inclusions. As alluded to above, this game plays similar to a souls game. I would imagine to the more hardcore souls players that this is a bit of a 'baby's first souls game', but nonetheless if you go into combat swinging without blocking and parrying you are likely going to have a bad time (particularly on some of the more challenging boss fights). The combat in this game feels so good and is so rewarding. I love the fact that there is a real mix of enemy types and you feel immensely powerful against a storm trooper but will need to strategise against most of the others. The force powers also feel great and add another layer of strategy. One of the things that I think is most important for a licenced game is getting the movement, atmosphere and feeling to feel right and true to the source material. It is one of the reasons Marvel's Spiderman is so good in that you get that true sense of being Spiderman. That same feeling applies here, you truly do feel like a jedi, the movement is smooth and the atmosphere is very Star Warsy. I'll also add, that the climbing and traversal is very much like Uncharted, but it does it so much better than Uncharted ever did. It feels great going from a wall run into a wall run to jump onto a hanging piece of shrapnel and you feel like there is a sense of urgency during a lot of these sequences. Overall, I adored this game. It had so many jaw dropping moments both in story and in game moments. There are two particular moments that were so incredibly amazing and may be some of the best sequences I have ever played in a game. With that being said, I do have two gripes with the game, first the technical issues are still present. I don't care too much about the visual issues like pop-in but I had one hard crash which was annoying. The second is that during the traversal it isn't entirely clear where to go at times. I found myself jumping into walls I thought Cal would latch onto only to find they weren't that type of wall. It was annoying but not enough to deter me from loving this game.