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Transcript
I’m still a bit mad at Jedi: Fallen Order for erasing the Dark Forces timeline from canon Star Wars, but thinking about it, something had to be done about the colons. Star Wars Colon Dark Forces, then the sequel Star Wars Colon Dark Forces 2 Colon Jedi Knight. And after that came Star Wars Colon Dark Forces Colon Jedi Knight Colon Jedi Outcast – it was all getting a bit silly. It’s hard to maintain a Jedi’s monastic dignity when your title’s got more colons than an inexpensive Cornish pasty. So perhaps it was for the best to wean ourselves back down to two. Star Wars Colon Jedi Colon Fallen Order and now the sequel Star Wars Colon Jedi Colon Survivor. Yeah, my friends called me the colon survivor after we raided that dumpster behind the condemned indian restaurant. But I digress. Fallen Order was EA’s Star Wars themed action adventure soulslike so perhaps a sequel could have been the opportunity, now that the uncertain toddling of the newborn IP was out of the way, to finally pin down what the fuck it was trying to be, and just to skip to the end, that opportunity was entirely missed. So we have another action set piece riddled soulslike that’s fretting too much about maintaining broad appeal to have the balls to actually be hard like a soulslike. It opens up ziplines back to a checkpoint with the psychotic frequency of a neurotic summer camp director.
Titular colon survivor Cal Kestis is now waging a one-man guerrilla resistance against the Empire and should probably join Aloy from Horizon’s support group for characters who already had their arcs tied up in the first game and are now forced to dully and hypercompetently mooch their way through one action set piece after another. And who have red hair. Sometimes he worries he’s not quite hypercompetent enough. Ooh, first galaxy problems. Oh, and once or twice the dark side threatens to overtake him and make him marginally less ineffectual, and that’s about it for personality. Apparently unaware that he’s in a prequel, Cal is upset that his ineffectual ass has achieved precisely fuck all to loosen the Empire’s grip. He’s probably also confused as to why no-one’s ever impressed by him. He’ll reduce a gang of nineteen poorly equipped bandits to a giant sizzling sashimi platter and the twentieth will still call him a pussy as they heft their cardboard tube with a box cutter on the end. Then he learns of a secret Jedi planet where refugees from the Empire might finally find peace, there’s bad Jedis, he has to get the band back together, meekly weakly sequelly plot.
More plod than plot, arf arf, the bit where he first learns of the secret planet that is what drives the entire story is after about six hours of rudderless ricocheting between action set pieces. I struggled to maintain interest because Survivor is another victim of Last of Us 2 or God of War Ragnarok brand excessive padding, most egregiously in one chapter where Cal gives Maguffin du jour to one of his nerd friends and old mate says “I need time to study this, why not go rescue this hitherto unmentioned dude I know?” So you spend two hours pissing about in some ruins, find the dude, he dies like a chump, get harassed by a hitherto unmentioned giant robot, destroy it in a painfully weaksauce action sequence where we just get teleported to all of its weak points in a manner I feel like we could have done at any fucking time, and then when you get back to base old mate says “Right! Finished studying now, let’s continue the actual plot!” And if we’d spent the last two hours in our bunk flicking through Wookkiee jazz mags the story would have advanced precisely as much.
I hate this practice of modern narrative games, advancing the plot with the insolently slow pace of a fucking Sunday newspaper comic as they spackle all the gaps with endless meaningless spectacle, especially when the action’s nothing to passive-aggressively ignore emails from home about. For all the grand triple-A graphics shinier than a baby’s ballsack there’s something very careless about the way Jedi Survivor’s put together; the animation feels janky and I lost count of how often things clipped inside other things without even buying them a drink first. Combat’s pretty witlessly designed, as well; when it does get difficult it’s only because the game keeps randomly spawning mixed gangs of melee and ranged enemies with little regard for elegance or coordination, and then letting them all dogpile you at once. Most of the enemies’ unblockable attacks look exactly the same as their blockable ones. They just glow red a bit first like they’re slightly embarrassed at how much the animation team is copping out. I’d say the game seems to be lacking attention to detail, but that’s not true, it’s just reserved its attention for details that don’t matter an Ewok’s cunt brush.
Remember how in the last game most of the secret treasure chests the game suggests we go out of our way to find only contained cosmetics for the lightsaber and that felt about as rewarding as sanding down a concrete block with your most expensive cheesegrater because your lightsaber is generally as prominent onscreen as a lower-case L in Microsoft Word? Survivor doubles down on that. Now as well as new lightsaber grips and toilet roll tubes treasure chests contain different booties for your robot pal and fuzzy dice for your blaster, as well as clothing and hair options for Cal. Christ knows why he needed to open a secret chest at the bottom of a lake to figure out how to shave his beard into a pornstache, but I guess it’s far too late for things to start making sense. Still don’t understand, within story context, why all the enemies respawn at checkpoints. Although if they’re aware that it happens, it might explain their self-preservation instincts. Also, the environment design has become a bit more open on some planets and there’s a lot more side activity, especially on the planet you keep coming back to where your open quotes “home base” is, around which the game centres a whole additional smorgasbord of pointless collectibles.
Collect animals for the stables. Seeds for the rooftop garden. Fish for the aquarium. None of which adds anything to the story or makes you a more effective mass-murdering laser samurai, but at least it, errr… well, I guess it lets you take a break from the laser murder, if someone’s wiped snot all over your pause button and you’re afraid of touching it. I did a video a while back predicting that we’d soon see triple-A games cribbing ideas from the cozy life sims that have become so popular in indie circles, and I think this might be what EA thinks constitutes a cozy game. Bolting a flimsy gardening mechanic onto the side of their usual bullshit. Well, like a racist wedding planner, I’d argue some things were never meant to mix. It’s hard to feel the cozy vibes when you’re skipping through the forest gathering cuttings and six angry robots burst out of the undergrowth, shoot multiple rockets you barely have a chance to deflect and kick you right in the potting soil. In summary, what there was of Jedi Survivor to sink my teeth into, was overwhelmed by the salad, and the salad had too many croutons, and there was a slug in the lettuce. And the slug didn’t like croutons either.
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
