After almost two months of intermittent playing, I’ve finally finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. It was a lot of fun, even if I struggled with just how many collectibles there are (though the game gets points for giving you the ability to eventually unlock map icons for all of them) that I just did not care about. Honestly, the thing I was most-consumed with hunting down was enemies, so I could unlock the extensive collection of skills that were made available to me over the course of the game (and I’ve still got about a third of them to unlock despite having run through as much of the game as I care to at this point). The variations in combat options was incredibly refreshing, as was the variation in enemy combatants. Sure, it could be frustrating at times if my loadout was absolutely not the right set of powers and moves to be using in a given combat situation, but the number of options available within those loadouts meant only that I’d need to be a little creative to overcome these limitations. Throw in an interesting plot, some fun references to the greater Star Wars universe, a cast of great characters, and I’m willing to overlook the buggy and visually lackluster experience I had playing the game.

Let’s get the gripes out of the way quickly. Unlike the last two bits of media I wrote about, these issues were around long enough and happened consistently enough that I was fairly desensitized to them by the time I was about halfway through the game. Most of the time, the odd physical glitches, such as Marrin T-posing as she hovered in front of my character or Cal Kestis’ lightsaber being on while he’d tucked it back onto his belt during a cutscene happened after my PS5 had been on for several hours and were fixed by a reset of the game. Fairly basic stuff that looks janky but ultimately didn’t really impact my experience much. Other times, I saw significant framerate drops and some minor rubberbanding, but it was clear that the game was rendering something intense or loading a lot of area that I couldn’t see. These problems got steadily worse as the game progressed, which makes me think there might be some room for increased efficiency in the way the game saves and loads the various accumulations of your base (flowers, various collectibles, friendly NPCs, etc) since the worst contenders all happened around the base you eventually establish on Koboh (the second planet you get to in the game and the one on which you spend the most time). Other than that, it was just the odd visuals that I’ve written about in the past, but with the additional odd glitches, framerate drops, and stuttering that happened as I neared the end of the main plot.

Other than that, I had a great time. Sure, I ran into the same problem I had with Tears of the Kingdom, where I just got tired of endlessly chasing a bunch of collectibles, but it was a lot easier to just not collect things in Jedi: Survivor since the vast majority of the collectibles are just cosmetic items, most of which I didn’t care about. I changed my appearance once for each customizable feature (clothing, face, BD-1, lightsaber and [redacted for spoilers]) and then didn’t touch anything again until right at the end of the game when I thematically changed my lightsaber again. I did my best to make sure I got all the skill points and health and force upgrades as I went, but everything else I was content to ignore once I got tired of jogging around to find more seed pods or chests with barely changing variations of facial hair inside them. Most of the time, though, I didn’t mind running around since that meant i got to fight more and more enemies.

Combat was where this game shined. Sure, it could be frustrating to have the wrong loadout for a particular enemy (the Stormtroopers with the shielded machine guns are a pain the ass to defeat unless you’ve got the double-bladed lightsaber equipped) and the limit to two lightsaber forms meant I wound up just finding a pair that I like and almost never used anything else unless I was required to as part of a skill or combat challenge. Still, I spent the first half of the game experimenting with different combat forms and had a great time with it, even if I found some of them difficult to use with my prefered playstyle (lots of parries, lots of dodging, and tons of quick hits or powerful blasts). It was always fun to run into new enemies or advanced enemies with more complex tactics, struggle for a bit, and then finally be able to breeze past them. Sure, I wound up struggling again against any enemy I hadn’t fought in a long time and when I would swap between games (Ghost of Tsushima gave me a lot of habits that turned out to be VERY bad for Jedi: Survivor) I’d almost always get my butt kicked by mooks for the first half an hour, but I only once felt frustrated and like the game had set me up for failure. The rest of the time, I felt like I just needed more practice or to better watch the signals the game gave me for how to respond to the various threats of whatever enemy I was fighitng.

Combat, including a few fun and memorabl boss fights, carried me through the game, but the story would have done it if the combat hadn’t. It is a very Star Wars plot, with a hidden planet, some Jedi shenanigans, a fun plot twist that they actually earned even if it wasn’t terribly unexpected (they did some good work to make you wonder if you were just imagining things or if the twist you expected was actually coming), and plenty of classic Dark versus Light theming. They do some great things with lighting in a lot of the cutscenes and even the familiar ground they retread is done in a way that feels fun and interesting, if not entirely fresh. I’d genuinely recommend this game if you enjoy Star Wars stuff or even just this kind of Souls-Like game. You don’t need to have played the prequel, Jedi: Fallen Order to enjoy it, since they cover the salient bits in the beginning of the game, but the pair make a very interesting combo in what looks like it might become a trilogy. I’m not entirely certain there will be a third game, of course, but it really feels like they layed the groundwork to build off the series. Hell, I could even see there being a fourth or fifth game, even though that might put them into contact with the original movie canon. Which, you know, is who knows what at this point. I honestly do not have the time and energy to figure it out these days, especially since you don’t need to know anything from outside this game series to have a fun time playing them both.