Jedi Survivor is a great game and the best single player experience I've had since God of War. Developers Respawn have taken the three pillars of Fallen Order's design and expanded them in satisfactory ways. The combat is better, with five total lightsaber stances (crossguard, blaster, and dual wield are new) and new force powers like levitation, which lets you hover enemies in the air before slamming them down. The Metroidvania-like exploration now features a readable map, and the huge open world of Koboh which is filled with secret boss battles and monsters like the rancor. The platforming element is heavily featured and expanded with a force dash and a grappling hook, so you'll rocket Cal around Survivor's gorgeous worlds like Sonic, wall running and jedi flipping across vast chasms. And the story is probably the best Star Wars adventure since the original trilogy, with a battle-scarred Cal Kestis growing increasingly desperate as he wages a war against the empire. All periods of Star Wars are represented, from Imperial Stormtroopers of the OT to reprogrammed battle droids of the prequels to Kylo Ren's crossguard lightsaber. Unlike other Disney Star Wars media, Survivor features its own cast of characters and new planets, like the aforementioned Koboh and the mythical dimension of Tanalorr. Obi-wan or Yoda don't make a cameo, nor do you go to Tatooine or Hoth, so Survivor is free to forge its own story without being weighed down by the past, which is what I've wanted from Star Wars for ages. It is one of the best Star Wars games of all time, right up there with Jedi Outcast and Dark Forces.
Unfortunately, there's a dead albatross hanging around Survivor, and that's its rather abysmal performance on all platforms. Despite being undoubtedly a gorgeous game, Survivor is profoundly CPU limited, likely because Unreal Engine 4 isn't very multithreaded. So while CPU usage might be minimal, with only two threads being hammered, the game can't properly utilize your GPU in most instances. Koboh is the worst offender, with frequent drops into the low 40s on a Ryzen 5800x. No amount of VRR will smooth out a drop from 60 to 40, and no adjustment of settings will mitigate the CPU bottleneck. Changing all settings from Epic to Medium netted me maybe one or two frames per second on average at 1440p, and turning on FSR upscaling had no effect. A Digital Foundry analysis of the Playstation 5 version revealed pixel counts below 720p in performance mode, with the game frequently going below 40 fps! So obviously Respawn have pushed Unreal Engine 4, which was never made for large open world games, to its breaking point, and I'm doubtful any subsequent patches will be able to fix the issue. So despite Jedi Survivor being a great game, I really feel as though we shouldn't reward EA for pushing it out early. I've encountered numerous glitches and bugs, and although the game has only crashed on me once, playing with Ray-tracing on isn't feasible on PC, because it increases the CPU workload, leading to longer stutters. 2023 has been a bad year for PC games, and Survivor is probably the worst offender. Add a 70 price tag, and it's hard to feel as though EA isn't charging consumers a premium to beta test. In closing, a wholeheartedly recommend Survivor at a lower price point. It's a shame that the game has these technical issues, since it's excellent otherwise.
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