When Star Wars Jedi: Survivor launched in April 2023 – as a direct sequel to the well-loved Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – it was a messy affair. The most trusted name in the game performance world, Digital Foundry, called it “The Worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023… So Far” and when it was checked up on again a few months down the line, things were still in a sorry state. Even for those looking past performance issues had other negatives to pile on for almost every aspect of the game, leaving a legacy of shrugs and forgetfulness that was once a bright spot in the Disney era of Star Wars.
Well it’s time to see about all of that for myself. While I loathe handing over a single cent to EA, even a South African cent that is virtually worthless, Jedi Survivor is now included in PC Game Pass. Not only does this save me directly lining the pockets of EA, but if the experience was so terrible I couldn’t lose any money.
And before we get to that experience I must mention my PC. I have what I would consider a fairly unremarkable mid-ranger featuring a Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 3060 (CPU and GPU at base clocks), 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe M.2 drive. According to specs put out by the aforementioned EA and developer Respawn I should have a fine enough time running the game, even if my CPU is a bit long in the tooth. More on that later.
Well my PC wasn’t fine enough to run this game. Despite more than a year of updates to Jedi: Survivor the performance is still unacceptable. I first tried playing on the high preset at my monitor’s native 1080p and 75Hz but found it constantly dipping to very low FPS numbers. It wasn’t really the dips that were so bad, but the inconsistency of the whole game and how often it swings those FPS numbers.
What makes this particularly annoying with the CPU usage. I rarely saw it go above 60 percent. While I will also ding Jedi: Survivor for this, it’s a trend I see in many games which ask for higher end CPUs, but I constantly see my Ryzen 5 3600 being underutilised. Maybe this is something else to do with my particular setup or choice of settings, but it’s worth a mention.
After some experimentation I settled on the medium preset with DLXX set to performance mode. Let me put it this way: it was bearable enough for a game I didn’t “pay” for but if I bought this game on Steam it would have been refunded well before the two hour window was over.
While I did see 75 FPS a lot of the time, 50 was more common and again the constant stutters and fall to lower numbers made it so much worse. I have sat through console titles locked at 30 FPS that felt so much smoother than any second of gameplay in Jedi: Survivor.
All of this isn’t even mentioning that fact that every single time you launch the game you need to sit through a compiling process that is supposed to optimise performance. While this step only takes around a minute to complete by my timing, it’s a real slap in the face to see this screen on every boot up and still not have optimised performance.
Making all of this even worse is seemingly incoherent decisions around performance. For example: the main planet that players visit in Jedi Survivor is Koboh. This planet is basically the main hub of the game where most of the interactable NPCs hang out. You spend many hours on Koboh and, probably due to its size, performance gets even worse when you visit. Please, I need someone to explain the absolute moon logic of making the most visited area of the game the worse performing. Surely, knowing the importance of the location and how often players visit, it would have been given extra care and attention? Come on now.
The sad truth is this: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor still runs terribly and maybe you will win the lottery and your specific PC can run the game fine. For everyone else, if you are unwilling to put up with nonsense, it is still recommended to avoid this game.
The even sadder truth it that this is unlikely to ever change. Now that Respawn and EA have no financial incentive to improve Jedi Survivor, this version of the game is likely what will be its final state. I’d love to be proven wrong and for performance updates to come out, but I doubt I will be.
With my tolerance for the bad performance slowly building, I pushed through with Jedi: Survivor to see if it could still be a fun experience, and it was. I played through the game to completion and finished most side quests, so I won’t turn around and deny that I was looking forward to the end of work days to boot it up again.
The inherent draw of Star Wars and the power fantasy of using the Force is what did it here. It will never not be fun to slice up droids with a lightsaber, or use the Force to fling Stormtroopers off of railings or even deflect blaster bolts back at enemies. The pure fun feedback of being a powerful Jedi was enough to have me coming back over and over even when so many other aspects of the game were failing me.
I also have to give major deserved kudos to the huge amount of customisation on offer. By finding items in the game (and not buying them with real money) you can change the look of Cal Kestis, his weapons and his droid buddy BD-1 to a huge degree.
It was always a pleasure, when I got stuck on a puzzle and I needed to look up a video guide, to see what the creator of the video had chosen for their cosmetics. It felt like I was looking at a completely different character to my Cal Kestis and it inspired me to keep looking for new cosmetics.
This freedom is also reflects in the combat. Players can choose between five different types of lightsaber fighting styles called stances and two can be equipped at a time, allowing you to switch between them on the fly. This, on top of the traditional levelling up and unlocking new skills, opens up a massive variety in the way each and every combat encounter happens.
Customisation isn’t just a nice to have in Jedi Survivor, it’s core to the experience and it pulls off a very clever trick that I don’t think any other game has managed. Respawn wants to tell a very specific story with this game and this adventure is rather linear but, by giving players so many customisation options, the journey can still feel particularly personal even though we have no real choice in how the story goes.
This is a set in stone Star Wars story that was completed years ago, but it’s my version of Cal Kestis that completed it.
The hunt for cosmetics also acted as a Band-Aid to one of my most disliked parts of the game: Uncharted-style climbing.
There is a seed of hate in my heart for Uncharted-style climbing that is watered by every game I have to suffer through that features it. By the end of Jedi: Survivor I honestly never want to touch a single game featuring it again. The legacy of Naughty Dog isn’t going to be innovation in gameplay, pushing the boundaries of storytelling or mixing media, but the endlessly annoying climbing system it created.
A Jedi: Survivor sequel is already in the works and I truly hope this climbing doesn’t return. Not one to endlessly complain without providing a suggestion for a solution, I actually present two: space combat and a jetpack.
The Mantis spaceship is sitting right there, at idle, for most of this game. In the sequel, why not let us pilot it in space combat? Better yet, bring the deep customisation system to the Mantis so we can make it our own too. This would be much more fun than climbing the umpteenth wall and it fits perfectly in the universe of Star Wars.
At one part in Jedi: Survivor Cal Kestis makes a joke that everyone except him seems to have a jetpack. For the next game, just give him one already. It avoids climbing and Respawn can still make puzzles and platforming challenges to break up the flow of the game, but now it makes use of a jetpack.
Sitting somewhere between hate and praise is the story and overall writing for the game. It’s fine. There’s really nothing special or noteworthy about the adventure here or the overall arc of the characters. It’s a real shame because, with some improved writing and other changes I moaned about earlier, these games could become a new pillar of Star Wars to rival the shows and movies. Speaking of that…
While playing Jedi: Survivor I was also watching The Acolyte as episodes came out. I use the past tense there because I gave up after some episodes. The writing, some acting and other decisions in The Acolyte are so shockingly bad that it made me less excited to be a Star Wars fan.
Thankfully I had Jedi: Survivor to play which had the opposite effect and reminded that “hey, Star Wars is cool” and that sentiment held throughout, even with all the aforementioned problems.
Despite my overall warm feelings towards the game it is still difficult to recommend with all its issues and handing over money to the gaming devil EA. Game Pass is the ideal way to experience it both for the sake of where your money goes, and the fact that you can bail if the performance is a deal breaker.
This article is part of an infrequent series where I play through my backlog games. Previous articles cover:
