Will Diamond

Has all of the trappings of an excellent AAA single player Star Wars game, but release date should have been pushed to give it more development time. Honestly I’m very surprised to see anyone giving this game a five star rating. There must be a system other than PS5 (what I’m playing it on), XBox Series X/S and PC that’s optimized perfectly for this game. This looks and performs worse than Jedi Fallen order on my PS5, which of course was a last-gen title. Many textures render blurry and are generally low definition. I spent some time meddling with my settings thinking my console was bugged. Frame stuttering happens very frequently, particularly when in large environments. It also affects combat as frame drops (at 60fps performance mode) cause button input to lag, depriving the player of that fun fluid movement we have come to expect from this franchise. Texture and sprite pop ins happen quite a lot too in a jarring way taking me out of the moment. Aside from the patchwork needed to give Survivor a release date quality finish the game is good. A good balance of a large open world hub and smaller more linear maps to breakup the flow is good. Too much emphasis on wall-running and traversal, however, can tend to flatten the experience a bit. When executed in the more challenging areas, however, it’s actually done extremely well and is very satisfying. Story is also good, though somewhat forced in places to push the narrative forward. Will play it again on a harder setting once it’s actually been patched. Sad to see yet another potentially great game come out of the oven undercooked.