Star Wars Jedi: Survivor almost swept me off my feet

polygon.com:

Yes, there is fast travel now.

OK. Now that I’ve gotten the most important part of the review out of the way, let’s get properly started.

Writing a video game review is a bit like having a whirlwind vacation romance: It all happens so fast, and you absolutely cannot gauge the experience by traditional metrics. You and your new obsession cram an entire relationship into a really compressed time frame, and as a result, emotions can run a bit hotter than you’d anticipate. At the end, you slump into a chair at home and go: “What the hell just happened?”

At one point in my time with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe; at another, I turned off the game after beating my head against a boss fight for more than 30 minutes, then pointed at my PlayStation 5 and said, “Fuck this, and fuck you,” before storming off to bed in a huff. Sometimes I’d let out a piercing “WOO!” as I turned a grappling-hook vault into an air dash that literally took me through a Stormtrooper. Sometimes I’d look at a room of 10 enemies I was expected to fight all at once while being pelted with blaster fire; say out loud, “Nah, bro”; and walk away for a while. There were story beats I genuinely didn’t see coming, and story beats so predictable that I groaned when they happened.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a bought-on-sale game collecting proverbial dust in my PlayStation library, but in preparation for this review, I threw an entire weekend at it before I even touched Jedi: Survivor. To my surprise, I encountered many enjoyable characters, fun but rote story beats, reasonably engaging puzzle rooms, plenty of Uncharted-esque climbing, but also a parade of serious roadblocks. Huge maps with no fast travel — as you can