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Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. - What a difficult game to explain. It's amazing, but it's often infuriating. The game itself is an intoxicating mix of tough, exhilarating, souls-esque combat and surprisingly difficult 3D platforming. The combat suffers slightly from what seems to be input lag, which is death in a game this otherwise precise. I don't know if it is something to do with the PC port or just the way the game controls, but hitting a parry is too random. Even dodging is sometimes impossible to land. Your droid friend often ignores your requests for health stims. It means you often die to seemingly no fault of your own. I fixed this the old fashioned way - by dropping the difficulty down from normal to easy. At this level, the parry window is larger, so the window to hit it becomes doable, and the input lag is negated. It makes the game a much more enjoyable experience, while still being challenging. It feels like this should be the default difficulty, as it allows you to fight the still-tough enemies without feeling like the control issues are killing you more than the enemies.
I don't know if the game is designed to be a bit weird to control, but it is. If you go into a room full of earthenware pots, no matter how careful you try to be, those pots are getting stomped to smithereens. Cal lurches around, rubs his hands and face up against walls, catapults forward when you want him to stop, and takes extra jumps because you tried to correct for something a few seconds earlier. You try to jump a gap, but the input doesn't seem to register, so you press jump again, and he does a double jump right past your landing spot and into a ravine. This doesn't happen all the time, fortunately enough because there is a lot of very tricky platforming in the game. This is latter levels of Mario Odyssey stuff, combinations of moves such as jumps, flips, wall-running, flips to a different wall, air-dashes through forcefields, another flip and a wall-run, a flip back in the other direction then a grappling hook used to latch onto a rope before flipping off the rope, air-dashing forward and grabbing the edge of the next platform. I'm not exaggerating - this accurately describes a particular section I played last night. What's amazing is that none of this is done via Assassin's Creed style "parkour" where you hold one button to scale any building. You are fully in control of all of the moves, and it can be pretty unforgiving. If you reach the end of a sequence having hit all the moves, but are coming in slightly too low, tough luck - you're in that ravine. However, the game has a super-quick reset, generous checkpointing, and no real punishment for failure beyond losing a small amount of health, so it always remains fun and fair, and feels like a real achievement when you pull off a long sequence of moves and know that you did that rather than holding down one button and watching your avatar do it on their own.
The game's structure is fun, as it gives you a run-down bar as a base of operations, and various side-activities for you to do in the bar such as growing plants from seeds you find around the various worlds, or a strategy board game you can play with the varous regulars. I always like this sort of thing, how you can wander around having off-duty conversations with various characters, like in Mass Effect. Outside of the bar, the main planet of Koboh is an almost open world sized map. It even has Breath of the Wild shrines. They're REALLY reminiscent of BotW shrines though, in terms of what you have to do in them, and even the atmosphere of them. They're beyond a tribute, it's like someone said, "lets put BotW shrines in the game" and they did exactly that. Exactly that. There are also a few weird little sub-levels you can teleport to which give you a crushingly difficult bit of platforming to execute. There's an awful lot of stuff in this game. A lot of ideas, some of which could have done with being expanded further, although that might have stretched an already long game into the 50+ hours range.
I haven't mentioned the PC port. It's better than it was at launch, but it's a shit port. It's rare that the game loads properly first time. I've seen the crash report screen dozens of times. The game goes through an "optimisation" process every time it starts, which takes several minutes. At least when it does start, it runs well enough. The frame-rate is now rock solid. The game doesn't freeze or stutter. It does have fairly constant texture flashing though. You turn the camera and a few bits of the background flash white for an instant. I don't remember seeing this in other games, but in SW:JS it's pretty constant. Switching to other detail levels doesn't help, nor does turning the ray tracing on or off. It's a shame because otherwise it's a gorgeous game.
There's a 10/10 game in here, with best-in-class combat and platforming, and a great story and characters, but it's not been executed quite right, and I suspect it can't actually be fixed. It's still fantastic, but it's so close to being something really special.
Oh, and you sometimes find a new beard in a crate in the desert.
Want
More retro handhelds.
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My health in general. We had to call paramedics to my house last week. That was embarassing. Don't worry - I'm fine. It was just an Addisons Disease thing.
) if you do all content (and it's not BAD content) this has to be the longest non MMO game in the series right?