Developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by EA in 2019, Jedi: Fallen Order is a return to the golden age of Star Wars games. The game was hailed as one of the greatest story-driven games of the last decade. The sequel, Jedi: Survivor was released earlier this year and definitely lived up to the previous game’s big reputation.

Jedi: Fallen Order was a third-person, story-driven game following Cal Kestis, a padawan who survived Order 66 during the Clone Wars. Survivor follows the same character after a long time jump- about 4-5 years.  We open in a new setting for the game, Corucsant, and see that he is with an entirely different crew. The story immediately hooks the audience with Cal and this new crew, wondering what they are doing and what happened to the beloved characters from the first crew: Greez, Merrin, and Cere. As to avoid spoilers, I won’t disclose too much about the story itself.

Critics, myself included, were worried that the game wasn’t going to live up to the reputation of the first. A major part of the first game was the skill progression, learning new lightsaber and force abilities. This was tied into the storyline, so it would be hard to reset this progression for the second game. But, how could they keep an engaging skill progression without resetting the abilities we already learned last game? The answer: an entirely new skill set, and entirely new gameplay, without losing the core mechanics and abilities from the last game. It was a stroke of genius- they got rid of a lot of the excess things from the previous game, kept the important things, and gave us so much more.

The trend of improving upon the first game continued to the story. Jedi: Survivor‘s story had similar themes to the original, but was much more compelling; introducing new characters, places, plot lines, and even romances.

Overall, I give Jedi: Survivor an extremely high 9/10.