Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is great fun now that I've overcome PC issues

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May the 4 be with you all, and now is a great time to be a Star Wars fan (here I speak with some authority). Not only do we have several great TV shows to keep us busy and more, but we also have a new Star Wars game. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the sequel to Fallen Order, an action-adventure title with a Soulslike flavor and plenty of Star Wars fanservice. Jedi: Survivor is all of that and a little more.

This isn't a full review as I haven't finished the game yet - honestly, I played it to enjoy it at a leisurely pace rather than going through the story. Well, that and I had to fight the horrible PC port of this game before I could play. So that will be more of my impressions of Jedi: Survivor so far. And since I'm not obligated to do something timeless, I can complain a bit about the technical issues the game suffered from in the early days.

I won't bore everyone with a minute and overly dramatic account of how my PCs (yes, several) and I struggled just to make Jedi: Survivor work. I will keep it relatively brief. Long story short: it all started with the download. I played on PC and it basically downloaded in bursts. The Steam progress bar looked like a cutout of a mountain range. I downloaded it to my home and work computer to test, and it was the same on both computers, despite having separate internet connections.

I will bear the blame for the initial graphics slowdown: I neglected to undertake my usual practice of changing graphics settings for 20 minutes before playing. So seeing the opening cutscene took a while - and by the way, why is the cutscene of what's essentially Cal Kestis taking a cab marked as if it's an epic battle?

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Anyway, I would have forgiven the game all if it hadn't been for the game crashing on my work PC when I tried to adjust one of the graphics settings. When I first started playing the game it was crashing when I tried to edit any of them, and they were locked to Epic to begin with. By the time the first patch was deployed, it was just crashing if I tried to disable ray tracing. This eventually subsided with a driver update, although the game still doesn't run well on my work PC.

Most of these issues disappeared a few days after launch. Also, I managed to get the game to run flawlessly on my home gaming PC, which I built - although I had to scale the games to medium settings, but I'll take that in exchange for overshooting 30 frames per second. I'm still having the odd download issue with the gargantuan patches, but it looks like I've finally won the battle against the PC port of Jedi: Survivor.

One of my biggest complaints about Fallen Order is that, despite being set in one of the most difficult and desperate times in the Star Wars timeline, the story is about something something quite irrelevant. For lack of a better way to put it, the majority was more a Tomb Raider game than it was about a desperate former Padawan trying to hide from an Empire that wants to erase him.

In Jedi: Survivor, the story tries harder to focus on the immediacy of Cal's dilemma. Since he can no more stop using the Force than he can cut off a limb, it is very difficult for him to hide from the Empire. When he gets a line on what could be the ultimate refuge - a lost planet protected by a treacherous expanse of space - he leaps at the idea that he could help himself and other users of the Force dying under the watch of the Empire.

Jedi: Survivor also reinforced one of my opinions: Cal Kestis is one of my favorite new Star Wars characters. It's not Grogu, but he's up there. The sequel gives him a bit more room to show off his personality, as he's no longer in a breathless race against a fierce adversary to obtain a mystical artifact. Well he