Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Hands-On Reveals More Lightsabers and Better Maps

Studio Respawn's 2019 video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a hit with fans and critics, combining challenging lightsaber combat with rich exploration of space fantasy planets. Its sequel, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, doubles down on that proven formula with some long-awaited refinements and new tricks for the next chapter in the story.

The first game, Jedi: Fallen Order, followed former Jedi trainee Cal Kestis as he evaded the Empire in his quest to rebuild the Jedi order alongside his beloved droid BT-1 and a ragtag band of outsiders. The aptly named Jedi: Survivor picks up five years later as Cal struggles in his increasingly lonely fight against the Empire.

I sat down to play an early chunk of Jedi: Survivor At a press event last week in Los Angeles, California hosted by Respawn. Folks who weren't keen on the first game's mix of challenging melee combat similar to that in FromSoftware's Souls games with the sprawling area exploration of Metroid probably won't find anything new here to convert them, but fans of Fallen Order will love all the neat improvements in the sequel.

"Our approach was to raise the quality bar on everything and make the game not one individual thing, but the sum of its parts," Jedi: Survivor game director Stig Asmussen told CNET in an interview. 

My preview only scratched the surface of the studio Respawn's next game, so there's still plenty of surprises waiting for everyone when Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's release date of April 28, 2023 arrives. But until then, here's everything I learned that's coming in Jedi: Survivor. 

Light spoilers to follow for the game's first few hours. 

What's new in Jedi: Survivor?

Respawn's second chapter in its Star Wars saga packs a lot of new tricks that expand the gameplay, especially in combat. 

First off, lightsabers. While the first game let players add a second saber for Darth Maul-style double-sided lightsaber action, Jedi: Survivor gives players five different melee playstyles to choose from, broken up into stances: single saber, double-sided, dual-wielding lightsabers, crossguard (for heavy attacks) and yes, a saber and blaster pistol stance. That holster strapped to Cal's leg was a clue all along. 

Players can only equip two stances at a time, but they can be switched out at any meditation circle (the game's save points) or workbench, which are plentiful throughout the planets players visit. While I only got hands-on time with the first three stances, they're varied enough to find favorites. (Respawn gave us a sneak peek at the last two styles by letting a fairly talented developer carve through squads of stormtroopers in a combat demonstration -- and the blaster-and-lightsaber combo looked fun.)

"We have all these different moves you can get in the game," Asmussen said, noting that the added stances and lightsaber moves improve "how those things can chain together and create dramatic and challenging scenarios for the player."

The skill tree has been greatly expanded, giving players more moves and abilities to pick up through the game. Some are simple boosts to health and Force to fuel Cal's Jedi powers, but each stance has its own skill progression with neat new tricks -- one let me automatically deflect incoming blaster bolts by spinning my double-bladed lightsaber in a circle, while another let me slash with two sabers and quickly dash back. 

Cal's Jedi powers have gotten tweaked, too. While his Push and Pull abilities return, his Slow has been shifted from a regular power drawing on Force energy to a super ability that takes time to charge up. Instead of slowing a single enemy, it slows everyone in a radius around Cal, giving players a moment to breathe or get a flurry of free hits in. There's also a new mind-trick ability called Confuse, which can temporarily convert enemies to fight for you. 

Explorers and completionists can breathe a sigh of relief, as Jedi: Survivor has fast travel, allowing you to teleport between meditation circles. The map has also been upgraded with more information, including a trail showing the player's previous path and the ability to set "beacons" in a variety of colors. You can even tag these beacons through a new first-person surveying mode, where Cal essentially uses BD-1 as a pair of binoculars. 

Customization has also been overhauled, allowing you to switch out Cal's entire outfit (including swapping out hairstyles and beard trims) as well as BD-1's various parts and lightsaber components, all in a cleaner interface than the last game. These new customization options populate all the chests scattered throughout the planets Cal visits, and you can buy them in shops.

Jedi: Survivor hands-on first impressions

My hands-on segment started early in the game, when Cal and BD-1 -- flying the ship from the first game, The Mantis, alone -- make an emergency landing on the not-quite-a-desert planet Koboh to make some repairs. It's clear that the past five years have not been good to Cal, and he's coming to this distant world to get help from Greez, the Mantis' original pilot, who supposedly runs a saloon in a frontier settlement.

Dusty rocks and scrub fauna make Koboh feel like it's set in a western film, with humble prospectors living under threat of a local gang of raiders. As I worked my way to the settlement, battling territorial aliens, raiders and the Separatist battle droids they'd marshaled into service, it was obvious that Respawn had carefully reintegrated shortcuts so players wouldn't miss cutting down travel time. After dropping a zipline or tree trunk conveniently placed before a tough segment, when I got killed by a challenging mini-boss and revived at a nearby meditation circle, I was never more than 30 seconds away from having another go at the enemy.

The new game seems prettier than its predecessor, with sharper graphics and lighting effects. The animations have also gotten a facelift, giving Cal more natural movement as he clambers and flips around environments -- it reminded me of a more experienced Luke Skywalker hopping around Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back, which is fitting in Jedi: Survivor as Cal enters his own grimmer season with half a decade of fighting the Empire under his belt.

"Times are darker than they were in the first game, the hunt is getting even more dire," Asmussen said. "[Cal is] going to do whatever it takes to survive."

After a little trailblazing and puzzle-solving, I made my way to the settlement at the center of Koboh's map area, where I found a classic raider shakedown going on. Cal being a good Jedi, fought a raider boss to save the locals. I'd been playing on the default difficulty of Jedi Knight, so the boss wasn't too tough; the line between that and the next-hardest difficulty, Jedi Master, feels like it's upped the speed of enemy attacks to put more pressure on the player. There's also more health for the enemies and less for me. 

With the boss dispatched, I met up with the four-armed wisecracking Greez, and it became clear that some time ago, Cal's obsessive campaign against the Empire had driven everyone away and broken up his band of friends. But at Koboh, the wayward Jedi has an opportunity to re-center himself and grow the community, too: The frontier planet is a hub world where you return and grow the settlement around Greez's saloon. This is where you'll figuratively and literally plant your seeds (there's a garden area!) and sell collectibles you've picked up on your journeys.

Cal will also explore what else Koboh is hiding, including taking the fight to the raider base -- a grounded chunk of an old Separatist battleship from the Clone Wars -- as well as delving below the surface to discover temples dating back to the High Republic era. Taking place around 200 years before Jedi: Survivor, the High Republic is a setting that Star Wars media introduced in recent years that explores the best days of the Jedi Order, which could inspire Cal.

These callbacks to times of Star Wars' past, of prior triumphs and calamities, keeps Jedi: Survivor's themes firmly in the ballpark of the first game's emphasis on trauma and healing. Though more experienced, Cal is still shaken from the fall of the Jedi Order and years of evading the Empire's best efforts to eradicate its ideological foes have taken their toll. 

But amid that grim background tone, Jedi: Survivor retains its predecessor's levity with fun adventures and banter between Cal and other characters, especially his loyal droid BD-1. It's also riddled with secrets and lore tucked away on side paths, which meant I didn't get as far into the preview's available plot as I could have. Let that be a lesson to similar completionists who can't help but be distracted by the paths less traveled. There's a lot to explore, especially given how much of Koboh's sprawling area players can explore.

At the gentle prompting of a Respawn developer guiding my play experience, I did get a look at the coolest side quest in the early Koboh area. After delving into a mine in search of missing prospectors, I discovered their grisly fate: eaten by a Rancor. This iconic Star Wars monster was first seen nearly gutting Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, and it's now a serious challenge for a wayward Cal.

The boss battle was tough enough for me to bump the difficulty down to the lowest setting (Story) and I was still getting my butt kicked. Much as it was in Fallen Order, the combat system is far more suited to fighting mass groups of weak enemies than a lone tough baddie, as none of my Jedi powers affected the monster and my dodges didn't always evade its flailing claws. To their credit, Respawn's developers did include a secret strategy littered around the boss arena, which I won't spoil, but even with that advantage it was a tough fight as befits the iconic beast. 

A game for the Jedi in all of us

Respawn has refined a lot of the looser elements in Jedi: Survivor, streamlining exploration to make for easier return trips to planets and expanding combat playstyles while adding lots of depth to the skill trees and character customization options. It's Fallen Order taken to the next level in many ways.

That means it doesn't take any dramatically new strides, at least as far as I could tell from the preview. If you were hoping for even tighter combat with parrying and timing to match games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you may be disappointed. But that's also what sets Respawn's Star Wars games apart, Asmussen says -- that you can bump up the difficulty for a precision experience or drop it down for a more relaxed, "sloppy" style of play.

"The fact that you can play both ways and everything in between is something we can hang our hat on, because with Star Wars, we want to be able to have the widest spectrum possible," Asmussen said. "There's just so many different types of players out there."

While the sequel jumps five years ahead after the first game, Asmussen assured that there's still lots to explore in the nine years between Jedi: Survivor and the era of the original films when Rogue One and A New Hope take place.

"There's definitely still some space [to tell stories] there," Asmussen said. "We have our own kind of lane and other things that we can do in this game."