One of the most intense action scenes in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a bike chase. This comes at a pivotal moment after a major plot point, but I’ll avoid spoilers here and just say 'it happens'. The scene clearly has huge production values, and it looks incredible. However, it also feels very stilted and false. I wrote in my review that Jedi: Survivor's biggest crime is that it feels like a video game, and this is the perfect example of what I mean. Though entertaining, the whole thing is unavoidably false, and regardless of the stakes, it becomes impossible to care about any of it.
Level design is one of the core building blocks of a video game. People often think of it as designing an area - taking a space on a map and putting stuff in it. Back when gaming had traditional 'levels', there was a sense of adding objects and barriers in - with games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario. Bros, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sonic the Hedgehog, or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot, the player goes from A to B in a straight line, and so the game places various challenges along the way. In open world games, level design has to get more creative. For example, in Breath of the Wild, you can 'go anywhere'. But when you come to a mountain, most players are going to follow the valley path the mountain creates, and discover a village at the end of it. The player feels as if they have found this organically, when actually the game has manipulated them into going there.
In Jedi: Survivor, this manipulation is so transparent that your very participation in the game feels unnecessary. The game does not want you to play, it only wants to be witnessed. It feels a little like playing Dungeons & Dragons with an overzealous DM who doesn't care what your characters do at all, but only wants to tell their own, very fixed story.
Early on in Jedi: Survivor, you explore a base which has a speeder bike poised by an exit. I was disappointed that I couldn't jump on and explore the planet with it, but assumed there would be a later quest to fix it, or that it was a relic of cut content that would arrive as part of a later DLC pack. Instead, this bike is how the chase scene starts.
After an important event I will not spoil, Cal has to give chase to an assailant. If your Cal is like mine, he's very stupid and goes into the wrong room twice before successfully following the enemy. The enemy, though, is rather generous, and waits by this speeder bike until the moment Cal enters, at which point they speed off on said bike. Cal jumps on another, and the chase begins, except it's not really a chase at all.
Cal has to swerve around rocks and can take multiple pathways as the desert tracks weave and combine, but the distance between Cal and the bike in front of him is constant. It's not really gameplay, it's a cutscene with a fidget spinner attached to it. Later, Stormtroopers arrive to slow Cal down, and as you may have seen in the commercials, Cal can slam his bike into theirs and throw them into the air so they collide with a low-flying X-Wing. However, this slamming is scripted, and if you try to veer away, the game will snap you back into place. It gives you the honour of tapping Square (or your controller's equivalent) a few times to actually grab the guy, but otherwise you're just a spectator again.
This chase could be the game's high point. It's narratively important and gets the adrenaline pumping. If it were actually a chase, if you as a player had to fight off foes or were responsible for Cal closing the gap, it would be the game's crowning moment. Instead it's a very long cutscene where you can swing a speeder bike back and forth a little bit. It's easy to see why some people love Jedi: Survivor, because not a lot of games have the quality involved in this chase scene. But too often you can tell it was thought up in a conference room with pie charts and demographic data with collages from other games.
It just feels fake. I'm not really a Jedi, I'm sitting at home on my sofa controlling one with my thumbsticks. From the strange logic of wall jumping only working at predetermined points, the shuttling back and forth between Koboh and Jedah, and finding hairstyles in loot crates, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor just feels hollow. The bike chase is what happens when a hollow game wants to raise the stakes.