Platforming in Jedi: Fallen Order was just okay, which is ♏especially clear if you’ve replayed it recently like I have. It 💎reminded me of Uncharted and Tomb Raider, in the sense that the puzzle platforming aspect is a major part of gameplay. I wasn’t a huge fan of the mechanics. It didn’t feel bad, but it wasn’t as fluid as I’d have liked and it felt like the platforming dominated the game. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would have benefited from improving the flow of the game’s movement.
Moving around the world of Jedi: Survivor, in contrast, feels amazing. Respawn went a long way to improve the traversal mechanics in the sequel, removing many of the pain points that players complained about when Fallen Order was released. Movement is so smooth, in fact, that a friend who was ༒watching me play the game over my shoulder said, “ಞThat’s some real parkour shit. It looks like Assassin’s Creed.”
The quality of the movement makes Cal look like an extremely competent Jedi – he’s fast, graceful, and deliberate, especially in combat. But the platforming is on a whole other level than its predecessor’s. One t🔜hing that annoyed me about Fallen Order’s climbing was that you’d have to use your left trigger to grab onto climbable walls – just jumping to them wasn’t enough. It was a sm♍all thing, but it didn’t add anything to the game. It didn’t make the game more difficult, just inconvenient, especially if you have accessibility issues.
Another thing that pissed me off to no end while playing Fallen Order was that you couldn’t drop down from a ledge. I’m not the type of player that dedicates another playthrough to getting a 100 percent completion, and I’d rather get as much done as I can the first time around. That means backtracking to get every route sometimes. If you climbed up a ledge and decided you wanted to go back down to explore another route first, tough luck. You either jump down and pray you catch on to the wall in time to not f🦋all to your death, or you take the long route back to where you want to go. The game disincentivised backtracking this way, and I hated it.
However, Survivor fixes this as well, making it ꦦpossible for you to drop down with a click of a thumbstick. It’s also, in general, easier for you to grab onto things because you don’t have to do it manually, so even if you jump down, you have a much smaller chance of j💧ust dying, thank god. I’ve plummeted to my death in Dathomir too many times to count, and I’m glad that happens much less in Koboh.
Of course, Survivo𓄧r didn’t just add fixes to its flaws – it added whole new mechanics. One of my favourites is that you can climb on the ceiling now, but you can also grapple from point to point, jump from wall to wall in order to get to a higher level, dash in combination with double jumps (essentially letting you fly briefly), and bounce off giant floating balloons. Do all of these make sense in the context of the game? No, not really, but they do open up a whole new host of ways to look at the world and reframe your perspective.
Jedi: Survivor has its flaws, but I enjoyed the platforming in this game far more than its predecessor. Moving around in Fallen Order was a bit of a chore, but in Survivor, it’s a joy, and just one of the places where Respaw꧙n has improved on the formula of its origina⛄l game. We’re just two games into this series, and already I’m wondering what improvements the third will bring.