Highlights

  • Star Wars Jedi: Survivor offers a range of difficulty settings, ensuring that players can tailor their experience to their preference.
  • The Grand Master difficulty setting provides a challenging and immersive Soulslike experience, with tight parry timing and maximum enemy aggression.
  • Lower difficulty settings are available for players who are more focused on enjoying the story or want a less challenging experience.

Difficulty in games is always a hot-button topic with sound arguments on both sides, but that’s never more true than in Soulslike games. Now, traditionally, Soulslike games have been iconic for not having difficulty settings and therefore starting all players with the same advantages and disadvantages to learn in an unforgiving environment. With enough of these games played, it’s possible that a muscle memory will be established that can be carried from one Soulslike to the next, and that’s only partially true of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

Survivor, like Fallen Order before it, requires players to have a mastery of lightsaber combat and Force abilities that are both essential to success. Neither game is inherently easy due to being inspired by the difficulty of Soulslikes that it is inspired by. But because they’re more accessible as action-adventure Star Wars games, they do include a comprehensive range of difficulty settings. In this case, even though the hardest difficulty would seem outrageous to pick right away, the Star Wars Jedi games’ Grand Master difficulty actually provides the best Soulslike experience.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s difficulty settings are as follows, in descending order from easiest to hardest:

  • Story Mode
  • Jedi Padawan
  • Jedi Knight
  • Jedi Master
  • Jedi Grand Master
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Star Wars Jedi’s Hardest Difficulty is Also Its Most Immersive

Star Wars Jedi’s Grand Master Difficulty is as Great a Balance as the Force

Fallen Order and Survivor’s Grand Master difficulty setting is the ultimate challenge for any Jedi, giving players the tightest party timing as well as maximum incoming damage and enemy aggression. To be fair, enemy aggression is likely where this difficulty setting is the least comparable to FromSoftware’s Soulslikes since their enemy AI is often all over the place, but having maximum incoming damage and a minimal parry window grants incredible immersion for a Star Wars experience.

Indeed, Cal never perishes after succumbing to a single blaster bolt, but he will be cut down swiftly if they fail to block or evade enough of them. Enemy damage hardly ever feels cheap and can viably be perceived as realistic, especially when Cal is slashing a canonically OP lightsaber at enemies.

As for boss fight duels in Survivor like Dagan Gera or Rayvis, the stakes are high for both the player and Cal on the Grand Master difficulty because one whiff can mean certain peril, similar to how one properly timed side-step can result in the perfect opportunity to punish the boss and land a crucial hit. This difficulty is likely the closest to emulating an ordinary Soulslike experience from the beginning, and when players have upgraded Cal sufficiently he quickly begins to get the upper hand in a lot of encounters, which is no different from Soulslikes when players return to early-game regions after they’ve leveled up a bunch and found or upgraded far greater equipment.

Survivor also closely emulates Soulslikes with its stim canisters paralleling Estus flasks , and by collecting more there is always a greater sense of relief in any encounter when more healing salves are available and replenishable.

Star Wars Jedi’s Difficulty Options are Still Wonderful for Accessibility

Even with all this considered, having difficulty settings for players to tailor their experience will always be a boon. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor might appeal to Star Wars fans more than Soulslike fans, for instance, and in that case they might not want to instantly select the most arduous difficulty setting if they’re mainly concerned with seeing the story play out.

But if Soulslike fans enjoy such games and still wish that they were able to lower the difficulty, Survivor becomes a perfect solution. Soulslike fans are accustomed to dying repeatedly, losing progress or XP, and generally having a hard time getting back to a desired area once they’ve been slain, and while the Star Wars Jedi franchise can certainly provide that experience if players wish it’s fantastic that lower difficulty settings are available too.