Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy

The Good
The lightsaber is cool. A couple new force powers and improved ways of using old ones. Using the 3 different kind of sabers and the 5 or so colors is cool. You go to a bunch of different planets. The music and voices is ok. You can choose your force powers. You can choose the missions to some extent.

The Bad
First, choosing "Light or "Dark" force powers has ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the game. Get all "dark" powers and you can stay on the light side. Max-out on "light" and you can turn to the dark side. The force powers are very unbalanced. Grip lets you choke guys like Darth Vader and throw them around. This allows you to barely use your lightsaber and just throw stormtroopers and dark jedi down cliffs or into lava. The game can be extremely easy. Stormtroopers are sit there firing lamely at you while you block their shots. Dark Jedi will, if you fight them, then just get a short distance away, turn off their lightsaber (!?) and sit there, allowing you to shoot at them and\or recharge your force and health. The toughest part of a game is finding where to go and not falling off a cliff. The levels are linear and boring. No civilians or anyone else. For no apparent reason, thugs or other non-empire guys will attack you. Also, I don't think street (or roof?) thugs on Coruscant should have powerful weapons like the disruptor rifle and thermal detonators while the supposed powerful storm troopers just have blasters and the occasional repeater and "metal gun". The story is ridiculous. Something about resurrecting a ancient sith lord using force energy stored in a scepter "sucked-up" from places with lots of force. Since the people trying to bring the sith lord back to life are evil, why not use the power on themselves. After all, even Darth Vader made an offer to Luke to help him overthrow the Emperor in Empire Strikes Back. In the beginning of the game, you get to "customize" your character, choosing species, looks, etc. However, this weirdly has no effect what so-ever. No change in abilities or anything else. Same voices even!!! All the missions are described as meet with this and talk with this, etc. But that never happens. You are always ambushed, or the guy you were supposed to talk to gets killed and almost every level is fundamentally the same. The game also offers almost nothing about your character's past or anything. You just slash your way through a seemingly endless supply of the same 7 or so different types of enemies. The "basic" force powers, speed, push, pull, and sense, unlike what you here in the training mission, are rarely used for anything. You don't really need to push any switches etc. this brings up the worst problem, the lack of depth. You won't go through a city, getting stuff to trade with other people or interact with anyone in a non-linear basis. The galaxy is nearly lifeless. it seems that the entire galaxy has either your allies, or mercenaries, dark jedi, stormtroopers etc. out to kill you. Boba Fett is in one of the missions. Normally, this would be a good thing, but they totally make him more of a nuisance then anything else. Mostly, he will just fire bursts of laser fire as you deflect them back, hitting him with his own fire. Occasionally, he will use his flamethrower or missile launcher, but not enough to show him to be a deadly assassin. Finally, absolutely no puzzles!!! If your not hacking and slashing through enemies, wandering from room to room, you're putting your cross hair over everything to see if it can be affected by the force.

The Bottom Line
If you are a die hard Star Wars fan, wait a couple of years for the price to get down to ten bucks. if not, avoid it, as it is a complete waste of money. (I spent 50 bucks on it and learned the hard way)

The Good
This game capitalizes on its predecessor's strength: lightsaber combat. This time around there is more variety with plenty of opponents and new saber modes (dual saber and saber staff). While these fights can get fairly hectic, the developers have added some special moves that you can execute, and the whole experience can really come together quite well.

While the story is minimal, and there is a groan factor at the beginning of every mission as you "unexpectedly" encounter trouble in the unlikeliest of places, once the action gets going it is generally varied enough to keep you entertained. There are vehicles to operate, huge monsters to contend with, and you even get to man the battle stations to shoot down some TIE ships a couple of times.

The Bad
The games missions are structured more like "chores", which you must do in groups of five (you can skip one of each group), in order to get the the few plot-advancing missions. This means that each one is mostly unrelated to the others plot-wise. A major gripe I have with these missions is a good 50% of them are not what they advertise to be. For example there is an early mission taking you with rescuing crash survivors. However once you get to the crash site, your ship breaks and it turns out there are no survivors to save. So the mission is actually about fixing your ship to get back. There are quite a few such bait-and-switches, where nothing gets accomplished by your being there.

My second biggest gripe is the level design. Of all the Jedi Knight games, I believe the first one with its old proprietary engine worked the best at presenting Star Wars' massive settings. In Jedi Academy, to an even greater extent than in Outcast most of the levels seem cramped and artificially walled off. Additionally, some of the levels' population of baddies goes strangely unexplained. While it's easy to believe that an Imperial Remnant installation on some god-forsaken planet would be full of Storm Troopers, one tends to wonder why the rooftops of a residential district on Corusant are a veritable menagerie of alien life hell-bent on trying to kill you. Civilians are nowhere to be seen, even in places you would expect them, and a number of areas seem empty and desolate because of this. And while there is significant variety in levels, a lot of them are simply a sequence of nondescript hi-tech looking rooms with various meaningless displays, populated by a lot of troopers. I believe that the use of the Quake 3 engine, which was designed to allow for intense combat in relatively small and cramped quarters really hurts the game here.

Puzzles are more or less meaningless - there are buttons to push and keys to find, but it seems like they're only there because one is supposed to be pushing buttons and finding keys in these types of games. The rule of thumb is push any button you see, and this will get you past 90% of the games "obstacles".

It is also unfortunate that the designers chose to limit the use of force powers to a few "key" points. For example, while you posses the push and pull force powers, you can only use them on designated objects in the game world. It would be much more fun to incorporate the force powers into the physics system, and allow the player to find creative ways to use them to navigate obstacles. Instead you will see your trigger light up when pointed at a "force-friendly" object, to let you know that this rock, out of thousands of identical rocks in the level can be force-pushed.

The Bottom Line
Despite its flaws, it is definitely an enjoyable experience once you get going. The lightsaber fights alone are worth the price for a star wars fan. As a shooter/saber fighter it's a pretty good game, but don't expect a lot of Star Wars immersion.

The Good
It’s been ten years since the defeat of the Empire above Endor’s sanctuary moon. While the New Republic continues to battle the Imperial Remnant, Luke Skywalker’s newly trained Jedi are fulfilling their historical role—that of guardian and peacekeeper. This may not be a dark time for the Republic, but it is a tenuous time for the Jedi, especially with the Cult of Ragnos threatening to resurrect the ancient Sith lord.

The Cult reveals itself during the opening cutscene, firing on a transport carrying would-be students. This is revealed to be a diversionary tactic, with the Cult’s real motive involving hacking into the Academy’s computers. If the Cult can locate areas strong with the Force then they can siphon the Force energy for their Master. At this point in the Dark Forces franchise, you’d think that only Kyle Katarn could thwart their dastardly deeds. You’d be wrong.

After the events of Jedi Outcast, Katarn is now a Jedi Master training students (of which Jaden, your character, is one). In an interesting contrast to the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Academy begins with you picking Jaden’s gender and race (KotOR offered human-only role playing). You then customize Jaden’s outfit and select a lightsaber color and hilt. As you progress through the game you also add new Force Powers, so in many ways Jedi Academy blurs the line between shooter and RPG.

While the entire game covers the Cult of Ragnos threat, the structure of Jedi Academy differs from previous entries. After the initial events and training/tutorial levels, you are presented with five missions around the galaxy. You can play the missions in any order and only have to complete four of them to advance to the next tier. The structure of the game works out to be five mini-missions followed by one larger story-related mission, repeated three times.

As you move up in tiers, your core Force powers (Jump, Speed, Push, etc) advance to the next level (up to level three- Jedi Knight). After each mission, you can add a new Force power or strengthen a preexisting one. These are the other Force powers (Light or Dark Side) like Heal, Grip, Mind Trick, etc. In an interesting switch, Force powers no longer seem to be viewed as good or evil, rather it’s how you use them.

Unlike Jedi Outcast, you start off with a lightsaber (something Jaden was able to build on his own before the Academy). Lightsaber combat is even more dynamic this time around with many more new moves and combinations. I can’t really say I figured out how to use the new moves, but with frantic button mashing I executed many of them. Towards the end of the game, you have the option of keeping with your single saber or picking dual sabers or a double-ended saber. You can also bring along the clumsy, random blaster and other weaponry if you want to try Jedi Academy as a FPS. These weapons are less vital this time around, especially against Dark Jedi who can deflect blaster bolts and Force Push missiles back in your direction.

So how is the game? The mini-missions are a lot of fun. There are plenty of different landscapes, mission types, villains, etc. You can investigate an attack on a Jawa Sandcrawler, become the hunted in a The Most Dangerous Game level, explore the acid rain blasted ruins of Vader’s Bast Castle, plant targets on an orbital platform for a Rogue Squadron assault, and more. Within the missions you can ride Tauntauns on Hoth, race along on swoop bikes, turn a capital ship’s turrets against a wave of TIE Fighters, and kill many many Stormtroopers and Dark Jedi.

The Bad
So what’s wrong with this game?

First off, this is the first Dark Forces game which isn’t a great improvement over its predecessor. In-game graphics are great and the rendered cutscenes look great, but the cutscenes using the game’s engine are poor. Lip-synching is way off and character animation is clumsy. Pathfinding seems to be missing in missions where characters fight along side you and they are also less effective this time around and more prone to falling down chasms, not reacting to combat situations, and (in one strange situation) attacking each other. Finally, spawning is very visible in this game—it’s very disconcerting to see enemies beam in right in front of you.

Then, while the mini-missions are varied, there is no depth to them so you have a nonlinear game comprised of very linear missions. One mission was so strictly scripted that I had to restart the mission when I took the wrong path. Other missions end abruptly once the goals have been met, so in some cases it may be possible to escape combat and just run from objective to objective.

Finally, the story is serviceable but lacks the punch of Dark Forces, the scope of Jedi Knight, or the richness of Jedi Outcast. Jedi Academy does feature a Light and Dark Side path, near the very end of the game. Unlike Jedi Knight, which had a primitive, but workable, alignment system, Jedi Academy stops the game at a crucial moment and tells the player: “Do this to be on the Light Side or do this to be on the Dark Side.” The end result is something that feels like a compilation of mod missions, feebly tied together.

The Bottom Line
Where does this leave us?

Jedi Academy is still a great game, but it suffers in comparison to Jedi Outcast. I would recommend this game for its fun, short missions that mix familiar worlds and characters with new planets and enemies. I think it misses the mark set previously, but it was such a high mark.