Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II

The Good
It was nice being a jedi, for a bit. The lightsaber weapon is fun. Enemy AI is better than many early 3d shooters. Some of the mission goals were original. Unfortunatly, that's about all.

The Bad
So many things are bad in this game. Let's start with the voice acting-- there are occassional good clips, but the rest is flat and basically 'awful'. The acting in the cutscenes is so miserable, I can't really explain it; you have to see it to believe it.

The automap is a nightmare to use; it attempted to be something like Daggerfall's 3d automap, I think; it's hard to tell because when you can actually tell where you are, you have no idea which way is up or down, and why the rotate buttons make the map turn three-sixty in half a second.

The levels are ridiculously frustrating and their layout often makes no sense at all-- while most maps in plot-based first person shooters have semi-decent excuses for why you can't go anywhere but where you want to go, Jedi Knight dosen't even really try. There are just mysterious walls blocking you off all over.

Oh, I said plot... ouch. The plot is so terribly, painfuly horrible, I almost cried. It all begins because Our Hero is off to avenge his father! Yes, it's the ultimate cliché, but they didn't even bother to give it any original twists in this game. I never finished it, because I knew I would do something horrible to my computer that I'd badly regret if I heard the android-actor who plays Our Hero intone 'You killed my father!' in one of the cutscenes, but I have heard from friends who braved the game how it ended, and it's just as cliché as the rest of the game. I have read some Star Wars novels, and I know how horribly written, typo-plagued, and plot-deprived most of them are, but nothing prepared me for this plot.

The force powers are also terribly unbalanced. Some are utilities, like Force Jump, which are easy and neccessary. The others are useless and you never use them throughout your entire play time. And the others are overpowered and once you get them, you breeze through the next several levels.

Although nothing could really have raised this game's enjoyability to a 5/10 with me, I might have given it a 4 1/2 if only there had been something good to save it. But the one paragraph at the top of this review says it all. Nothing else is good in this game.

The Bottom Line
Jedi Knight is basically a shooter that gets it all wrong. I would not recommend buying this game even if you are a Star Wars fan. Dark Forces remains fun, if unoriginal, with a much better plot and much more replayability. I would recommend it or Jedi Knight II over this title any day.