Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

All righty, then. My first game review! I watched my brother play through the entire game over the course of the last

week. This review does contain spoilers, so if you still want to play it yourself, I suggest not reading further.

Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast is all right, as far as Star Wars games go. The Force powers in particular are quite good. However, the story is, in one word, pathetic, and considering that story is important to me, that’s a lot of a downer.

From the top: Music. I would say the music gets a score of 2/5 only because John Williams wrote it; otherwise, it would have a score of .5 or something. I don’t think there even was music for most of the game, because I sure don’t remember it. The Gamespot review claims that there was, but I missed it. One oddity was that there wasn’t ANY music during the credits! What? But the credits are so boring otherwise! Okay, you can see how many names there are in the ’special thanks’ sections as opposed to the normal credits… Anyway, I demand more attention to music in my games.

Story: Story was extremely weak. It was linear, predictable, and had about .05% of tension. Yes, the girl dies, but we all know they never kill off the female lead indefinitely, right? That sort of switcheroo was done to perfection in Radars of the Lost Ark; it actually had me fooled for a good portion of the movie and I was really surprised when she showed up again. However, in JKII… well, we got to the end of the levels of the area after ‘Jan is dead’ and then took a break. The next time I even remembered she was there, before we started playing again, I knew she wasn’t dead. The few lines on philosophical or Force-related matters were the same-old same-old, and there is a huge contrast between Master Skywalker’s gentle chiding of Katarn’s obsession with killing Desann (breezed over, really) and the collective Jedi’s displeasure with Anakin’s behaviour in the New Trilogy movies.

Another story point: it felt like it was just providing excuses to go to a new location. While some might say that that’s the point of a story, especially in a first person combat game, I personally felt it was flat and boring. I have no idea how it measures up to the original Dark Forces (only got to about level 3-ish… kept getting killed by sewer creatures) or Jedi Knight I. I can say that Dark Forces felt reasonably like “I’m going on a mission! Go in, get objective, get out.” with the story framing that. I thought that felt plausible. A comment about story in general: Fire Emblem is perhaps my favourite, with battles almost like interruptions to provide some ‘game’ to go with the ’story’, although I realize this is not everyone’s cup of tea. Zelda is also good with lots of open-endedness but with all the NPC’s and side quests (mostly) fitting in to their world and the overall plot simple but well developed. Final Fantasy seemed less entertaining; while I haven’t played ANY FF (gasps of shock from readers) it looks a little like walking from cutscene to cutscene, which seems a little pointless and interrupts both game and story needlessly. Although, FF has excellent stories in general and the full-rendered cutscenes are really lovely.

So, to Graphics! They are quite decent for the age of the game, I think, although the Gamespot reviewer comments on the excellent lip-syncing…. excuse me? What lipsyncing? But I have to say that Luke and Lando, the two main franchise characters, are quite real looking, and the polygons are not too noticable until they start moving. Jan… I thought in Dark Forces she was the cute/spunky type? They’ve sexy-fied her, I think. The stormtroopers are fantastic looking, and terrain is pretty good, although you can see the bottom in some bottomless holes and rocky terrain is very chunky. Cities are  excellent, though, and the interiors of bases and ships. Props like AT-STs and TIEs are well done and move like they’re supposed to. The lightsabre also deserves special mention, as it will cut holes (that do heal eventually) in whatever terrain is touched by it, and will evaporate raindrops (which, however, can pass through rock) and will extinguish in water. The stormtroopers display an admirable level of AI, although since my brother got word of Force Unleashed he can’t talk about anything other than that game’s next-gen AI, which does look to prove amazing. Anyway, the visual effect of combat is very good, with stormtroopers flinging their weapons in the air when they die, and the occasional severed limb. Occasionally our game suffered a small stuttering when Force Speed was used, but not enough to really interfere with gameplay unless he was fighting a Cortosis Jedi. Also it kept launching with the brightness at 0, which meant either really really dark levels or that we had to go and adjust it every single time. The only other minor detail I’d like to point out is that… kissing should not be attempted yet even with the level of graphics available to this game. Unless you have reeeeeaaaaaally good romantic music to go with it. Oh, and I liked how the first level felt very much like Dark Forces.

Gameplay: My only real complaint with the AI is the fact that stormtroopers, as long as they have their weapon, will keep shooting at your lightsabre and will eventually kill themselves. Hardly realistic. Force powers are fantastic to use, and while fighting with the lightsabre is occasionally clunky as you can’t turn fast enough to hit an enemy behind you (especially a Cortosis Jedi) it’s generally extremely effective. The various shooter weapons are very handy, although my brother mostly used only the pistol, the sniper rifle, and the Nerf-gun (my name for it… it’s the rapid-fire machine-gun thingy). He would have liked to use the rocket launcher more, but didn’t find occasion to, although the final boss battle was very amusing for a few seconds (before he reloaded). Levels were nicely laid out, although sometimes it was hard to find where to go next. Puzzles were fairly good, and one source of amusement is finding all the different ways to get killed by terrain, whether from being squashed closing doors or getting fried by electricity or mining car repair equipment… you know the room I mean.

Audio: Excellent audio. Voice actors well chosen, especially in the case of Luke and Lando, of course, and for Lando, actually, the original actor provided the voice, which means of COURSE it’s spot on. The sound effects were also very good, from various lasers to terrain noises to footsteps.

Overall, this game gets about 3/5. I still think the flatness of the plot means that it deserves less, as it and the lack of music added up to a slightly unsatisfying play experience, but the good gameplay and decent graphics do partially make up for that. Having watched this game once, I’m probably unlikely to watch it again.

We have not tried the multiplayer version (not enough players or programs) so no comment on that.