Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed

"What do you mean the hyperdrive is busted?"

In 2004, SOE released the first expansion for the MMO, Star Wars Galaxies. This new and exciting expansion featured the one thing that was previously missing from the Galaxies experience and that was the ability to pilot a spacecraft. With several ships, both known and from the Star Wars lore, this gave Galaxies gamers a different approach to combat rather than just ground battle. Jump To Lightspeed allowed for gamers to pick a faction, either with the Imperials, the Rebels or as a Privateer and fly for them as well as choose a new profession: Shipwright.

In terms of new additions to the game, there wasn't much aside from the two new professions, Pilot and Shipwright, though there were a few more times added to the game such as the Starship Crafting Station and Reverse Engineering for Shipwrights. You were also given a space yacht that could be decorated if you wanted to take a quick jaunt around the galaxy with a group of people. If you wanted the chance to pilot ships like the Falcon {YT-1300} and Boba Fett's Slave I, you now had your chance.

Space, the new playground...

Space was always a wish that I had when I first started playing Galaxies and it was finally realized with the release of Jump To Lightspeed. With several hours of play, I quickly ran through the ranks of the Imperial Navy and got my first Ace badge. Several missions greet you from most of the space stations and with the number of planets at the time, there were plenty of places to go and plenty of enemies to fight. The overall training in the game begins with your first piloting mission and you can learn the intricacies of space flight as well as dog-fighting in about twenty minutes.

If you went a little further with some of the more distant planets such as Dathomir, Endor or Yavin IV, you can pick up duty missions, which are a good source of experience points and money if you're on the broke side. Another aspect to space flight, is that once you blow up your enemy, you may collect space loot, which could be sold to a parts broker located in any of the major cities on the Core Planets. If you had a Shipwright friend, or are one yourself, you can Reverse Engineer the parts with other parts of the same level to get a component that was superior to the previous components that you used.

Once you're done with space and have collected your badges and gone through the different mission stories {there are nine total}, there isn't much more to do but to farm the space parts and sell them off to a broker, or have them engineered into better parts for your fighting ship. Once you hit the Ace portion of the Piloting profession, you have access to the multi-player ships that allow you to travel throughout the galaxy with friends in the co-pilot and gunner positions. One of the problems here is that you have to have people with good coordination or you'll find yourself floating in space.

This leads to another small problem in which the multi-player ships are pretty much useless unless you have a good crew. For most people, they'll have their Ace status and have access to the higher end single-player fighters, so finding a good group is hard to do. The end-game fighters {such as the B-wing, TIE Oppressor, Krayt} have very little value unless you have the best parts available from hours of farming the higher end enemies. One more problem here is that the good loot is few and far between, leaving you for hours on end mindlessly wandering in space.

If you want to PvP, there are two zones available. Kessel, which is where you need to go in order to finish your Ace and Deep Space. I can honestly say that in all the time playing, I was never much into Deep Space simply because you were flagged for PvP immediately and usually ended up getting killed by an opposing player who was waiting at the load point. Fighting in space PvP usually was a matter of who was quicker on the trigger and who could fire the missiles faster than the other guy. Without really working with those aspects, you might as well stick to hunting random mobs in space.

Portions of the combat in space really depend on what it is that you want to accomplish. If you want to get the most out of the space simulation, then you need to learn the different missiles, counter-measures and combat techniques that will keep you from getting killed. While not terribly difficult to learn, it takes a bit of skill to learn how to program your droid and use the programs effectively in the heat of combat. One mistake and a more skilled player can cost you time and money to repair your ship.

Shipwright on the other hand was a rather fun diversion from the normal crafting. It does require the best materials in order to get the right combination of weight, power, energy use and the like, but the best part is the Reverse Engineering. With the right parts, you can take loot and turn it into a single component that is truly superior to player crafted items. Enough practice with this and you can become a rather well known Shipwright with all the materials and customers to buy ships from you.

The lights of destruction...

Visually, space is rather appealing to the eyes in terms of the detail that is used on not only your ship, but those of the enemies. When you wish to change the way that your ship looks, the customization kit shows you a new paint job. Take too much damage to the engines, or blow your enemies engines and sparks fly behind the damaged component. Detail on the ships is as close to the movies as you can get here, with lights of the engines and the laser blasts in the midst of space.

The surrounding space also looks rather beautiful in terms of space junk that you fly through on occasion and the nebula's that you can fly through if you go searching for them. Asteroid fields and the planets rotating throughout your adventure in the background give an expansive, if not gorgeous backdrop to what you're doing. A problem here is that if your graphics card isn't up to the challenge, you have to turn the nebula density down quite a bit to compensate. This does take away from the overall experience, but if you don't care much for that, then it really isn't a big issue.

In space, no one can hear you scream...

The sound effects that you run across in Jump To Lightspeed aren't bad and capture the feeling of flying in space fairly well. You'll hear the hum of the TIE Fighter, or the high-powered whine of the YT-1300 at full throttle. The battle music is a little on the bland side, but if you have enough focus on the fight in front of you, then it quietly fades into the background and you don't really notice. One of the main problems that I had was with the alarms when you were getting hit. A screen flash is sufficient enough for me to know that something is shooting me, I don't need an ear-shattering wail every 10 seconds to let me know.

Do, or do not...there is no try...

Interface and control issues are a big downfall here in terms of being able to stay in the fight while knowing just where you're going. Unless you're good with a keyboard and can remember where all of your programs in the hotbar are located, you absolutely need a joystick to compete. With the right joystick, banking, firing, evading and performing mind-bending maneuvers becomes a breeze. The interface issues are the sheer number of menus, most of them useless unless you're completely obsessive about knowing just how much mass is on your ship. You cannot load new weapons on the fly and once you're out of missiles and counter-measures, half of your keyboard just became obsolete.

Just not enough...

Jump To Lightspeed gave me the ability to fly in space and feel the experience of piloting one of the iconic star fighters that I'd always read about or seen in the movies. However, without really adding much to the overall game aside from the new venue to play in, there isn't much here that kept me interested more than a couple of weeks. Interface menus and lack of a good joystick will keep most people from really enjoying this and the hardcore {abet one-sided} PvP isn't something that you can just jump right into.

If you can get through some of the more insanely hard missions and bare to farm for weeks on end after that to get the right components, then you'll love this. After a few weeks, it turned into more of a job than fun and once I'd experienced the story-lines from all of the different factions, I use my ships now for transporting from planet to planet. For me, the Shipwright profession was a good diversion and space was fun while it lasted, but it's now nothing more than something to do when I get tired of the ground game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/11/06