Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

"We don't see an FPS this good again until Half-Life"

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 is an amazing Star Wars first person shooter continuing the story of Kyle Katarn, mercenary for the Rebel Alliance. However, this time around, the story focuses more on Kyle's quest to find out who killed his father and the secrets he unearths in this quest (The most crucial one to gameplay being that Kyle himself is actually a Jedi.). Over the course of the game, Kyle must proceed through 21 lengthy levels (Though six of those are purely boss levels.) wielding a lightsaber and a wide variety of Star Wars weaponry, including many of the memorable guns from the equally amazing Dark Forces 1.

Produced in 1997, this was one of the first FPSs to make use of 3D cards to create a much more 3D environment than Doom or Dark Forces 1, but I won't pretend to be an an expert on the subject. For its time, the graphics were top notch, providing a wide variety of buildings, environments, and enemies for Kyle to overcome, trek through, and fight. However, in this day and age, the graphics look pretty bad, but graphics do not a good game make. The only thing I can complain about is that if you choose to use mouselook, you'll learn the hard way how much mouse smoothing has advanced over the years. This great game did give me motion sickness on more than one occasion back when I could still count my age on two hands and a foot due to the jerky mouse, but you'll quickly grow accustomed to it. The story is told through live-action movies with witty dialogue and... acting. Not REALLY good acting, but good enough to be better than many movies. In fact, the game is kept lively by Kyle Katarn's one-liners throughout the game, my personal favorite happened late in the game when, to proceed in an Imperial facility, I had to set a lengthy crate in continuous rotating motion to cross it to where I needed to go. When seeing this, Kyle quipped "Not ANOTHER thing to fall off of!"

The game itself plays like a cross between Half-Life and Dark Forces. The extremely talented team at LucasArts, when given good control of a third dimension, uses it properly in providing a huge array of obstacles to cross, from sewer pipes to aqueducts to canyons to needlessly elaborate (In a fun way) doors, bridges, and gates that must be navigated around and manipulated through switches and navigated again to get to the end of the level. Half-Life fans should feel right at home, but still get a little tense at some of the more outrageous set pieces, like the framework of an unfinished aqueduct suspended high enough over the water below to kill you should you walk off of the girders. The amount of variety in each of the game's levels (Including one taking place aboard a cruiser that is literally falling apart as you hastily try to make your escape.) ensures that the game never truly gets boring. The combat is fairly enjoyable, with a variety of interesting guns and enemies, the lack of particularly intelligent AI (Mind you, the enemies are not stupid. They see you, they shoot/attack/throw explosives at you.) is often compensated with intelligent placement of the enemies to catch you off guard or otherwise be a challenge to get around. Thankfully, if you are shot dead in combat, or if you otherwise killed, the game has ABSOLUTELY no load times for reloading save games. You will automatically pop right back to the last point you saved your game in less than the blink of an eye, no matter how powerful your computer is. No FPS today can do that.

The lightsaber itself is moderately useful. It can deflect enemy shots reasonably well, as well as dice enemies and grates like a hot knife through butter. You are also automatically given a third person camera to assist in lightsaber use (Though you can switch to and from third person at any time to help you do whatever you feel needs to be done in third person.), but for the most part, you'll probably keep the lightsaber in your holster in favor of some of the game's heavy weaponry for most of the game except for the Dark Jedi boss battles. You only get two types of slashes with the saber. A one stroke swipe, and a powerful double stroke that leaves you open for attack. While not nearly as interactive or useful as it could be, you'll still find it fun to use. (It is worth noting that sequels to Jedi Knight, made by a different company and many years after this one, put this lightsaber combat to shame graphically, though I prefer the simple lightsaber of this game for reasons I shall not talk about in this review.) Other weapons include Dark Forces staples such as the Stormtrooper rifle, thermal detonators, the rapid-firing Repeater Gun, sequencer charges (Read: land mines OF THE FUTURE) and the awe-inspiring, enemy-obliterating concussion rifle, all of these guns are nearly useless against the Dark Jedi bosses. Speaking of the Dark Jedis you will meet through the game, they are the most varied batch of saber-swingers you'll ever see. From a duo of aliens, one huge, one tiny, to a crazed Twi'lek wielding two lightsabers to the evil Dark Jedi Lord Jerec, each of them will provide a challenge for your saber skills.

Being a Jedi, you have a wide variety of Force Powers at your disposal, but you must allocate Force Stars to activate them and to determine how powerful they are. Force Stars are given to you at certain points in the game and you are awarded one each time you get every secret area in a level. Naturally, this is a great reason to scour each level for secrets. Force powers include speeding up your character, jumping really high, healing yourself, pulling weapons from enemies' hands, becoming invisible, throwing rubble in the area at your foes, and the standard Dark Side powers of choking and lightning throwing, not to mention a few others. As you proceed through the game, you will slowly gain access to more Force Powers to which you may allocate Force Stars. An added feature is an alignment meter to tell you how close you are to the light side or the dark side. If you kill civilians or pick dark side powers, you will fall closer to the Dark Side. However, saving civilians and picking light side powers will move you closer to the light side. Toward the end of the game, Kyle will choose between the Light Side (Stop Jerec and save the galaxy.) and the Dark Side (Stop Jerec and rule the galaxy for yourself.) depending on your alignment meter, effectively creating two different endings and two different ways to play the last quarter of the game. (I will say that I never beat the game as Dark Side simply because Force Healing, a Light Side power you are denied for going Dark Side, is TOO DANG USEFUL!)

The music is all John Williams stuff, stored in tracks on the game discs, giving the music very good quality. Furthermore, the music is used quite a bit more tastefully than other Star Wars games that simply splice together every battle theme and throw it into one huge orchestral mish-mash. Most of the level songs are fairly soft, slow movie soundtrack type tunes. Only when you get to the boss battles and certain particularly frantic levels does the music escalate into the battle songs we have heard in every Star Wars game by now. In the game's defense, Jedi Knight was made long before Star Wars games had nearly overdone the John Williams music.

Overall, Jedi Knight is a classic game, one of the best first person shooters ever made in my book. The force powers, variety, and sound level design make this game a definite 10 out of 10. If you can get this old game out and can deal with dated graphics, then by all means play it. Getting it to work on XP is relatively painless.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/13/04