Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

"Great game, but not without flaws..."

This game is a port from the PC game, and it was successful, mostly.
GAMEPLAY 8/10
You can use weapons, lightsabers, and forces powers to take down baddies, and you'll have to use them all to go through the game's many puzzles. But the puzzles are sometimes long, annoying, and just plain frustrating, but when you get sick of doing puzzles, you can zip to multiplayer with bots for a break.It is sometimes a pain to scroll through items and force powers in the heat of battle, and you're restricted to just weapons in the first 5 levels, which does get boring. Once you get your lightsaber, the game picks up. With a lightsaber, you can use three different modes, with a stance for each mode. There's moderate, where there's medium speed and damage, with the ability to string up to five attacks into a combo. There's fast, with fast but weak hits, with an infinite combo threshold. And there's stong, where you get slow, heavy strikes. Anyway, the lightsaber is the most fun weapon to use, and you'll end up using it most. There's also multiplayer, but it's not online. You can have up to ten bots, and two humans (,Yes, only two.) It has a lot of functions, and it's got unlockable goodies.
GRAPHICS 7/10
This is where the game suffers. The graphics are very nice, but when fighting, there's an occasional slow-down, and the blurry screen resolution doesn't help either. Also, the characters only move their mouthes in the cinematics and FMVs, but when ingame, the characters never have facial expressions, or even talk with a moving mouth. The cinematics are also a little fuzzy, but not that bad. This game's also a little dark, and difficult to see at times. Other than that, the textures are crisp, and the models are fine. The little graphical glitches are little things that you don't really notice that much, but the frame rate does slow down at times, and skips on rare occasions.
SOUND 8/10
Fine, the tracks are good, but the songs restart if you pause and return to the game, and there's some glitches with skipping, but nothing too bad. The music is of high quality, and so are the sounds. The voice acting is very good, but Jan's voice is very personality-less. The sound is, still, very nice.
CONTROLS 9/10
Solid, and nearly fully customizeable to fit your needs. There's several clever configurations so you can find the one that's best for you. They're not clumsy, and they're easy to get into. There's still times where you'll be scrolling through force powers while being blasted by enemies in front of you, but these occasions are very rare.

FINAL WORDS
The frame rate suffers a bit, but this game's still worth the 50 bucks you'd pay. I bought it, and I'm keeping it.

OVERALL 7/10
Rent or Buy? BUY

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/05/02, Updated 12/05/02