Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Raven's latest increment in the Jedi Knight series takes a proven formula and adds some nifty customization elements. On the way, however, it seems that they somehow managed to take the proven formula and un-prove itЕ

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The first thing you'll notice about the game is how ugly the menu is. It's quite frankly one of the most boring and drawl game menu's I've seen in recent times, but to be fair it is just a menu and it does work (despite having to load again if you want any multiplayer options). Naturally I figured that the game would start looking a lot better once I actually starting playing it, and the initial character customization screen shows that the characters aren't really that high-poly but the textures are good and there's an impressive amount of options to boot (you can select your race, gender, head, upper and lower body clothing and then some limited colouring options for the above) so I figured I'd let that slide while getting into that Уready to enjoy a sweet gameФ mood having semi-recently played through Jedi Knight 2 on PC. Unfortunately, nothing got prettier - as has been customary for Raven in the past years on quite a few games, the Quake III engine was used to create this game. While JK2 looked rather impressive way back when it came out, its graphics are pretty outdated now, especially on Xbox. In truth Jedi Academy seems to somehow look like it took a step back from JK2 and it makes your shake your head looking at how a two year old game like Halo can look 5 years ahead of one that came out last month.

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Graphics aren't everything though, so despite my disappointment with the visuals, I continued on with a fairly optimistic outlook. Sure, the voice acting for the male main character sucks (the female is actually quite a bit better) but hey, he doesn't talk too much anyways. As I played through the first levels I became increasingly aware or how outdated the game is - the character models for Luke Skywalker and Kyle Katarn are the EXACT same ones used in JK2, the non-combat animations range from mediocre to downright poor, the soundtrack isn't nearly as dynamic as it should be and the lightsaber fighting really doesn't work as well on a thumb stick as it does on a keyboard - what swings you perform are dictated by what direction you move in, a shame when the system in the semi-par Xbox game Obi-Wan worked so much better but was part of a much lower quality franchise. Then again, you get to pick you lightsaber styles, so that makes it all much cooler right? Wrong. Not until around a third of the way through the game do you get to pick either a single saber, a double bladed staff or two single bladed sabers. You're even stuck with the УmediumФ style of saber-attack until you're almost ready to choose your final saber setup, and unless you elect to have a single saber you only get two out of the three anyways.

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On the other hand, you are a student at the academy so in the context of the game it does make sense that you shouldn't get your really sweet weapons right away. The same goes with force powers - you get to choose which ones to upgrade before each mission. The game actually has a recurring level selection pattern: you'll start of with a couple mandatory missions, select at least 5 of 6 available optional missions (meaning that you don't have to do all six but doing the last one gives you another chance to upgrade your force powers so why not) and then rinse, dry, and repeat. This goes on for two or three cycles until the story actually starts to kind of go somewhere, even though it's nowhere terribly new or exciting. It's all VERY predictable and the while the force powers are classified as light and dark, you don't even pick a side of the force to ally with until the last mission, and then the only difference is whether you fight just the dark Jedi or the dark and the light. Whoo hoo.

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What about mission variety though? Well, there's a decent amount. You'll get to visit a couple of familiar locations along with a huge array of new ones, and you'll even ride a Taun-Taun and a swoop. Too bad the swoop physics are easily the worst I've ever had to endure - hitting a wall dead on will simply ricochet you off it and should you be unlucky enough to climb a few feet up one of the level's sides you'll fly up and down it over and over until you're able to wrench the joystick in so many unnatural ways that it finally gives up trying to fly straight up a sheer hill side. How any developer could actually leave this good idea but scrap of a level in a game is beyond me.

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While we're talking about stupid glitches I might add that I once had to go back three save games because Kyle Katarn's AI decided to jump into the ceiling rather than through the hole in that ceiling over and over and over creating an endless cutscene, which, I might add, you cannot skip. It was really funny the first time. It really wasn't the second and third.

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The lightsaber fighting is also sketchy at best - you can clash with a dark Jedi for as long as five minutes before killing him or you may kill him on your first hit but there really is no level of skill involved, it's all about how fast you can mash the trigger and jerk the thumb stick around. Force powers do come in handy (force lighting is hella sweet) but changing through them is a pain in the ass, since it defaults to up and down on the d-pad and changing weapons defaults to left and right, so it's not terribly uncommon to be in the middle of a saber fight looking for a certain force power only to suddenly whip out your pistol. Useful. Of course you can equip one force power to the X button, but that is almost required to be force push since that's the only way out of being force gripped by your seemingly endless dark force wielding opponents (both lightsaber using and not). You'd think that it would also work for just pushing enemies around and breaking their hold on you when they start using the up-close implementation of force drain, yet oddly enough while it does work for them (they can force push you around and push you out of a physical drain) it doesn't work for the player, and let me say there are few things more frustrating then getting an enemy down to a very small amount of health only to be stuck in a situation where all you can do is put the controller down and watch your health drop over and over and over.

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The saving grace about the lightsaber battles really is the variation in styles and the cool animations. Despite getting constantly frustrated it was nary too irritating a task to tangle with the dark side again and again. You'll even occasionally lock sabers with an opponent which requires you to madly mash both shoulder buttons but will reward you with a really cool death animation should you reef on your controller hard enough. Additionally, while there are only 8 force powers to actually choose from (the core ones upgrade automatically, namely force jump, pull, push and sense) they can be very useful, not to mention fun - walking into a room with close to a dozen storm troopers and using level 3 (the highest) force lighting killing them all almost instantly as they fly across the room giving off forks of electricity is pretty damned cool.

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Then there's the multiplayer, the only area of this game which seems like it was remotely close to being finished at the time of release. The levels aren't that hot but with the new styles and the fact that you're forced to pick either light or dark side powers there's a lot more strategy involved and playing other real people with the same disadvantages as you (i.e. the force pushing issue) makes things more fair and more fun. Lag is a bit of a problem with higher numbers and even split screen with six bots gives the Сbox a bit of trouble but it's nothing unbearable and it really is the best part of this game.

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