You, Jaden Korr, and a bunch of other new, force-sensitive students are on shuttle headed towards Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy on Yavin 4. Before reaching the academy, the shuttle is hit by a powerful, mysterious ray that sends the ship crashing. You and another student by the name of Rosh Penin are uninjured by the crash.However, you find yourselves isolated from the rest of the students. As the only student with a light saber, you help Rosh get to the academy after overcoming nature and a few unexpected obstacles: imperial troopers and a dark Jedi. Once at the academy, you get caught spying on a few dark Jedi; their leader disappears as Luke Skywalker, a few Jedi and the surviving students return but not before knocking you out with a mysterious scepter. As you wake, you are greeted by Luke, Kyle (from Jedi Outcast) and Rosh. You quickly rise through the ranks of the academy, getting more and more involved with a dark Jedi cult going by the name of Disciples of Ragnos, who are siphoning force energy from all over the galaxy; the same cult that you encountered at the academy. Your goal is to find out what they are up to and stop them.
Even though the story sounds somewhat fascinating, the non-contiguous storyline really detracts from it. To add to the pain, the game felt as if it were only one hour long and, of the eighteen~ available missions, only around half of them were related to the main storyline. Another thing that I didn't particularly like was having missions that you couldn't use your light saber - honestly, you're Jedi in training; you're not a scavenger, trader, pilot, or gunner. Oh, and it doesn't end there! Many of the puzzles in the game have you going around attacking your environment and spamming your force powers to see if something will open a door, destroy a force field or drain water. The one nice thing about the story was your ability to eventually choose to remain on the light side or go rogue (join the dark side) near the very end. If you picked the dark side, the game difficulty would skyrocket due to you now having to fight your former allies as well as the dark Jedi.
Jedi vs. Jedi combat is probably the key feature of this game. For those of you who have played Star Wars: Battlefront II (SWBF2), you'd think Jedi Academy would put it to shame. In SWBF2, your Jedi have two force powers, basic ground and aerial attacks with a special dash attack. In Jedi Academy, you have all of that plus at least 6 more force powers (light/dark side) as well as chain combos. You also have to chance to lock light sabers with an enemy to do a cool execution, get executed or do a nifty dodge. Not to mention, you don't have to sacrifice how your character looks to get the fighting style and force powers you want. You can customize your character quite a bit in Jedi Academy; you can pick your race, gender, clothing, type of lighter saber and it's style of hilt as well as what force powers to level up as you progress through the game. Even with all of this, SWBF2 stands unscathed; you might have all those neat combos and force powers in Jedi Academy but many of your attacks can't land on a stationary non-Jedi target - even when your reticle is on them - making your selection of attacks even more limited than what's available in SWBF2. Should I mention that many of the force powers available aren't viable at max rank either; you'll find yourself only using heal, speed and maybe force lightning. And, if that wasn't enough, there is very little predictability to when hits are landed on enemy Jedi and vice versa since the ability to block attacks is passive. Overall, the Jedi vs. Jedi combat was a let down. I attempted to try the multiplayer part of the game only to realize that there were no active players and everything was so severely mod'd, like Left 4 Dead's current servers, that whatever little balance the game had was gone.
That brings up another thing - mod'ing. There are many nice additions to the multiplayer part of the game. However, all the multiplayer servers are empty and therefore you can't exactly enjoy any of the mods. The single player portion of the game has quite a few nice mods as well; these mods range from different skins, new combat styles and even movie battles. There are an uncountable number of mods available at File Front but I couldn't find enough decent quality and unique mods that could extend the playability of the game for the PC - never mind Jedi Academy for consoles, where no mods are available.
As you can possibly predict, I don't consider Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy worth buying or renting unless the multiple appearances of Luke Skywalker make you jizz your pants or maybe you lack a high end PC or next-gen console. Compared to newer releases like Star Wars: Force Unleashed, you might just want to consider leaving this game out of your electronic shopping cart.
Jedi Academy - Jedi vs. Jedi. Mission: Valley of the Jedi.
Recorded using "WeGame". No sound
because WeGames doesn't support Win7 playback drivers.
Recording wasn't meant for full screen view.
By: Eric Fernandes
For some reason, the video's quality when down the shit hole when I uploaded it to blogger. Oh, well.
ReplyDeleteI see your gmail account finally started working for the blog. Did you manage to figure out what was blocking it or did it just randomly start working?
ReplyDelete