STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

It's literally DOOM with a Star Wars skin and more story. So what's not to love? If you love Star Wars, check. Did you love DOOM? Check! Did you wish DOOM had more story? Check! Honestly, this is a fun shooter game; that mixes in some story to give you that Star Wars feel through and though. Very enjoyable game.

Ok so I bought this game way back when I bought my very first graphics card, a shiny 3dfx jobby with a whopping 4mb of ram! Rose tinted specs aside this game still holds up today imo. The character models are very primitive by todays standards and the graphics date back to the very early days of graphics cards so you should adjust your expectations in those regards accordingly. The level design is pretty good and the locations are quite varied. The animations are janky but have their own charm. The sounds are pure Star Wars and therefore automatically awesome and phrases from several of John Williams SW movie scores play throughout adding greatly to the atmosphere. The gunplay is fast and frenetic and the 3rd person lightsaber combat is basic but fun. The story is bog standard gaming fare and the fmv is really badly acted and cheesy. Perfect. I had a great time with it when it first came out and I'm having a great time with it again now. So what are the caveats? Well It runs like absolute garbage in win8 and even though I haven't tried it on windows 10 I should imagine its much the same. For a start the 3d accelerated graphics cannot be enabled with a basic install on Win8. The only option you have is software rendering which is a bit pants. Trying to enable 3d gets you a black screen with the sound playing and the the hud only. To enable 3d for this game in Win8 you have to download the DGVoodoo workaround and even then the game runs like a sideshow with blurry textures everwhere and rubbish lod. It kinda works but it's terrible. And forget running at any playable resolutions higher than 640x480. The only way I got this game to work as intended was to install Win7 alongside Win8 on a dual boot sytem and load it up in Win7 which contains the necessary files and system framework to run it properly . Wallah, all cool and good times to be had.

It was a wonderful gaming experience. I can recommend it to anyone, who has no problem with the graphics. Personally I like the visuals very much because they are not irritating or sickening, but maybe I'm just old. Schortly after I played it through, I did it again. A truly rewarding gaming experience through as I think great Leveldesign most of the time. Very easy access through GOG, way easier than installing the CD-Version. Thanks!

Excellent level design, interesting weapons and story.

DF2 (5/5) is still fun from the start to the finish with a nice coherent story and huge levels. MotS (3/5) improved colours and jedi powers are now must in order to progress but unlike DF2 it suffers from huge difficulty spikes and it is filled with plenty of not so obvious puzzles and hidden paths so you might easily get stuck.