STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

This game will forever have a special place in my heart as one of the most "Star Wars" things to have ever been made. However, the game requires some manual tinkering to get basic 3D acceleration to work, and I cannot get the background music to work at all, in spite of an impressive effort by the community. Your mileage may vary depending on your operating system.

This was my absolute favorite first person shooter back in the day, it had a good story, an interesting variety weapons, a great atmosphere, superb cutscenes... The maps were awesome, it was the first game that really gave the feeling of being huge. The moment when you reach that huge tower and have to find your way in past AT-ST walkers and such... Getting strafed by a tie bomber when you finally reach the top of the tower... Releasing Sam from Sam&Max from a secret storeroom and let him kill the rest of the level... Shooting a grenade at a stormtrooper and making it stick with a timed detonator and watch him run to his friends and take them all with him... It was absolutely fantastic BUT still I won't buy it to play it again and I'll explain why. While this is a truly superb FPS it remains a FPS and those really don't age well at all. The story and map is completely linear, the AI is extremely outdated... So IF you want to buy this understand that you are buying a real old game and accept the flaws that come with old fps games, however great they may be.

This is the game that I remember playing hours and hours and hours. It used FMV cutscenes to tell the story (I was really sad when they started using the in game engine to do cutscenes back in the day cuz they sucked - there was all this talk about immersion and crap, but I would wade and grind through a terrible game if I knew it had good cutscenes - the reason I'm playing grey goo now?) It had an awesome community around it and I can't think of a game I had more fun playing MP ever. If you are interested in some of the community created stuff check out massassi.net. There is a wealth of add-on content there for both MP and SP. Some of the SP crafted campaigns were pretty amazing considering the time period - fully voiced etc. There are three games that I remember playing in my whole life and being like "wow this is really awesome". This game, KOTOR, and the first Halo. Stop reading this and go play it - convince everyone else to play it to and go get some maps from massassi!

First of all, I've absolved a complete runthrough and expierienced no problems with the GOG-Version, neither on Win XP x64 or Win 7 x64. Well done, GOG! The rating above is for the game itself. It appears clearly outdated by todays standards and not only technically. I really don't have a problem with the edged characaters or the awkward drawn lightsabers. But I do have serious issues with enjoying this old classic. If you played this game by the time it was released, it my have been an amazing expierience with the lovely live action cutscenes (although the acting may be no hollywood material), the extensive levels with 200m deep abysses and the movie-like scenery and looks. But the game has also an unnerving AI. The enemies are partial running around like ants but hits you with blasters like snipers. Its is nearly unavoidable to get hit (even against a single enemy it is hard not to take damage) and there are no real lightsaber skills like in the successors. In the few lightsaber duels, you need to try to hit the enemy constantly at his side or back by stupidly running around him. This is always a matter of sheer patience. There are always playing the same parts of some of John Williams' Score in the background, which is normally of course great, but not when it's always the same short clips again and again and again. At some parts of the game I even got the feeling that the "blaster-only" predecessor made a bit more fun. However, the story and the immersion are quite better than in the subsequent parts of the series, as well as the anxious and in most parts successfull conversion of the old movies' themes, making it still worth playing, especially for SW-Fans.

Recently gave this a replay with the OpenJKDF2 engine and the base game still has all its charm and great level design that I remember from when I was a kid. I never played MotS beyond a demo disc back in the day and always regretted it. Well, having it included in this bundle has been great because it has helped confirm that I was missing absolutely nothing ever since. By the second level of MotS, it's abundantly apparent the original developers had moved on to bigger and better things. The amount of level design contrivance is simply appallingly bad. I know it wasn't ever going to be as grandiose as the original, full budget game, but I think even the poorly done in-engine cutscenes were an early warning sign that MotS was basically just a cash grab. At least the original DF2 is well worth the price of admission!