STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

I'm always baffled when I see a badly designed game get a high score just because it's Star Wars. Dark Forces II has one of the worst level design I've ever seen. Long, tedious, uninspired levels rivalize with a host of bugs to create a less than satisfying experience. If you like exploring old classics, this game may be interesting, but if you're just looking for a good time, I highly suggest you try something else. Just a few examples of the atrocious design: at some point, you'll be running around endlessly in a gigantic, undetailed Empire... fortress, or whatever, trying to find the exit door among thousands of identical walls. Somewhere else, you'll try to navigate mazes of identical corridors with unclear objectives, not even knowing what you're looking for. Sometimes, you'll die on the spot when a random scenery explosion will occur in the environment without warning (yeah, looking at you, Falling Ship level). Other times, huge holes in the ground will be impossible to fall through, being in fact solid rock despite their clear appearence. Other times yet, you'll die riding down an elevator, because an Imperial officer is stuck under it, and for some reason your character also get crushed. Another instance of this "vomit level" level-design, and quite possibly the worse, is that ending some levels will require you to jump in a pit.... BUT depending on the angle of your jump, you may finish the level or simply die. I've been killed 2 times trying to finish level 18, then spent a whole hour looking for the exit, as this pit was clearly not it... Then read a walkthrough and realized this place I've been falling and dying IS the exit... then died 3 more times trying, then finally finished the level. So f***ing ridiculous. This list of design turds could go on and on. Really, people, I don't even understand how you could give this game more than 3 stars. And that's IF you're a die-hard fan of Star Wars. A neutral, unbiased score would be closer to 2/5 stars. Life is too short to play bad games.

There are two ways to enjoy this game: 1) play it 'properly' or 2) play each level until you're bored then skip it with a cheat, getting to the lightsaber duels faster. At the time, this game was something amazing. It gave you lightsaber face-offs, effectively a short movie due to live-action cutscenes, and use of the force. This came long before the prequel era and I don't think there was any game like it before. All of it was/is pretty clunky and unwieldly, and look even worse compared to the finesse of battles from even unspectacular games like the Episode III game. Battles basically involve you running in and out hitting the 'attack' key. While the nostalgia is heavy for many, if you're a younger Star Wars fan who never played or heard of this game, there isn't much for you here unless you're an FPS addict, maybe. The game is primarily a very basic FPS. You shoot, you get shot at, you heal yourself. There's no story progression to keep your interest through the levels like modern FPS', you just blast your way through a map until you finish the level and maybe get a cutscene. Of course, this sounds like the famed Doom et al, but for a 20 year old in 2015 it's going to feel empty. 2/5 may seem a low score, because back when it was released it would be 4/5 if not 5/5, but take the nostalgia goggles off and the vast majority of other Star Wars games are far more playable than this is today.

Being a great fan of Dark Forces (a game that did almost everything right in terms of ambience, sound and clever level design, even with the limitations of the time) I couldn't wait for the next-gen Jedi Knight (and I had to, since you needed Windows 95 and basically a new computer to play it!). Back then, Lucasarts could do no wrong. And now you could wield a lightsaber? Well, it was a good effort, but I found JK tedious to the bone. The levels were long but uninspiring. The story was awful (and in really cheesy FMV--ah, the pain!!!). Fighting with the lightsaber in FPS ended up being a pain - doubly, since you basically need it for all the fights against Jedis. The Force powers systems was a good idea, but badly implemented. The force indicator takes forever to charge. You can force-grab the stormtroopers weapons, but then they walk around like idiots instead of trying at least to punch you. The "force-vision" has a really annoying noise. The worst is force-jump: if you upgrade it to the full, you'll take damage when you land! And the weapons somehow looked less interesting than Dark Forces. Overall, a curious case of "more-is-less", that marked in my opinion the beginning of the decline of Lucasarts, from a truly innovative, labor-of-love company to churning one mediocre product after another, with the occasional exception. Still, if you can find them, there were exceptionally good MODs and user-made levels out there, with great stories - much better than the campaign. And with no FMV sequences.

This version by GOG is utterly broken ; you are better off just getting the original game files and making it work yourself. GOG obviously put 0 effort into making this compatible and it is a travesty that they are dishonest enough to sell this as a working game when it so obviously is a disaster.

I wanted to work all my way through the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games and just can't get myself to finish this one. My biggest gripes are the ridiculously unfair level design (often arenas where you have no cover and enemies spawn all around you, and SO MANY elevator traps), the shoddy controls (there is a half a second lag between pressing the move key and actually moving, making fights even harder and unfair; oh yeah, and you can't quick swap weapons), and the annoying maze like levels that just take it to a new ridiculous level. The weapons are shit, the lightsaber does not deflect consistently and you'll get damaged every so often, which is a death sentence on hard. The other weapons are slow, inacurate and unsatisfying to shoot, and since you can't shoulder peek due to the controls, it's really unplayable. Did I mention you can't quick swap? When you reload a save. you'll fire your weapon once, if you happen to have a grenade equipped and are facing a wall you are now in a death loop. The graphics have aged horribly. Just awful blocky polygons with awful textures. At least Dark forces had decent textures and a cute pixel charm to it. Only redeeming quality about this game is the nice original music and the story and acting are pretty good (so far at least), although the actors look nothing like the models which is just a bizarre choice.