Star Wars™: Jedi Knight™ II - Jedi Outcast™

THE GOOD: + Classic old-school shooter action in the Star Wars expanded universe + Great atmosphere and iconic locations THE BAD: - Old-school level design; not necessarily in appearance (which is good, considering the game's age), but lacking modern touches to make the player's progress easier - Old-school unforgiving difficulty - Clumsy "Force" controls THE UGLY ! One of the worst, notoriously-bad FPS levels ever created: "sniper town". A test of player patience, not skill. Drops the game to two stars simply for being there, regardless of the game's other strengths. It's that bad. TECHNICAL NOTE: Old-but-robust Quake 3 engine powered; handles widescreen well with .cfg tweaking; doesn't run out of the box with Intel integrated graphics (modern Intel graphics are more than powerful enough, but Intel has garbage OpenGL drivers), this is fixable with OpenGL-DirectX wrapper.

Lightsaber control is delayed, unprecise, sluggish. Same applies to guns: There is a notable delay when you hit the fire button until the gun actually fires. Quite some of parts of the game are classical "Raven" style, i.e. you waste quite an amount of time trying to find out how to progress after you cleared a level. Technical issues with solutions: 1. No sound on HDMI (especially Intel)? - Toggle EAX in game, move mouse over menu item to trigger a sound, toggle again if you like. 2. Too friggin' dark, and Gamma in game menu does not work as expected? - Edit jk2config.cfg - seta r_gamma "1.7" - seta r_overBrightBits "0" 3. Too fast? - Edit jk2config.cfg, try - seta com_maxfps "60" - or CheatEngine like I did. 4. Aim assist makes you MISS the target? - seta cg_dynamicCrosshair "0" Near the end your fellow jedi fighters are supposed to help you, but they tend to sabotage you rather by, for example, pushing you or disable the traps you set "to protect you!" Let them be killed, and then you can fight undisturbed.

Tried everything! No success!

the game wont work. how do we return it :/

Jedi Outcast, by its own, is still a great game, but my problem is that I can't possibly rate this higher because Jedi Academy is vastly superior. Though in many ways Jedi Outcast improves on Jedi Knight, in particular lightsaber combat, but in more it actually goes back a couple steps! Atrocious pacing, worse puzzles, worse level design overall, the progression system has been massively dumbed down and the story is kind off weak compared to the epic and immersive experience you get in Jedi Knight. Academy, which everyone agrees has the more polished lightsaber combat, adding more saber types, always gets a bad rep for its story but I think Outcast's story is worse. If they killed Jan it maybe would matter, but because it turns out she is alive after all and Desann really isn't that interesting as a villian. Jedi Academy's story isn't as immersive or important as Jedi Knight's, but the contextualisation works surprisingly well (the Imperial Remnant actually feels like an Imperial remnant and the cult actually feels like a guerrilla threat, justifying the great variety of locations!) and, like in Jedi Knight, force alignment matters and important characters can die. But even on its own, Jedi Outcast levels are frustrating mazes with the solutions being anything but satisfying to find out. Outcast has this constant muddy gray tone that becomes grading quickly and further exacerbates the lack of variety and awful pacing. Jedi Oucast is to Jedi Academy what American McGee's Alice is to Alice Madness Returns: The levels drag on for far too long and half of it you spend on Imperial installations. In addition, ALL the Nar Shadaa levels are atrocious. I originally wanted to call it the second worst, but despite MotS's frustrating final levels (they are a great change of pace and style though, fitting the theme of the title!), I still had WAY more fun with it.