Played this game a few years back solo aand had an itch to play it again. Couldn't find any lobbies in my area and this game is unplayable with 300 ping. Plaaying solo, the bots are really good at drooling at walls but that's about it, you have to solo carry a team of 20 bots while the enemy AI coordinates and pushes. It's a testament to how well the game is crafted that it's still a good game :) It's star wars, it feels like star wars, it's immersive and fun. The battles are action packed and feel real. But yeah, don't expect too much solo, and online will depend on the playerbase in your area.
I don't know why so many people rave about this game, it is objectively worse than the first one. The premises are boring and uninspired (a savage from a village), the main quest makes little sense, the starter areas are ugly, boring, full of empty areas and containers, and useless NPCs. The quests feel very superficial and uninspired. The game is poorly balance and shoehorns you into combat builds (not to mention it's ackward trying to roleplay a Science buff coming from a savage village...). Sure it adds QOL features, but is still riddled with bugs and broken triggers. A pale copy of the first game. Been slogging through this for a good 15 hours and just don't have the energy to continue. If your game doesn't capture the player within the first 10 hours, it's a bad game.
Replayed this game after 20 odd years, and the flaws are glaringly obvious: lack of directions, bugs, skills that do nothing (steal), broken quests, broken triggers (especially towards the end of the game). Yet what this game does well, it does flawlessly! The atmosphere is one of a kind, the story is incredible, the voice acting and writing blows most modern games out of the water, and the graphics have held up really well if you don't mind pixel sprites. If you've never played this game, don't be put off by the harsh beginning. Make sure to dig out the manual and read it and/or consult guides and other players if you get frustrated. It's well worth it believe me.
Be warned: this game is LONG and SLOW. This is because the major complaints people had with Fallout 1 and 2 (this game was made with the same engine and the same devs) was the low repeatability. So they artifically inflated the game life in the worse possible way: long winded and tedious quests. Everytime you think you've made a breakthrough in the story, they send you to another filler island. The world feels progressively emptier (you can see the end areas are quite barren and unfinished, the starter areas are well done however), until eventually you grind to the end of the game. If you can stomach that and have the patience and time, this is a very unique game with some great mechanics. One of the first game to introduce crafting, and the system still holds decently to this day. Magic is also awesome and arguably superior to crafting. The possibilities are huge and the game has a lot of replay potential, if you can deal with the grindy slow sections every time you do another run. Highly recommend the community patch to clear the many many bugs the original game has.
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.
You know, back in the days this game was quite hard, mostly because no one was playing WASD+mouse. You had to play this with keyboard only, using arrow keys to move. You'd get shot by enemies standing in corners or higher up purely because you couldn't move your field of view fast enough (to look up/down, you had to hold PageUp/Down XD). Fast forward today, I thought like trying this game again with my modern god gamer FPS skills to see how it's like. First thing first: you can't remap keys or mouse! You'll have to download TheForceEngine for that. No big deal, it works well. Alright, now that I'm in with a proper config, I'm surprised at how fast, responsive and fun the gameplay is. The guns are satisfying and fun to shoot, movement is fluid and dynamic, hard diff is challenging but not impossible. the graphics and MIDI music have not aged well though, but the gun sounds are good and very star wars'y. If you're a younger gamer, this might be a dealbreaker. But if you can tolerate it, there's 10-15hours of fun solid gameplay in there, in something that has become a piece of gaming history and star wars canon.
