However these are still dangerous times. The IMPERIAL REMNANT continues an increasingly desperate fight to regain power. Worse yet the CULT OF RAGNOS seems to be a new and powerful SITH order on the ascendant. The Jedi are once again stretched trying to maintain this fragile peace....

Familiar ships and people abound.
Think it can still do the Kessel Run?

Of course if we were doing this review in full StarWars style we would cut from the above scrolling text and drop down onto a planet view to watch Jaden Korr's shuttle begin descending to Yavin 4. The game does do precisely that and it gives you an indication of how well steeped this game is in StarWars lore. A lot of detail work has been done to keep the sounds, characters and look of the game all solidly in keeping with what the films have shown us. It is a pity we couldn't get Mark Hamil himself to voice Luke Skywalker but the voice actor used covers the role fairly well if not entirely convincingly. We do get the voice actor for Kyle Katarn returning and we continue the tradition of having Kyle present in the Jedi Knight series.

Power plants don't have to be ugly y'know, although
being situated on a volcano makes this a tad risky to visit.

Raven have done a lot here to tweak and update the Quake 3 engine powering this game. Largely to good effect too with some very wide vistas being presented to the player. You get to fight on the planets Hoth, Coruscant, Tatooine and Vjun to name but a few. Each has it's own variety of weather, climate and general architecture. This is one of the pleasures of the game, getting to re-visit some familiar locations and seeing quite a few others only talked about in passing or mentioned in the books. However this is still the Quake 3 engine and while large landscapes are possible they invariably end up looking quite blocky in a way that texturing just can't hide. Matters improve greatly when inside again and those precious polygons can be spent on a much more detailed environment.

Night fighting on Coruscant.

Other spiffyness on the graphics front is the use of updated effects for the force powers. Push/Pull now generates a 'focal bubble' lensing effect when used, and the lightning seems tweaked a little. There are also glow effects and other lighting updates. Like Jedi Outcast this comes at a price - the game is more heavily CPU bound than anything else and modern cards will not be wildly stretched by it. At least modern nVidia cards won't, we don't know what happened here but this game has definite issues with ATi cards that require turning off the dynamic glow effect to solve. The game will work with the option on, but it ends up on later levels causing a very irritating screen flashing that would be nasty if you were epileptic at all.

On top of that those of us with force feedback devices need to configure them off in the game settings - or risk having saved games that are impossible to load. Windows 98 users have to disable EAX support - the drivers we have for Audigy cards is now sufficiently old that it won't work with this game. The major oddness this causes is the movie sound to be lost and odd glitches eleswhere in the game engine. It is annoying because the game does sound really good with it on. Even with all of these tweaks to cater for the game we still get occasional lockups when transitioning to new levels that caused hard lockups on the review machine we were using.

Fighting on a tram moving at speed.
One of the more memorable missions.

To add insult to injury we also have quirky engine oddities. Push/Pull effects work fine on the early levels but on later levels their use causes the game engine to stagger. Somewhat dangerous when you are trying to maneuver on some of the tall places the game asks you to go. You end up not using these powers and fortunately force lightning is very suitable as a substitute. Also the CD check only checks the first drive - very annoying for people with more than one drive. Finally we have various oddities in the game scripting that every so often creates a situation you can't either escape from or progress onwards from in the game. Clearly Jedi Academy needed some more polishing time, especially when you consider the last game was a much smoother playing experience and it was from the same developer.

Mission briefings are often inaccurate.

We at Gameplanet truely hope that a patch is on the way because when you get past these irritations the game itself is quite solid. It avoids the tedious run and gun phase that Jedi Outcast started with and immediately lets you indulge the secret fantasy that every geek has at some stage contemplated - being a Jedi. Most of us have the sense not to videotape ourselves playing out that fantasy and instead seek the next best substitute - games like this. You start the game customising exactly what Jaden Korr will look like. The name is sufficiently ambigious that it can be either a male or female character you play and better yet not neccesarily human either. You then pick the clothing and lightsaber hilt you prefer. These touches do nothing in a gameplay sense other than allow you to produce an avatar more to your tastes and thus someone you care about a little more than the random muscled stranger we normally get.

Debris from a previous battle abound on Hoth.

From customisation we get a quick movie and then an in-game cutscene to establish our initial relationship with Rosh. Here is the first slight slip, Rosh is an annoying little jerk. If avoiding the dark side means resisting hurting this little twerp then the Academy must produce many Dark Jedi. Fortunately his appearance after the first set of missions is largely limited to the odd cutscene and then finally around the end game sequences. The first mission introduces us to the over arching story that unifies the game of the activities of one Sith Cult the Disciples of Ragnos. This mystery cult is active all over the galaxy and is often behind the scenes with many of the missions you will undertake. Yep, that is right, in a break from the entirely linear storytelling experience of most FPS Jedi Academy breaks things up for us by offering a selection of missions to perform that are in a wide variety of places.

Swoop bike racing. You can use your saber to cut
the nose off enemy bikes causing spectacular crashes.

Better yet these missions are quite varied in their goals. You have a prisoner rescue where you have to distract a very hungry Rancor, escape and evasion by swoop bike from Disciples, beacon placement for Wedge Antilles as you knock out a Remnant facility, prison escape (one of the few missions to take your lightsaber away), infiltration (which somehow always seem to end up being all out fights), information gathering and the odd surprise mission which briefs you on one target and then changes the mission when you actually begin it (the Tram mission being a prime example here which was advertised as something else entirely). This variety makes for happy gamers as no one combat style or maneuver will work the entire way through the game. You will be heavily reliant on your light saber for most of the time but various enemies are resistant to them and require a different tactic to defeat.

Seen one Tuskan, seen em all.

We really enjoyed the variety in the missions and only have one niggle - given the very open structure the game has this seems ideal for having quite divergent light and dark side mission sets. While you do get to choose which side of the force you are going to be on this is an almost superfluous choice, as it affects only the ending and it seems a major opportunity has been missed here. When are we going to again see a game like the original Jedi Knight where your choice in the force made a dramatic difference to how the game played out? Still if that is the biggest foible we can find with the gameplay then you know Raven have to have done something right. Icing on the cake is a multi-player mode that allows you to test your saber skills against others online. It is a nice addition but suffers from the same problems that all saber based online games do - the fighting is extremely ping dependant and is pretty much unplayable on pings over 200 ms. It can be a great deal of fun but we somehow don't see this catching on in a large way.

Here Kyle is modeling the latest in Jedi Spring Fashion,
a dusky coating of Force Protect that caters to every weather clime.