Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (includes Mysteries of the Sith)
by LucasArts Entertainment
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Video Game Reviews of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (includes Mysteries of the Sith)
Customer Review: Mara Jade all the way!
Summary: 5 Stars
When i first played this game at a friends house i was amazed!This game is sooo much fun!In Jedi Knights you play the star wars charecter Kyle Katarn then in Mysteries of the Sith in the first 4 levels you play kyle again but in the other levels you play Mara Jade!I loveeee this bundle pack!:-):-) it's the best!Customer Review: The closest one can ever come to being a Jedi Knight!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is definitely a cool game, no doubt about it. This game totally obsoletes the first Dark Forces (that game is pretty old!). This game truly immerses you in a 90% authentic Star Wars environment. Great graphics, unlimited movement (like Azrael's Tear), and the wonderful soundtrack from the movies. I wish this game had more ties with the movies (like having Luke, Han, Chewie or Leia appear), but the plot of Kyle Katarn and his battle aganist the Dark Jedi is still pretty good. The movie sequnces are my favorite for they broaden your sense of the game and bring the characters alive. My only complaint is why there needed to be so much combat and less puzzles and such? I get so sick of gunning down storm troopers. The fights with the Dark Jedi are COOL and the Force powers are really fun to use. All in all this is a great game and one of the cooler games of today that can run on lower resolution computers.Customer Review: A great game for Star Wars fans
Summary: 5 Stars
Anyone who has ever seen Star Wars has always had 1 reaction: I wonder what it would be like to be a Jedi/Sith. Well now they have the chance to answer that question. Plus you get 2 games for the price of one! Who wouldn't like that deal? Jedi Knight takes you into the eyes of Kyle Katarn, a Jedi Knight. As you play through levels the challenges get harder and harder. You will need to hone your lightsaber practice in order to beat the game. Mysteries of the Sith picks up where Jedi Knight leaves off. This time the game takes you into the eyes of Mara Jade, a former imperial turned Jedi. Once again you will want to hone your lightsaber practice, because this time the challenges are harder(fighting a rancor for example.) These games are worth the money!Customer Review: It's true, I can't handle the Force!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Owners of low level Pentiums (200 mhz and less), dissatisfied with the performance of such new games as "Half-life" and "Rainbow-6" on their antiquated systems should get LucasArt's "Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight". The sequel to the classic Star Wars game, "Dark Forces", JK offers more than improved graphics and sound reflecting hardware advances since the mid-90's. With its more realized worlds, fleshed out charachters and complex puzzles, playing the newer game feels like watching a new Star Wars movie that doesn't...well...dissappoint. And because of the improved gameplay, as opposed to special FX which change little from movie-to-movie, the experience is even more palpable.In JK, you become Kyle Katarn once again - the freebooting soldier of fortune. Out to find his father's killer, Kyle crosses paths with an army of dark jedi marshalled by the Evil Jerec. Cruising the galaxy in the typical miles-long Star Destroyer, and flanked by an endless army of stormtroopers, Jerec searches for the fabled "Valley of the Jedi", a burial ground holding the force energy of countless Jedi. Were he reach this sacred battleground, warns the spirit of a departed jedi, "the eradication of an entire star system, in a whisper, would be within his power!" Revenge is forgotten and galactic salvation takes priority. Along the way, Kyle will learn the ways of the jedi - to make super jumps, high-speed dashes, or grab guns from his enemies. But every Jedi faces challenges as he grows in power, and the game allows Kyle the choice of eradicating the dark side...or succumbing to it.
JK has a much tighter plot than DF, keeping the action within a smaller number of worlds and locations, with a much more linear progression. Gameplay is also improved in that, for a first-person shooter style game, the body movements are much more natural. The up-down and sideways head movements, separately coordinated in the older game, are easily managed with a single mouse control. While the rigid head-movements tended to give players of the old game car-sickness, players of the newer game can leave their Dramamine in the medicine cabinet. The levels are mostly diverse and the John Williams score keeps things hopping. Star Wars devotees may even remember which of the movies' scenes go with which music.
Non-fanatics need not go hungry, as the game supports a seeming ocean of add-on levels produced by game enthusiasts. While most of these internet-downloadable levels add on the Star Wars theme, others, called Total Conversions, or TC's, restructure the game to recreate anything from Star Trek to 007. Parts of JK itself seem to recall other movies. The occupied city of Baron's Hed recalls pre-WW2 Cairo from "Raiders" (outgunned swordsman, not included), while Indiana Jones would've felt at home in the darkened tunnels of a Jedi Temple towrds the endo of the game. In another level, Kyle must escape from a towering Dark Jedi fortress by creeping through vents, jumping through elevator shafts and crawling around very narow ledges, all faster than you can say "yipee-kay-yee you fuzzy nerf-herders!!"
That said, the game is not without cons. AI is pretty spotty - with storm troopers running for cover once they've lost their blasters. As in the movies, the troopers fall like flies while commandos seem more duarable without all that armor, and have a much better aim. The biggest dissappontment is the game's biggest selling point - mano-a-mano using lightsabers. In the films, saber duels represented the epitome of brute force and choreography. Technology hasn't reached the stage where such a myriad of body movements can be represented in software, and the combatants in JK seem to hop around like crazed monkeys until, inexplicably, one of the chimps wins out. Inevitably, the game climaxes on just such a duel against Jerec himself.
Until then however, JK is compelling and downright fun. Replay value is high given the complexity of each level. I downloaded the demo in 97' and played it almost non-stop for 2 years before getting the full game. (Custom levels won't work with the demo or the SE version that comes with repackaged editions of the original DF) This edition comes with "Mysteries of the Sith", offering added missions and improved graphics over JK, but still requiring the older game to run. You won't be dissappointed, and you'll give that old pre-Celeron system a new lease on life.
Customer Review: The Dark Side of the Schwartz
Summary: 5 Stars
Jedi Knight (JK), a first-person shooter game set in the Star Wars universe, is the sequel to Dark Forces - but that doesn't begin to describe its sophisticated gameplay engine or narrative. To begin with, JK brings back Kyle katarn, the hero of Dark Forces. Being a sequel, playing JK is a lot like going to see a Star Wars seuqel that's just opened, and the experience is a mix of the old (familiar charachters, situaitons and John Williams' score) and the new. Because the game-engine of JK is much more sophisticated than that of Dark Forces, the experience of something new is much more palpable than that of seeing a new movie (barring some hyper jump in special FX technology). In JK, ex-Imperial Scout, Rebel spy and mercenary Kyle Katarn has gone on personal leave, meaning he's gone to hunt down the man who killed (ofcourse) his father. Unfortuntely, the culprit is Jerec, the leader of a band of evil dark Jedi who, to stay in charachter, cruise through the stars in a monster ship larger than some moons, and possess numerous mystical powers. Jerec killed the elder Katarn to extract the location of the fabled "Valley of the Jedi", the battleground containing the force energies of countless fallen Jedi. What begins as a mission of vengeance becomes a race to reach the valley before Jerec. Along the way, Kyle learns the ways of the Jedi, which means that slowly amasses the powers of super-speed, high jumps, to see through walls and make guns fly out of people's hands.
JK has a tighter narrative than Dark Forces - the older game merely sending the player to numerous planets in an effort to learn the secret behind a new Imperial weapon. JK is much more linear, and the different levels join together to form a single cogent story-line. Many of the levels seem like homages to other movies: in one level, Kyle must escape an imperial sckyscraper starting from the roof and proceeding down (faster than you can say "Yipeekyaayy") by way of elevator shafts and ventilation ducts; the tower itself is built on top of a ruined desert town reminescent of pre-WWII Cairo (big desert warriors w/big swords and no guns, not included though); to reach the Valley of the jedi, you pass through another ancient stone temple (another Raiders gibe); and so on.
Technologically, the game is light years from Dark Forces - with more fully realized objects, distances and special FX. Head and body movements, which seemed annoyingly artificial in Dark Forces, are much more natural here. (People who got carsick playing Dark Forces will find definate improvement here.) Just as in DF, though, JK allows the use of add-on levels which can be downloaded from numerous sites on the web (not all levels are star wars related - fans of Starship Troopers take heart!!). This edition of JK includes the once separate campaign disk "Mysteries of the Sith" (MotS) which has better graphics and more aggressively intelligent enemies (while stormtroopers who lose their guns in JK run around like beheaded chickens, their counterparts in MotS are willing to go mano-a-mano).
I originally ran this game on a P-166MMX with 16mb of RAM and found graphics and sound excellent. While a better machine would run newer games like "Half-Life", Jedi Knight has enough to keep my mind off obsolescence for a long time. Set to John Williams' score and relying on the proper sound effects, it's as immersive an experience as a Star Wars junkie can get on anything less than a Pentium II.