![]() ![]() Those enemies who so frustratingly zig-zagged your useless laser fire earlier now become an endlessly hilarious barrage of saber-fodder, and the catharsis of deflecting stormtrooper fire back where it came from and generally dancing a merry Jedi dance of death through all and sundry is very, very real. It’s a surprisingly deep and sophisticated take on the Jedi’s signature combat style that makes every fight a delight to slice your way through. Well, there's still the small matter of some very annoying snipers in Nar Shaddaa, but once you deal with this final humiliation, we promise, things really do turn themselves right around – because Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast has the best lightsaber combat in any Star Wars game to date.Įven after all this time, it’s still fantastic. However, once you’ve slogged your way through five levels worth of this torture, arrived at the Valley of the Jedi, reawakened those Force powers and gotten your hands on that sweet, sweet lightsaber, things really do turn around. There are also some chronic jumping and climbing puzzles to navigate, which will make you consider pulling the Joy-Con off your console and binning them for the sake of your sanity (let's hope you don't play this on the new Switch Lite). We challenge you not to use a walkthrough guide at some point in the first half of this game, thanks to the fact that the solutions to many of its dreadful puzzles require you to awkwardly jump around pieces of background scenery in order to climb up into some little vent that you would never be expected to access in a modern video game. Some of these switches are almost impossible to find due to chronically bad placement this is compounded further by pretty terrible textures on computer consoles and walls that make finding the point you’re meant to push a switch difficult to see or easy to miss. Levels are full of locked doors which require switches be pushed in order to progress. Early combat problems are also compounded by archaic level design, and you can really see how the basic language of video games has drastically and fundamentally changed over the past 17 years some of the puzzles, random guesswork and head-scratching leaps of faith expected of you here make absolutely no sense to modern gaming sensibilities. We can’t stress enough that you will have to really strap in for a very tough time, save-scumming like you've never save-scummed before in order to finally get to the point in the story where Kyle hooks up with Luke Skywalker, gets his lightsaber and starts unlocking some of his Force abilities. Played with a keyboard and mouse on PC, these early combat sections weren’t such a massive and clumsy pain, but with console controls, they are an uphill battle. Your opponents in the first few hours with this game will run right at you blasting away with no regard for their own personal safety, and quite often attack you en-masse so that almost every encounter leads to you clinging to the very last remnants of your health and shields – a situation compounded by the dearth of health packs scattered throughout stages. ![]() The pew-pew action here really is quite poor – something that isn’t in any way helped by the addition of motion controls – and until you find some way to reliably deal with your enemies that works for you (we prefer to charge, strafe and stun them as much as possible) you will die. It is, in fact, manned by a rather large garrison of Imperial forces, and armed only with a selection of uniformly bad guns and thermal detonators with a laughably tiny blast radius, it’s up to you to face off against this army of braindead stormtroopers who constantly zig-zag around in front of your blasters making them nigh on impossible to shoot. Things kick off with Kyle and his partner Jan Ors investigating a supposedly deserted Imperial Outpost on the planet of Kejim. This is a game that locks everything that makes it so highly-rated behind a long and arduous trek through some very poorly-designed opening levels full of terrible puzzles and awkward gunfights against dodgy enemy AI. Some of this is down to the fact it’s such an old game at this point, and archaic design decisions are to be expected however, just as much can be attributed to a deeply problematic and badly-judged start to proceedings that was just as annoying back in the day as it is now. For around about the first four-to-five hours of your adventures as bad-ass intergalactic mercenary Kyle Katarn, things are pretty bad. Well, let’s get the negative stuff out of the way first.
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