Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
When Star Wars: Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast came out, people were amazed at how this game incorporated lightsaber fighting throughout the course of the single and multiplayer game. In this newer version of the game, Jedi Academy improves on the lightsaber fighting and makes your Jedi days even more fun.
Primitive Character Customization
Jedi Academy takes a different approach then Jedi Outcast did. When starting the game, you select a character that you can customize using the game's skins. There are only 6 different skins you can choose from: human male, human female, Twi'lek female, Rodian male, Zabrak female, and Kel Dor male. For each skin, you can customize outfits and skin tone. You can also choose lightsaber color and hilt type. You can select a color for your character's clothing, but when you chose your color, it automatically defaults all of your character's clothing to this theme color. There is no way to make your pants a green color and your shirt a blue color. This character selection mode is very simple to use, yet there are not enough choices to make it that great.
Jaden, it's Luke, what happened?
After selecting a character, you start watching yourself in cinematics. No matter who you are, your name is Jaden. You are a student who is starting classes at the Jedi Knight Academy. As you travel to the campus on a ship, you meet a young, and ambitious kid named Rosh. He quickly befriends you right before the ship starts to fall out of the air. Before you know it, you are out of your crashed ship and stuck on one side of a river while Rosh is on the other. You quickly rescue him and continue on to the campus. Once you get there, you climb up some rocks to witness a strange event. You see a woman and some men gathered around as the woman seems to be sucking up the force from the academy and storing it in some weird looking thing. The next thing you know, the group see you and shines their strange light at you. You black out. As you wake, Kyle and Luke greet you and begin to interrogate you about what you saw. You tell them all that you know, and then move onto training. Once training is complete, you are ready to carry out various missions in order to complete your training and become a Jedi Master. Da da da.
Mercenary vs. Real Life
The game has a balance between Jedi training missions and a real plot. As you complete various missions to prove yourself as a Jedi, the plot with a strange cult develops. When it gets serious, you start to do a little investigating for Luke and Kyle. Therefore, Jedi Academy provides you with a cool mercenary like training mission part, as well as a real world problem to deal with that needs your attention.
Working with Allies in the Single Player Mode
Becoming a Jedi Master is not easy work. Your missions can get pretty rough. Right after you complete training, you are thrown into a screen that lists available missions for you to beat.
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These missions can be simple like having to transfer parts from one ship to another, but can get as hard as infiltrating an enemy base and deactivating bombs so a city doesn't blow up. Kyle Katran is your Jedi instructor. He will accompany you on some of the missions that you partake in. Even though he will be there in the game, he doesn't do much. There aren't any real times where you will get to travel around with him. All you do is split up and look for different objectives. In one mission, you get to walk around with Chewbacca. This mission is fun, and getting to fight with him is even better. Another mission I liked was having to find out if there was any activity in a barren iceland called Hoth. In this map, you get to utilize kangaroo like dinosaurs called Ton-Tons and ride them. While controlling your Ton-Ton, you get to use either your lightsaber or E11 blaster rifle and tear down enemies as you ride by them. All maps are detailed, however, missions can sometimes feel repetitive. Just like in Jedi Outcast, you will start to feel like you are do the same thing over and over again, even though maps are different.