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Star Wars Jedi Knight II: | ||||||||||||||
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his is the third installment in the career of Kyle Katarn, the mercenary agent of the Rebellion who first appeared in Dark Forces, the Star Wars-themed port of Doom. In DF, he crisscrossed the Star Wars universe, gunning down stormtroopers with blaster fire and thermal detonators. Kyle returned in Jedi Knight, where he discovered his talent for the Force and set aside his blaster for a lightsaber. That adventure nearly turned him to the Dark Side, and in the beginning of Jedi II, Kyle has turned his back on the Jedi and returned to his blaster and his detonators. Sadly for the remnants of the Empire, Kyle's lightsaber is not out of action for long.
The single-player game of JKII covers 24 often huge levels. There are the usual endless underground tunnels and generic Empire architecture corridors that have to be fought through, but there are also several city and outdoor levels as well as some on one of the Empire's capital warships. Kyle fights bounty hunters and aliens familiar from the movies, but thankfully there are still bucketloads of stormtroopers to be defeated.
There is some puzzle-solving in JKII. There are keys that must be found and heroic jumps and climbs that must be made. There are places where the terrain of the level is far more of a challenge than the enemies that walk it, but the main business of the game is killing. Most levels have over 100 enemies that must be removed in one way or another. The ways start with guns and bombs on the first few levels, then add the lightsaber and some Force powers. As the game goes on, Kyle continues to get better guns and more Force powers while also getting better at the powers he has. The enemies, of course, get tougher right along with Kyle, so that by the end of the game, Kyle is a one-man army taking on equally high-powered villains.
Fun things to kill and fun things to kill with
In first-person shooters, defined as video games where the player takes the role of one character and the object is to kill everything that moves, the most important part of the game is what the character is killing. Nazis make excellent villains, generic alien monsters do not. Mafia tough guys make good targets, drab rent-a-cops do not. In JKII, players get to kill stormtroopers, and they are excellent targets. The game's other villains are acceptable, and the late-game duels with the various Dark Jedi are pulse-pounding, but in all three of Kyle's adventures, the games have been at their best when he is killing the guys in the white armor, and JKII is no different.
The second most important thing in a first-person shooting game is what the character kills things with. The only complaint to be made about JKII comes here, and it is simply that by the middle of the game, Kyle has too many ways to kill things. Once he has his lightsaber and his Jedi powers, the temptation is to set aside all the guns and explosives, but the game discourages this because it contains enemies that can't be reached with a lightsaber or Force powers, such as the snipers on the outdoor levels. Again and again, the player blasts through a section of the game with one weapon or power, only to realize in retrospect that it would have been easier to use a different one. There are simply so many ways to kill that switching between them never becomes automatic.
Story isn't the third or even the forth most important thing in a first-person shooter, but it is a great bonus when the game has one. JKII has an excellent one by the standards of the genre. It includes guest appearances by Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian. The fate of the rebellion is at stake, of course, but the events are also personal, with Kyle's history being both the trigger and the solution.
Jedi Knight II is the best-realized simulation of lightsaber combat ever done, so it is a shame that the players don't get to use all the bells and whistles of it until late in the game. If the game weren't going to be a purely lightsaber one, I would have preferred if it made players choose between being a Jedi and being a blaster slinger. — Eric
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